Uneven mobilities: the everyday management of app-based delivery work in Germany

Abstract

On-demand mobility platforms have long struggled with profitability in industrialised nations. To compensate, companies seek out new forms of rationalisation and automation to increase the efficiency of mobility work. Most scholarship on mobility platforms has focussed primarily on the experiences and responses of platform workers to managerial decisions and forms of software-based control; less understood are the managers and technologies themselves. My ethnographic research with logistics management and couriers (‘riders’) at Fleatz, a German app-based food-delivery company, shows how the effort to increase the efficiency of rider mobilities is underpinned by the central managerial goal of ‘breaking even operationally’, wherein the cost of providing courier services is offset by the revenue from the orders the couriers fulfil. However, I identify three challenges to increasing rider efficiency: low rider investment in the job, the limitations of rider-management software, and the German political protection of labour and data. Examining platform mobility from both sides of the user interface—from workers’ and managers’ perspectives—allows us to understand not only the anticipated but also the more hidden limitations of platform rationalisation.

Keywords:

• platform labour
• mobilities
• Germany
• data
• rationalisation
• couriers

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Joshua Barker and Andrea Muehlebach for their support of this research and the development of this article, and to the three anonymous reviewers for helping to improve the structure and argument. The research for this article was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The German Social Security Code (Sozialgesetzbuch) stipulates that companies have to employ workers if three of the following five criteria are fulfilled: (1) at least five-sixths of the worker’s revenue comes from the company, (2) the worker does not themselves employ anyone subject to social security contributions, (3) the work is usually carried out by the company’s regular employees, (4) the work has no characteristics of entrepreneurship, and (5) the work has been previously performed for the same client in an employment relationship.

2 Platform labour is, of course, subject to other forms of capitalist accumulation. For an expanded analysis of the expropriation of worker data, see van Doorn and Badger (2020).

3 The majority of Fleatz riders are clearly migrants. As a detailed analysis on the intersections of platform-based and socioeconomic migrant mobilities is beyond the scope of this paper, I refer readers to Altenried, Animento, and Bojadžijev (2021), Xiang and Lindquist (2014), and Sassen (2008).