Precarity and instability: contradictions in the work on food delivery platforms

Abstract

Digital platforms have appeared and developed in a framework of economic crisis that has led to the deepening of various forms of inequality, precariousness, deterioration of living conditions for large sections of the population. These platforms have also generated far-reaching changes in economies. This would have meant that its expansion responds to a series of characteristics in accordance with that situation. Attending to the great expansion of digital economies and platform capitalism, this text intends to make an approximation to some of the explanatory keys of the elements of a specific type of digital platforms: food delivery platforms. Here some of the issues that have arisen since their greatest controversy and discussion is analyzed: the moment of emergency, innovation, flexibility at work or their role in the labour market. To this end, some of the discourses presented by the digital delivery platforms themselves and the discourses of the riders of these platforms are analyzed.