As part of a seminar on political ecology I took, I spent some time reading about and thinking about Covid-19, platform labour and risk. I went down quite a few research rabbit holes, particularly about zoonoses (diseases jumping from animals to humans, or, I guess, vice versa) and the development of the HIV/Aids pandemic in Southern Africa. I read one paper from 2010, which really threw everything I thought I knew about HIV/Aids and zoonoses out of the water. It turns out zoonoses are pretty regular, and are not the lightning bolt moment for pandemics I thought they were.
Rather, we should accept that zoonoses occur and will continue to occur, and look at the social context and the ease of a virus adapting to human hosts. In the case of HIV/Aids, this was the extent of genital sores as a result of a syphilis epidemic in colonial cities based on the exploitation of locals by European powers.
Platforms shift risk, which has become increasingly significant in the pandemic
The key claim I make in the argument below is as follows. Platform delivery agents have already been forced into accepting all the risk associated with their work. These risks include things like traffic accidents, health insurance and even lack of demand for the service. This should ensure generous profits for the owners of the platforms (but mostly just ensures generous investment). The pandemic has something like doubled the revenue of the platforms and pushed more people into delivery work. It has also radically changed the risk profile, exposing riders to the disease.
Platforms aimed at shifting risk to riders, an innovation of the 2010s, have some into their own now. They are fantastic at shifting risk from the wealthy to the poor. The only way I see to stop this is to organise and unionise.
Here’s the full text, I’d be delighted to hear any feedback on it!
“As we learned from mad cow disease, which has quickly become a morality tale for the integrated networks in which we live, life and death are both network effects, which is one of the reasons why food networks have become such important sites of political contestation.“
(Braun, 2008, p. 256)
When the virus first impacted my life in March 2020, I had to cut a trip short due to increasing health security concerns coming out of New York City. As a well-paid employee of a digital education company, the subsequent lockdown and long period of insecurity in Europe did not affect me negatively to any great extent. I lived comfortably in relative isolation, and every Sunday I went out and bought a new kind of fish and learned to cook it to varying degrees of success.
Whilst I learned to cook seafood, millions died worldwide, and thousands in my city, of a horrific disease for which there was at the time no effective treatment. Those working in medical professions were clearly at an increased risk of dying of the disease, and this was covered extensively in media in Europe and North America. What was not covered extensively in the media, at the time or since, was the extent to which those working in logistics and delivery were also at an increased risk of dying, which has been calculated in the few analyses of excess mortality according to profession performed, to have been similar to or higher than that of medical professionals (Public Health England, 2020, p. 53), (Chen et al., 2021, p. 7), . The fact that I and people like me lived comfortably whilst others died preventable deaths working to maintain our isolated metabolism was not fate but a product of the political environment in which we all live.
Existing political ecology literature is at pains to show that there is no such thing as a “natural” disaster (Smith, 2006; Collard et al., 2018, in Mehta et al., 2022, p. 3). This essay aims to explore the explanatory potential of a political ecology lens to shed light on the way that environmental threats in urban environments can be managed with the use of algorithmic administration of precarious food delivery workers, maintaining urban productivity for capital at times of extreme health crisis, to the cost of the lives of so-called “system-relevant” or “necessary” workers.
In metropolitan cities across the globe, digital platforms like Uber-Eats or Food Panda provide customers with access to home delivery of a wide range of food items from shops and restaurants for a small fee, and riders (usually cyclists, motorcyclists or moped riders, but also drivers and users of other kinds of vehicles) with access to a highly precarious source of income. Riders are strictly self-employed, lacking social benefits, sick pay and holiday, but with the ability to choose when and where they want to work. In order to maintain discipline amongst its workforce, digital platforms have developed a range of algorithmic and non-algorithmic management techniques, such as ratings, surge pricing, GIS systems, system deactivation and gamification to conduct riders around the city in a way that is most profitable for the company, and to ensure that there will always be riders in areas of the city with demand for services (usually wealthy areas) (Vecchio et al., 2022, p. 8). On-demand delivery is going through a period of growth, to which the pandemic has contributed, because providing food, drink and other daily necessities to wealthy individuals at home, reducing their need for contact with other residents of a city going through a pandemic, is a highly profitable business. Often riders, wearing conspicuously colourful backpacks and rain jackets, were solitary figures on the streets of major capitals during periods of lockdown (Vecchio et al., 2022, p. 1).
