Understanding the Spatial and Temporal Logics of Gig Work in Food Delivery Apps

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Kyle Moore, whose focus is on food delivery apps. These serve as an example of the gig economy, which enables irregular work structures and task-based activities by workers who usually provide all of their own equipment for their tasks. The workers themselves are also one category of app users, in fact, and exist in a liminal legal state between employees and freelancers.

Workers are required to be online and available around peak usage times, then, and this leads to a kind of power chronography that relates to the temporal rhythms of everyday life. While a selling point for this gig work is its flexibility, ultimately that flexibility is itself dictated by the rhythms of gig economy customers and the cities they live in. This also applies to the businesses that sell things through these platforms and their apps, in fact.

This can be understood through a politics of visibility and surveillance; these apps are enabled by locative media technologies, and force their users into a logic that is dominated by such politics. The apps promise convenience (especially speed and time efficiency), and this is enabled also through real-time tracking (emphasising surveillance and temporal power dynamics); they are structured by location as represented through estimated delivery time rather than physical distance.

Being able to track the gig workers delivering the food order then produces a kind of algorithmic gaze which decouples customer expectations from the reality of the riders delivering the food; what is not shown are environmental conditions like weather and traffic, estimated wait times at restaurants, alternative navigational practices, modes of travel, accumulated delays, or worker pay rates.

Further work must explore how this is experienced from the perspective of the gig workers themselves.