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ABSTRACT: The impact of digital platforms upon the employment structure and work conditions has attracted widespread scholarly attention. However, research on workers' agency and subjectivity in the platform economy is relatively under-explored. Using fooddelivery workers in China as a point of departure, this article provides an empirically grounded and theoretically informed account of delivery workers' agentic performances. We utilise the notion of contingent agency to capture the expedient, ongoing, and variegated measures developed and manoeuvred by workers to exercise agency from their structurally vulnerable position in the labour process and employment relations. While agency in practice is always contingent and never static, we conceptualise the notion by unpacking the multiple factors that have shifted the ground for workers and hence contributed to the contingency, to shed light on the interplay between workers' agency and the unstable and elusive character of platform capitalism. The article concludes with a discussion on the implications of workers' contingent agency for labour politics.
KEYWORDS: Platform labour, food-delivery platform, worker agency, China.
Introduction
The question of how digital technologies have changed the employment structure in China leads to no easy answer. Some scholars see digital workers as a new class in the making, with solidarity and empowered subjectivity (Smith and Pun 2018), while others connect Chinese workers' experience to the global trend of precarity and argue for a careful assessment of workers' empowerment against political and institutional changes (Lee 2016). This literature provides critical and valuable understandings about labour agency and worker empowerment actions in general. In the debate on Chinese worker's empowerment or class formation, however, there is limited systemic documentation and examination of workers' exercise of agency. Complementing the macro approach toward the collective movement or institutional changes, we adopt a micro lens in this article to address the question of agency by examining workers' lived experiences, struggles, and survival tactics in the shadow of platform capitalism.
There has been a rapid expansion of the labour force in the Chinese digital economy during the last decade, and the trend is likely to continue. It is estimated that more than 200 million people will be working in China's digital economy by 2020.1 Platform-mediated food-delivery service provision has become one of the fastest growing sectors for various employment types (Sun...