Urban political ecology posits that rather than identifying what is ‘natural’ and what is not natural about the city, the key question asked of the field is the way that processes of capitalist urbanisation take non-human material, mobilise, marshal and metabolise it to produce socio-ecological assemblages that support the urbanisation (and thus profit maximisation) process (Swyngedouw, in Perreault et al., 2015, pp. 609–610). The development of a cohort of vulnerable riders directed algorithmically through urban viral and traffic risks contributes to the “frantic search for a “smart” socio-ecological urbanity” by “a global urban intellectual and professional technocracy” in the service of “resilient urban governance, the commodification of environmental ‘services’, and innovative – but fundamentally market- conforming – eco-design”. Of course, exactly as predicted by Swyngedouw, this process is “predicated upon mobilising precarious labor and dispossessing local people from their resources and livelihoods” (Swyngedouw, in Perreault et al., 2015, p. 610). This essay will attempt to “highlight specific weaknesses in systems-based analytical approaches to the elucidation of socio-ecological relations” (Gandy, 2022, p. 214), namely existing analytical approaches to platform logistics and risk management in the pandemic. As outlined by (Wallace et al., 2020, p. 11), the cause of the adverse outcomes of the virus can neither be understood alone in an ecological analysis of its zoonosis and transmission, nor in the global political economy that regulates metabolism and risk, but in the interplay and mutual constitution of the two domains.
Platform logistics and precarious labour
Variously known as “on-demand” or “gig-economy” platforms connect consumers, producers and delivery agents in specific locations, using the smartphone’s GPS to intermediate. They require both labour and capital, in the form of equipment, from delivery agents (Tubaro & Casilli, 2022, p. 7). Online platforms have been rapidly growing in size and scope for the ten years prior to the pandemic- in the UK, the number of people working for online platforms at least once a week doubled between 2016 and 2019, from 4.7% to 9.6% (Huws, 2020, pp. 8–9). During the pandemic, demand for platform mediated labour has increased even more rapidly. Delivery apps became the only way for isolated individuals and families to procure daily necessities, and closed restaurants sought desperately for new channels to sell. Whilst Uber’s taxi service gross bookings dropped by 44% from 2019 to 2020, in the same period, its delivery service grew by 110% (Uber Technologies, 2021, as cited in (Tubaro & Casilli, 2022, p. 10))
The growth of platform labour is based on the reframing of the employment relationship to one of client and consumer. In this way, platform companies avoid any liability for social or other insurances, unemployment, accident or lack of demand. Effectively shifting all the risk of employment to the worker, and simultaneously being able to leverage large amounts of investment funding, platform labour is thus able to offer consumers large savings, whilst workers must find ways to manage their risk on their own or within family or confraternal units, something which is particularly challenging seeing as they are more likely to be migrants, members of ethnic minorities or those in society with the least resources (Huws, 2020, pp. 10–11). This occurs to the extent that companies may not respond to delivery agents who have had a traffic accident except to ensure the delivery of their load (Vecchio et al., 2022, p. 6). The growth of precarious jobs as riders or in platform logistics in major cities has been paralleled with growth in employment in those same cities as cognitive-cultural workers for the same start-ups or for the major companies of the larger tech ecosystem (Mahmoudi et al., 2020:42). Thus a double urbanisation takes place, as privileged employees of tech companies move into cities to increase the rate of capital accumulation, whilst migrants from the urban periphery perform the deskilled work that produces value.
Along with the devaluation of the worker to the status of freelancer, platform labour companies have been able to attract large amounts of investment capital on the basis of their new approaches to the supervision of labour. They employ algorithmic tools not just to cut out an expensive layer of middle management but also to optimise the exploitation of their pools of workers. This belies the supposed freedom offered to the ‘self-employed’ delivery agents (Rosenblat, 2016, p. 3761). Information asymmetry between the rider and the platform ensures that the delivery agent makes decisions that benefit primarily the company itself and secondarily the client, on whose behalf the delivery will be made. Blind acceptance of orders without knowing their value or difficulty, along with low minimum costs, ensures that the volume of orders remains high, and orders made will always be picked up. ‘Surge pricing’, the regulation of a market in orders in which areas of high demand have their fees inflated to incentivise a match in supply, regulates the movement of workers to areas of the highest profitability for the company (Rosenblat, 2016, p. 3762). In general, the goal is to reduce the amount of ‘friction’ in the ‘market’ to a minimum, allowing the constant provision of the maximum amount of service for the highest possible price. However, the friction identified can also be understood as areas of resistance, in which the individual worker, or groups of them, can leverage their labour for higher returns. The reduction in friction shifts costs further onto the individual worker, ensuring she works as hard as possible and only on those tasks that create the most possible value for the company. Because demand can occur at any time, platform labour jobs are ‘Monday to Monday’ (Vecchio et al., 2022, p. 5), and with the use of multilingual mapping tools, can be formally carried out by anyone regardless of their knowledge of the city, of local languages or of local labour law. At times platform companies may institute bonuses, designed to keep workers online and available, delivering the largest number of orders to the highest value customers, and because of their monopoly of information, workers are not able to make informed decisions about how to respond (Rosenblat, 2016, p. 3765), (Vecchio et al., 2022, p. 5). Finally, platforms maintain numerous communication channels with their workers, through push notifications, emails, text messages or phone calls. However, communication in the other direction is limited by the company, with customer call centres taking the place of HR departments. This further limits delivery agents’ ability to fully understand how the relationship with the platform works (Rosenblat, 2016, p. 3771).
