Migrant, Entrepreneur, Man: Platform Food Couriers’ Navigation of Precarity and Vulnerability

Work on food delivery platforms is characterised by increasing vulnerability and a disproportionate representation of a racialised male workforce composed primarily of (undocumented) migrants. Despite mounting criticism of the gig economy model, entrepreneurial discourses and practices continue to be celebrated, produced, and reproduced by politicians, mainstream media, and workers alike. This article draws on three years of ethnographic research with food couriers in the UK and France and explores how platform workers mobilise entrepreneurial aspirations to assess and enact their masculinity within and beyond the workspace. It focuses on two common tactics adopted by these workers: account renting and multi-apping. However, the intensification of work resulting from these practices – combined with a lack of citizenship rights and economic precarity – ultimately undermines their entrepreneurial ambitions.