Entangled Platforms: Brazilian Migration and Food Delivery Struggles in the UK

This paper takes the case of Brazilian food delivery workers organizing in the UK to demonstrate how migrants can buttress the local labour power, even in such adverse conditions. While research acknowledges that migrants are the majority of the labour force in this industry, especially in the Global North, little is known about the detailed consequences for the labour processes and collective action. Moving from the discussion on how the food platform economy is shaping migration globally, this research sheds light on how this industry is being (re)shaped by this particular composition of its workforce.

The concept of 'platform migration', along with the Marxist theory of class composition, provided the analytical route to understanding how both ‘platforms’ (of delivery and of migration) are integrated. While platforms have benefited from migration, mainly by providing access to a larger pool of potential workers with little or no social protection, this dynamic has also produced the conditions for workers to respond and react. The migrant condition creates common ground cutting across all aspects of this industry, from the labor process and life experiences to collective forms of resistance and organization. It is by no accident that most organic strikes in these countries have been led by migrant workers (Cant, 2017). As a consequence, these struggles reflect the weaknesses, strengths, and transnational potentialities of these migrant communities. This double movement, I argue, is at the core of the political economy of the platform industry.

This study is based on a five-year participant ethnography with the Brazilian drivers' community in London and the IWGB Union, a migrant worker’s trade union in the UK where I spent most of this time working as a full-time organizer. As part of this role, I engaged in many delivery struggles in Brazil as well.