Riyaj Shaikh
Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
Food delivery platforms are location-based services that rely on minimal, quantifiable data points, such as GPS location, to represent and manage labor. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of food delivery work in India during the COVID-19 pandemic, we illustrate the challenges gig workers face when working with a platform that uses their (phone’s) GPS location to monitor and control their movement. Further, we describe how these, along with the platform's opaque, location-based logics, shape the delivery workflow. We also document how the platform selectively represented workers’ bodies during the pandemic to portray them as safe and sterile, describing workers’ tactics in responding to issues arising from asymmetric platform policies. In discussion, we consider what we can learn from understanding gig workers as `infrastructure’, commonly overlooked but visible upon breakdown. We conclude by reflecting on how we might center gig workers’ well-being and bodily needs in design.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3641918
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2024.acm.org/)