Global Capital in Local Context

This article examines labour agency among food delivery couriers in Croatia and Serbia, two Central and Eastern European markets where public protest and legal actions against platforms remain scarce. Drawing on 53 interviews with food delivery couriers in Croatia and Serbia, the paper identifies a triple constraint in the form of algorithmic control, subcontracting model of work organization, and structurally weak institutions that divert the agency away from collective channels and into two individualized repertoires: strategic non-compliance and strategic misappropriation. Strategic non-compliance refers to individual actions such as task selection, rejections, and timed logoffs that deliberately bend or break platform rules with the aim of maximizing profit. Strategic misappropriations involve couriers’ use of subcontracting and institutional weaknesses to externalize costs, thereby increasing their take-home earnings. These individual actions are not just responses to production regimes but constitutive elements of platform capitalism as it materializes in hybrid institutional regimes.