Reassessing precarious and immigrant work: A psychoanalytic investigation of workers’ subjectivity and affective experience in food-delivery gig-work

In contemporary research on low-skilled immigrant workers, scholars have highlighted concepts such as precarity, exploitation, and racism as key loci of problematisation. Furthermore, how migrant workers experience exploitative and racist work-environments is also a topic that draws the attention of researchers, as these challenges influence and relate to workers’ subjectivity, affect and perspectives of otherness. Additionally, how subjectivity relates to resistance and what forms of control and consent influence the subjective manifestations of resistance—from an organisation studies perspective—is an important factor to examine as a fundamental attribute of workers’ lived-experience. My focus lies in the intersection of these three lines of thought and in particular how lived-experiences of precarity and otherness should be investigated within a framework that takes into consideration the combination of affective-experiences, subjectivity and practices of control and resistance at work. Lacanian psychoanalysis offers a methodological tool that can assist in shedding light on this interrelated perspective of the lived-experience of migrant workers as well as in analysing their subjectivity and affective economy in a multilayered fashion. To this end, the present study examines these questions by collecting a rich set of empirical data from migrant-riders who work in food-delivery platform-work in England. The analysis of the data collected is made from a psychoanalytic perspective which traces the different identifications that workers’ employ in their speech. Thus it allows the examination of the food-delivery subject—with its lack and different objects—along the modes of enjoyment that support their articulation. In this way, the suggested findings may improve our understanding of how migrant-workers experience their precarious and exploitative working conditions. The main contributions of this study rest on how riders embrace the precarious conditions of food-delivery in a way that sustains their commitment to this work, and secondly, on how the algorithmic system of control functions as a human resource management practice in food-delivery gig-work.