Key to understanding the role of platform labour in the changing urban environment with regard to viral infection and pandemics is the concept of risk. Initially, the structure of platform labour created a situation in which riders take on the entire risk of working (accident, death, unemployment, lack of demand), whilst the platform can reap the rewards through information asymmetries and algorithmic control. This expansion of urban labour exploitation into new spaces made possible through technology was aimed at achieving large profits in the context of a rate of profit crisis. However, as mobility became a viral risk in itself during the most recent epidemic, this inherently exploitative labour relation was adapted to ensure that the most marginal workers took on even more risk (of infection) in order to maintain the isolation of the least marginal workers, and maintain the (often digital) infrastructure of the new urban economy.
Virus ecology in urban space
So far, it is clear that the pandemic created new conditions for the growth of delivery platforms, which promise highly efficient exploitation of labour to create profits and fulfil a task made necessary by a viral outbreak. However, at this stage of the essay it is unclear what insight a political-ecological lens can offer to this situation. Initial approaches within political ecology to disease focused on disease patterns and vulnerability; recently, however, this approach has expanded to take into view health more broadly and historically, and its effects on a range of bodies, human, land, animal, plant and microbial (Kaup, 2021, pp. 569–570). This essay aims to explore the relationship between the city, platform labour and the virus, and the extent to which a political ecology lens can provide insight into these relationships.
Capitalism requires continual growth in the rate of profit, which in turn requires ‘continuous and highly uneven dynamics of continuous socio-ecological transformation’ (Swyngedouw, in (Perreault et al., 2015, p. 614). Cities provide interfaces for a wide range of resources, allowing the kinds of assemblages required by capitalism for its increased rates of profit, as already described with the example of labour platforms. Simultaneously, cities have become sources of vulnerability in the current global health paradigm, as globalisation and the reemergence of transmissible diseases shifts professionals from a bounded to a relational understanding of health, and global cities become nodes connecting exotic and foreign rural and peri-urban spaces (Gandy, 2022, p. 207). Zoonotic events since the 1990s have contributed to this paradigm shift, as the movement of pathogens from animal bodies through human and urban assemblages threatens the ability of capital to reproduce itself. Gandy’s ‘zoonotic city’ is a post-modern site of chaos, with ecological, bacteriological and viral agency challenging dominant standardised socio-technical forms of the regulation of urban life (Gandy, 2022, p. 203). The ‘unbounded’ nature of cities and bodies are not and never were governable with 20th century techniques of harmonisation and regulation, and new forms of biopolitics will be required to ensure ‘sustainable’ development and profit growth in the face of coming urban zoonoses (Gandy, 2022, p. 208).
Conventionally three historical epochs have been identified to categorise epidemics since the dawn of history. The first is connected to the development of agriculture and connected zoonoses such as the plague, tuberculosis and rabies. The second is related to the development of industrial cities and the lack of knowledge of sanitation causing cholera outbreaks. The third countenances new forms of ill-health connected to the demographic transition and lifestyle diseases, along with new transmissible diseases such as Ebola, HIV, and SARS. However, this leaves out the most important of all epidemic transitions, that of the genocide of inhabitants of the Americas. The transmission of Smallpox and Typhus to and the likely transmission of Syphilis from the Americas predated the development of industrial cities and heralded the beginning of a new epidemic epoch in which the extractive frontier of colonial capital was also the source of disease (Gandy, 2022, pp. 205–206). As humans urbanised, the infrastructure necessary to urban life like drains, sewage lines and water mains were built and made invisible, disappearing underground and to the peripheries of cities. 20th Century modernist biopolitics promised to sanctify and sterilise the city, providing its inhabitants with a feeling of safety from the epidemic horrors of the past (Braun, 2008, p. 254). This safety emphasised the freedom and independence of the (privileged) urban resident from the biological world but simultaneously marshalled more non-human bodies than ever before in support of their healthy existence through networks of food production, sanitation, energy production, exercise, landscape maintenance, medication and medicalisation (Braun, 2008, p. 255).
