Mobile Work

Mobility has historically been a means of work for many: herders, drivers, vendors, beggars. Today’s digital platforms like delivery and e-hailing taxi businesses have turned mobility itself into a precisely measured task and a tradeable commodity. Through such platforms, one can buy a piece of mobility service—or “outsourced” mobilities—for the sake of safety, convenience or efficiency. And one can sell one’s mobile labour, measured by time and distance. What are the relations between capital, labour, technology, regulation and public perception in these new mobile forms of work?

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Rationalising platform mobility in food delivery

In the case of food-delivery platforms and other last-mile logistics operations, courier work is mobility transformed into labour-power. As such, mobility is subject to processes of rationalization. With examples from courier and dispatching work, this entry explores how rationalizing platform mobilities is a primary motivation in collecting and processing courier data.
Bronwyn Frey
Published online 29 August 2022

Shibazono Danchi: a Japanese public housing complex as part of the migration infrastructure for Chinese IT workers

Shibazono Danchi is a public housing complex that was built in Tokyo in 1978. Serving as a temporary residence, it has become part of the “migration infrastructure” that transnationally and regionally facilitates Chinese IT workers’ mobility. Despite their concentration, with extremely mobile livelihoods, these workers don’t form a strong migrant network in Shibazono Danchi.
Tetsuya Imaoka
Published online 16 November 2021

Asylum workers in German logistics centres

Relaxed labour laws in Germany has led logistics companies (such as Amazon) to work with private employment agencies to mobilise asylum seekers to work in warehouses as pickers and packers. The pandemic only accelerated the growth of the logistics sector, with the growth in e-commerce. However, the intense demand of the jobs available negatively impacts asylum seekers’ social mobility.
Žiga Podgornik Jakil
Published online 14 September 2021

International student workers in Australia and Aotearoa-New Zealand during the COVID-19 pandemic

International student workers’ plights in Australia and Aotearoa-New Zealand during the COVID-19 pandemic raise questions regarding the rights of students as a special group of mobile workers, and future student mobility to the region.
Vidya Ramachandran
Published online 21 June 2021

The emerging 'mobility business'

Mobility businesses sell customers the service of having someone else move on the customers’ behalf. Expanding rapidly, the business has far-reaching economic and social implications.
Biao Xiang
Published online 15 April 2021

Working holidaymakers in Australia and Aotearoa-New Zealand during the COVID-19 pandemic

Declining numbers of ‘working holidaymakers’ in Australia and Aotearoa-New Zealand during the COVID-19 pandemic have produced a labour deficit in select industries. Those who have remained in both countries throughout the pandemic have experienced an increase in demand.
Vidya Ramachandran
Published online 19 July 2021

Amazon's mobile workforce and its protest movement in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic

Amazon’s warehouse and delivery workers became an essential and rapidly expanding workforce in the United States during the pandemic. Amongst various categories of workers, protest and legal mobilization arose as part of a movement to protect Amazon employees in the mobile sector, even while so much else of the country was in lockdown.
Danielle Douglas
Published online 4 May 2021

Platform (im)mobilities: migration and the gig economy in times of COVID-19

Testimonies of gig economy workers during the pandemic in Germany show that lockdowns have altered labour options, creating and consolidating new patterns of mobility and immobility.
Moritz Altenried, Manuela Bojadživev & Mira Wallis
Published online 25 May 2021

Daily-wage migrant workers, employment relations, and emergency relief during COVID-19 in Jordan

The government of Jordan provided some emergency assistance to migrant workers during the pandemic, but migrants’ lack of formal employment impeded the implementation.
Shaddin Almasri
Published online 25 March 2021

The proliferation of mobility business during the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa

This entry sheds light on the different forms of mobility businesses that emerged in South Africa, and how online ride-hailing firms expanded their businesses by collaborating with companies to transport employees and deliver goods during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020.
Mengnjo Tardzenyuy Thomas
Published online 21 June 2021

“Essential workers” in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic still struggle for livelihoods

After the start of the pandemic in March 2020, workers in the United States who continued to go into work – delivery workers, warehouse workers, farmworkers, healthcare professionals, and others who are not frequently in the limelight of the media – became known as “essential” and “frontline”. This entry depicts the way in which, between March and November 2020, such workers shifted in the public eye from an “invisible” class to a class resembling national “heroes”, but without all the crucial corresponding rights, livelihoods, and safety protections.
Danielle Douglas
Published online 27 May 2021

Tourism to the Canary Islands during the COVID-19 pandemic: making mobility ‘safe’ instead of halting it completely

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the government of the Canary Islands has implemented a strategy based on advertisement, economic diplomacy, and public health security to sustain tourist mobility, a vital element of the Islands’ economy.
Lore Purroy
Published online 25 May 2021

During the COVID-19 pandemic, migrant farmworkers in the United States are in high demand - yet are offered little protections

Migrant farmworkers in the United States were deemed essential during the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning that they would continue to work in spite of outbreak. However, these internationally and seasonally mobile workers were disproportionately at risk, and often not given adequate protections.
Danielle Douglas
Published online 27 May 2021