The Fragmented Labor Power Composition of Gig Workers: Entrepreneurial Tendency and the Heterogeneous Production of Difference

Abstract

The literature on digital labor platforms requires a focus beyond techno-utopianism, foregrounding the role of living labor that materially sustains the fantasies of convenience ingrained in platform capitalism. The gig workers embodying living labor exhausted by location-dependent platform work are mainly migrants. Yet, greater understanding of the complexity of difference production and the gigification of work is needed. The article is prompted by the desire to understand the relationship between entrepreneurialized workers and heterogeneously produced differences within the labor power composition of gig workers active on location-based labor platforms. Drawing on ethnographic data produced together with migrant workers engaged in food delivery and cleaning gigs via labor platforms in Helsinki, the article first analyzes the organizing logic of gig work mediated via platforms through the notion of transversal entrepreneurial tendency, and second, the entwined forms of social, legal, and algorithmic difference produced among gig workers. The article argues that differentiation in labor power composition is dynamically related to the interactions required and facilitated by the platforms. The article contributes to discussions on entrepreneurialization in the contemporary world of work and the specific ways in which the social, legal, and algorithmic production of difference shape the constitutive hierarchies of platform labor.