A post-doctoral researcher at Peking University wrote a paper on his experience as a delivery platform rider, saying that delivery platforms are like cages that exploit riders and reduce their autonomy, while collecting and analyzing rider data to control the labor order. The paper has recently raised concerns in Chinese society.
According to public information, the paper, titled “Labor Order under ‘Digital Control’ – A Study on Labor Control of Delivery Riders,” was published in late 2020 in the The paper, titled “Research on Labor Control of Delivery Riders under ‘Digital Control'”, was published at the end of 2020 in “Sociological Research”, a first-class professional academic journal hosted by the Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The author is Chen Long, currently a Boya Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Peking University, who published this paper in the past during his doctoral studies.
According to Chen Long’s interview with Sohu News’ media Extreme Day Studio, referring to the findings of this dissertation, “The platform and odd-labor economy is a cage in which he [the laborer] cannot dominate the labor market, and the monopoly of big data squeezes riders to their human limits and becomes an accomplice in the exploitation of riders.”
According to the report, the core theme of Chen Long’s doctoral dissertation research is “how capital controls workers and how workers resist.” In order to complete his doctoral dissertation, Chen Long joined a team of delivery riders in Zhongguancun, Beijing in 2018 and spent 5.5 months conducting fieldwork, delivering daily deliveries and experiencing the riders’ labor process.
Chen Long observed that the company lends its platform system to silently collect the rider’s order taking situation and driving record, analyzes the rider’s data by big data, and uses the data results as a tool to control the rider, making labor order possible. “Digital (digital) control not only weakens riders’ willingness to rebel and eats away at their space to exert their autonomy, but also makes them unwittingly participate in the process of managing themselves.”
By redistributing control, Chen Long says, companies make themselves invisible from this control process, leaving riders everywhere, yet achieving the purpose of substantive management.
He pointed out that management is generally divided into 3 aspects, the first is “guidance”, the second is “evaluation”, the third is “reward and punishment”. In the past, these three items were decided by the boss, but in the delivery platform industry, the role of the “boss” disappeared, the guidance of riders (dispatching) is the responsibility of the system, assessment (good and bad evaluation) is the responsibility of the consumer, rewards and punishments back to the hands of the system.
Chen Long mentioned that even if a rider has a grievance, he doesn’t know who to vent it to, because the boss is actually who the rider can’t find anymore, and may even vent it in the wrong place. “I noticed then that many riders were genuinely cursing the cell phone system and felt that the problems were caused by this system.”
According to his observation, under such digital management, platform companies seem to give up direct control over riders, but in reality, they dilute the responsibility of platform companies as employers, and labor conflicts are shifted between the system and consumers, as if it is no longer the company itself that must be responsible.
Chen Long admits that when he wrote this paper in 2018, he thought that changing jobs might be a way for riders to rebel (against digital control), but now he no longer thinks so because everyone is doing the platform and it’s an odd job economy, “You think you are getting out of a cage, but in reality you might be entering a new one. But it can’t be helped, because many riders’ own conditions dictate that he can’t dominate the labor market.”
He believes that “[change] is hard. Unless the platform wants to change, or the government introduces relevant policies, there is no way out.”
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