Drawing the precariat
I have finally gathered the graphic illustrations for some of the food couriers' stories I am collecting for my project Doing Gig Work. I am extremely excited to introduce you to some of these amazing graphic works done by Alin Tămășan, Oana Lohan, José Sherwood and Ionuț Dulămiță.
They will be featured on a web platform that is still in the making, as well as other media (some zines and, hopefully, an exhibition).
This is still a work in progress, but you can read a bit about the idea behind using illustrations to tell stories of precarious workers in this little text I prepared for the Work, Employment and Society Conference 2021.
The work in the gig economy is characterised by opacity and alienation. Using sleek and shiny app interfaces accessible at a finger’s touch on our smartphones, the digital platforms operating in the gig economy effectively hide from view the intensive human labour that ultimately enables our daily instant gratifications. In the case of platform food deliveries, this hidden work comes in the form of a moving dot on the map, invested with the luring promise of a tasty and warm meal. Our relationship with workers are turned into a simple ranking and reputation system designed to regulate the performance of workers (Gandini 2016) . As the possibilities for social bonds and empathy with workers are stripped away from us, there are very few opportunities to get to know about the working conditions in the gig economy (Woodcock and Graham 2020).
This work draws on preliminary data resulting from an ongoing project on the social implication of platform-based food deliveries. We use a mixed methods approach involving ethnographic work alongside creative methods comprised of graphic illustrations and multimedia interactive mapping to account for the working conditions of platform food couriers in Manchester, UK.
