First Rule: Keep Pedalling. Co-Theorising with Food-Delivery Workers How to Make Digital Platforms Capability-Enhancing

ABSTRACT

In both academic and public debate, there is an increasing consensus that digital labour platforms can have both positive and negative impacts on digital workers’ well-being. This article has two aims: the first is to evaluate this impact through the multidimensional lens of the capability approach, taking the food-delivery sector in the city of Verona as a case study. The second aim is to involve selected riders in a co-theorising process to imagine how platforms should be designed to become capability enablers. To reach them, the research combines two different qualitative methods: a covert auto-ethnography, during which the author worked for a food-delivery platform, and a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews, inspired by the dynamic public reflective equilibrium technique. In addition to contributing to the principles that should govern platforms’ design, this article makes two specific contributions to the existing literature on the capability approach. Methodologically, it contributes to the so-called list debate by proposing a synthesising method for selecting capabilities that combines philosophical and empirical insights. Theoretically, it frames the relevant capabilities which were identified during the research under a meta-capability for meaningful work, opening the path to a multi-level analysis of a flourishing life’s different dimensions.

KEYWORDS:

• Gig economy
• platform cooperatives
• auto-ethnography
• dynamic public reflective equilibrium
• capabilities list
• meaningful work

Acknowledgements

I thank Enrica Chiappero-Martinetti, Ingrid Robeyns, Luigi Cominelli, Lorenzo Sacconi, Giampietro Gobo, Nadia von Jacobi, Massimiliano Vatiero, Rutger Claassen, Morten Byskov, Matthias Kramm, Björn Lundgren, Thomas Stephens, and Cherise Regier for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of the article. I also thank the participants of the session “Work Capabilities and Human Development” of the 2023 HDCA Conference, the participants of a seminar organised by Ingrid Robeyns during my visit at Utrecht University, and all the teachers and participants of the 2022 HDCA Summer School for their precious suggestions, both about the methodology and the theoretical framework. Finally, I thank two anonymous reviewers and the editorial team of the journal. All the remaining errors are my own responsibility.

Disclosure statement

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

Data Availability Statement

No supporting data will be made available apart from what can be found within the article to protect the interviewees' privacy.

Notes

1 Note that Uber Eats and Mymenu are no longer active at the time of publishing this article.

2 The only reference to work in Nussbaum’s list (2011) is indeed made within the tenth capability, “Control over One’s (Material) Environment.”

3 The demographic survey conducted at the beginning of each interview covered variables connected with the riders’ range of variance in the city: age range; geographic origin; biological sex; household status (living with family or alone); whether deliveries were the interviewee’s main job and how much he or she depended on deliveries for subsistence; average monthly wage; how many platforms the interviewee had worked for simultaneously; means of transport; knowledge of the Italian language; and educational level.

4 For example, chatting with another rider outside a restaurant while I was waiting for an order, I discovered the platform for which I used to work had accepted me because at that time many accounts had been deactivated due to a major strike after a wage reduction in the city.

5 Casa del Rider is a project recently started in Verona by a group of food-delivery workers and local associations. The aim is to build a house for riders where they can rest, charge their phones, repair their means of transport, go to the toilet, wait and drink something hot during cold and rainy days, and find help with understanding all the legal aspects of the job. The group is also urging the municipal government to provide a proper location for the project and directly take on some management responsibilities.

6 The Italian Confederation of Cooperatives, a national association representing, assisting, protecting, and auditing affiliated cooperatives based in Italy.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pietro Ghirlanda

Pietro Ghirlanda is a Ph.D. Candidate in International and Public Law, Ethics, and Economics for Sustainable Development (LEES) at the University of Milan. He is also a research fellow at the University of Pavia, Department of Political and Social Sciences. His work examines the platform economy from a social justice perspective, with a specific focus on the ethics and economics of platform cooperativism as a more democratic and equitable organisational model compared to that of private commercial platforms.