One of the first diseases to ‘break through’ this feeling of safety was HIV. The moral panic of western societies to its outbreak demonstrates the terror felt at the crumbling of the modern health and hygiene regime. It also proves to be a fantastic example of the power of political ecology to explicate viral phenomena, as outlined by Sousa et al. (2010). In the absence of similar research into the current pandemic, it shows the interaction of socio-economic and viral-ecological systems to produce (or destroy) health. The authors demonstrate that, far from a freak biological occurrence, the zoonosis of SIV, the simian precursor to HIV, was a regular occurrence and a simple and straightforward outcome of the bushmeat trade in West and Southern Africa. The virus was poorly adapted to humans and did not last long in its hosts, unable to maintain chains of transmission long enough to adapt to human biology and viable transmission vectors. This only happened at the advent of colonial cities in Southern Africa, likely in the formerly Belgian Congo, where only 20% of the population was female, prostitution very common and Genital Ulcer Disease (GUD) endemic as a result of transmission from the Americas through the colonial expedition, between the 1850s and 1930. Without specifically the presence of endemic GUD, it is unlikely that HIV would have adapted to human transmission when it did (Sousa et al., 2010, p. 2). Other vectors (homosexual sex and intravenous drug use) became important in the 1970s and 1980s in major metropolitan centres in North America and Europe.
The confluence of ecological and political-economic factors created the potential for zoonosis, viral adaptation to human biology and the shuffling and reshuffling of behavioural vectors allowing for transmission. Epidemic disease is thus a political, social and economic fact as much as a biological or ecological one. This paper argues that, in fact, epidemic disease can only be fully understood from a political ecological standpoint, in which the physical existence of the virus is literally formed by political and economic contexts, as with HIV and colonialism, as well as ecological contexts like the presence of GUD and bushmeat trade.
Although the field is still emerging, it is already possible to identify potentially key political ecological contexts of the current epidemic. The concept of risk, particularly the risk of exposure and the risk of economic ruin due to lockdown, already appears key to understanding the ecological assemblages that are the pandemic (Gandy, 2022, p. 210), (Mehta et al., 2022, p. 2), (Wallace et al., 2020, p. 6). The way that economic demands have shaped mobility and immobility (Vecchio et al., 2022, p. 7), (Mehta et al., 2022, p. 5) through all kinds of environments has also shaped the way that disease vectors have developed, with those able to immobilise themselves able to avoid infection, and those already forced to take on all risk for their employment utilised to enable that isolation. And in a much more visible and notable way than with HIV, the virus has adapted in real time to our bodies, wave after wave becoming more or less deadly, more or less infectious, named after the countries that could not afford the vaccine’s intellectual property.
The virus is now a part of the city, every city, in the way that methods of accumulation of capital have responded to the pandemic and reshuffled resources, including the human kind, to ensure profitability. The way labour platforms have contributed to this reshuffling is just one way the city and the platform are becoming increasingly conjoined (Mahmoudi et al., 2020:40). Digital communication and calculation make transportation and storage cheaper, enabling the growth of both “symbolic analysts”, those creating the platforms, and a “precariat”, those forced to work in it, in the same urban space, where they provide each other scalable experiential goods and services (Mahmoudi et al., 2020:42). The final question that will be asked in this paper is, what kinds of mutually constitutive dynamics exist between the virus and the platform to achieve stability for urban capital accumulation?
Risk management in the city
As already noted, risk in terms of viral infection within urban environments began to be recognised increasingly in the late ‘70s up until the present day, as the positivistic modern 20th Century rationalist biopolitical approaches to health and hygiene started to fail. HIV, Ebola, SARS and the current epidemic all appeared during a transition towards a relational understanding of spatialised risk, in which colonial metropoles were no longer the nerve centres of nation states, but a node connecting the zoonotic hotspots of South Asia and West Africa with the national heartlands of Western nations (Gandy, 2022, p. 204). Ideas of sterility and socio-technical approaches to hygiene could not stop the spread of these diseases. When they were brought “under control”, it was also understood that more would come, that the ever-moving frontier of capitalist resource extraction, currently found in the already mentioned zoonotic hotspots, would continue to bring ever new species of exotic animals and viral reserves into contact with the global market, as long as the global market required ever-increasing profit margins.
