Cumulating precarity in a hybrid platform economy: gender, class, and the social exclusion of single mothers in Taiwan

The growing reliance on precarious and platform-mediated work raises fundamental questions about how labour markets, care arrangements, and welfare institutions allocate risk, particularly for single mothers. This article examines why single mothers in Taiwan are disproportionately concentrated in insecure and gig-based employment, challenging accounts that frame flexibility as individual choice. Based on a theory-informed qualitative re-analysis of 31 in-depth interviews, the study shows that such employment trajectories result from the interaction of long-hours working-time regimes, privatized care responsibilities, and heterogeneous forms of gig governance under solo caregiving. The analysis demonstrates that the gig economy is internally differentiated, generating distinct flexibility regimes and risk distributions, and that non-standard and platform-mediated work, flexible in promise but insecure in practice, produces cumulating precarity over the life course by constraining work hours and weakening social insurance accumulation. Theoretically, the study integrates social reproduction, work–family, and life-course perspectives to highlight time and cumulative risk as central mechanisms of labour-market inequality. Policy implications emphasize the need for reforms in working-time governance, care infrastructure, and the expansion of publicly funded childcare, and a shift towards citizenship-based social protection that decouples entitlements from employment status.