The Biopolitics of Unmanageable Risk in the Gig Economy

A hallmark of the gig economy is the near-complete offloading of risk onto workers. Recent research has begun examining how gig workers conceptualise and self-manage these risks. This article contributes to this literature by questioning whether it is ever possible for workers to agentically manage risk in the gig economy. Drawing on interviews with Australian ‘home task’ gig workers, the article explores the creative and agentic capabilities that workers developed to self-manage risk. However, it also demonstrates how these capabilities were routinely sabotaged by the platform and social conditions of gig work. Drawing on a Foucauldian theoretical framework, the article argues that this sabotage is an effect of biopolitical disinvestment into the gig economy, wherein gig workers are slowly ‘let to die’ by the neoliberal context of their work.