The Algorithmic-Bureaucratic Precarisation of Migrant Couriers in Italy

Our article uses a socio-legal lens to examine the construction of precarity among migrant food delivery workers in Turin, Italy. We argue that the Italian migration system, and the way it is implemented, narrows the range of sources of income, and pushes migrants into a condition of liminal legality, formatting the malleable workforce upon which food delivery platforms deploy their biopower. We thus suggest that the commodification of migrant labour in the platform food delivery sector in Turin, while driven by platform logics, is rooted in, and compounded by, the contradictions and opacity of the Italian immigration regime. We thus advance the novel concept of algorithmic-bureaucratic precarisation which allows an understanding of how the interaction of the legal and the digital causes migrant workers to be held on the outermost margins of employment.

By drawing on ethnographic data collected during the Covid-19 pandemic, we chart the growing centrality of food delivery platforms in the political economy of migration. In so doing, we show how the interaction between shifting migration policies, information asymmetries of digital platforms and legal loopholes exacerbates the socio-economic vulnerability of migrant workers. We unpack algorithmic-bureaucratic precarisation by describing the entanglement of legal and procedural failures that illegalise migrants and asylum seekers and put them at risk of exploitation. Through the specific case of migrant food delivery workers in Turin, we contribute to the legal geography literature on precarisation by highlighting how the platform economy is reshaping the nexus of neoliberal flexibilization and restrictive migration policies.