A promise of mobility? Migrant gig workers in multinational food delivery platform companies in the Netherlands

This commentary examines highly educated migrant gig workers who drive for multinational food delivery platforms in the Netherlands. It is part of the collection on The global politics of precarity and insecure work . Our study finds that the relative ease of securing a position in a delivery platform company offers educated migrants entry to the Dutch labour market built on the hope that this will facilitate their ability to secure a position in their respective fields. Delivery platforms capitalise on workers in what we call ‘positional limbo’, attracting educated, high-performing workers for low-paid, low-skilled positions. This precarious form of employment is instituted and sustained within the framework of labour and immigration management in the Netherlands. We find that this form of migration through the performance of platform labour is shaped by an increasingly flexible labour recruitment system alongside the internalisation of neoliberal discourses on work. We argue that together these sustain platform companies, reproduce inequalities in the labour market and produce a form of mobility-precarity that exists in the intersection of migration and platform capitalism. Our findings contribute to the development of scholarship on the global political economy (GPE) of labour and how digital technologies are impacting the future of work and immigration.