Infrastructuring platform delivery work: exclusions, coercions and resistance in delivery platforms’ migrant work in Bogotá, Colombia

Abstract

This paper analyses the experiences of Venezuelan migrant workers in Colombia as Rappi couriers. Rappi is a “work-on-demand via app,” founded in 2015 in Colombia, that links clients with nearby restaurants and stores through a couriers’ network. Drawing on STS (Science and Technology Studies) scholarship on labor and infrastructures, we explore the ways in which migrant workers interact with Rappi algorithmic, material and legal infrastructures, the coercion and violence they experience, and the tactics and solidarities that they create to make a living. We understood migration as a domination relation within gig workers, an approach that allows us to identify specific exclusions that migrant couriers suffer in an already precarious local labor market. Methodologically, we have developed an Ethnography for the Internet conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic through three different sources and interaction layers: WhatsApp and Facebook non-participant observation and exploratory interviews with Rappi migrant workers. In what follows, we offer a theoretical analysis of the intersections between migration and the gig economy infrastructures based on the Colombian case. Navigating the experiences of migrant gig workers with Rappi, we discuss the dynamics of inclusion-exclusion they live in their interaction with the platform and the infrastructures that support and constitute their work.