Migrant Agency in Platform Work: A Comparative Study of Food-Delivery Workers in Australia and China

Abstract

In Australia and China migrant workers are overrepresented in the platform economy, especially in food-delivery work – the segment of the platform economy focused on in this study. Despite the systemic differences in the institutional structures of these two countries, migrant platform workers experience strikingly similar constraints on their agency, which manifest in the form of individualised and largely invisible acts to cope with or improve working conditions. The similarities across two fundamentally different national contexts, which established theories assume will produce distinct outcomes, pose an empirical puzzle which the study’s central research question aims to address: How do labour migration regimes shape the agency expressions of migrant platform workers?

This thesis adopts a comparative case study approach underpinned by a most-different system design to investigate the agency of two groups of migrants engaged in food-delivery work: international temporary migrants in Australia and internal rural-to-urban migrants in China. Adopting Katz’s (2004) agency framework as the theoretical framework, this thesis develops a comparative understanding of how workers develop similar patterns in forms of agency and differences in agency practices.

This thesis finds that Australia’s visa-based labour migration regime and China’s hukou-based labour migration system both contribute to migrant platform workers’ structurally marginalised positions in the host labour market, and result in their similarly constrained agency. However, there are nuanced differences in how workers navigate structural constraints, shaped by the interaction between distinct labour migration regimes and migrant workers’ temporal horizons. This contributes to labour agency literature by incorporating institutional and temporal dimensions to the analysis of labour agency and developing new conceptual typologies to capture the different underlying meanings and mechanisms of workers’ acts.