The global networks which enable economic growth and protect residents and citizens from economic collapse are also ‘dangerous’ (Braun, 2008, p. 261). They have inhered within them both the ability to support the life of city residents and to take that life away. In order to ensure order, political and economic authorities must regulate the different kinds of risk within society. The risk of exposure to the virus must be weighed up with the risk to capital of the breakdown of the economy, and the challenge of maintaining supplies whilst in isolation.
Before the widespread lockdowns across cities worldwide, the mobile citizen was the privileged one, with the ability, but not the compulsion, to move through space. During the lockdown, the polarity of this dichotomy was reversed so that those unable to isolate were forced to take the risk of infection, and those able to become immobile, because of their ability to perform their work remotely, were also able to avoid the risk of exposure (Vecchio et al., 2022, p. 1). This increase in risk was perceived by the riders themselves (Vecchio et al., 2022, p. 7), as well as the choice between risking exposure and not being able to afford to eat.
The risks of virus exposure faced by delivery agents were and are by no means the only risk they face. Whilst an equitable society would distribute risks according to resilience, or simply evenly amongst the population, in order to protect the investment made in human capital, neoliberal societies concentrate risk in expendable, marginal populations. Not only do workers face intersectional marginalisation on the basis of a range of identities (Mehta et al., 2022, pp. 2–3), but they also face risks as a result of their mode of transport (bikes and mopeds), their lack of healthcare coverage and other social insurances, and their often precarious migration status.
The current pandemic forced capital to reassemble value chains, flows of goods and logistical networks in order to protect value production and profit. The preexisting assemblage of human and non-human beings was too vulnerable, mainly because certain classes of people, educated, high earning and highly invested-in, lived in urban nodes directly related to the external frontiers of capital accumulation, thrusting into biodiverse terrains in amongst other places South Asia and West Africa (although including the internal frontier, factory farms in the US (Swine Flu 2009) and the UK (Mad Cows Disease throughout the ‘90s). The rapidly developing labour platforms were marshalled, along with other logistical structures, to ensure the delivery of the necessary goods for survival to those wealthy and privileged enough to need them in isolation. The delivery workers’ ranks were swelled by the recently unemployed, who did not need any further convincing to expose themselves to the virus because they already, due to a variety of factors, were living on a precarious edge. Algorithmic management meant an invisible bending of the will of the workers without media attention and minimising resistance, regulating their conduct throughout the city, and ensuring high-profit margins and healthy customers. Just as with HIV, societies first need to be rendered vulnerable to infection, these populations first need to be rendered precarious in order to continue to expose themselves to risk, creating other vectors for the virus and further potential for it to adapt to its human hosts. Braun (2008) suggests that the experience of SARS implies that health and illness are not to be understood as qualities belonging to bodies but rather as ‘emergent effects of the biological, political, and economic networks that compose them and that position different bodies as more or less vulnerable or secure.’ This analysis centres on the contexts that produce health and risk, as well as the biopolitics that regulates these contexts and the beneficiaries of economic and health policies that produced the current epidemic.
Conclusion
This essay set itself the question, to what extent would a political ecological lens be able to explain the ways that algorithmically managed workforces were exposed to health risks throughout the current pandemic in order to maintain the health of their customers. It outlined the way that workforces are managed, that epidemic threats can be produced and that cities, viruses and platforms constituted each other over time. It showed the ways that capital renders human bodies vulnerable or resilient against poor health and the forms that this rendering itself is rendered invisible and naturalised as a part of the literally “natural” world. In particular, it has shown how the way risk is managed in platform capitalism has been utilised by clients and owners during a major pandemic to continue to burden poor and marginalized people with the costs of death and disease, and maintain a smart city with isolated nodes of power and wealth intersecting with a small army of exploited “employees”. Specifically, because the role of delivery agents was already predicated on the agents taking on the entirety of the risk attached to their work, it was very easy to include the risk of ill-health and infection within that package.
This is the key explicatory power of political ecology within this field; it renders visible the economic and ecological contexts of phenomena such as health and shows how the two areas constitute each other and the phenomena itself. Throughout researching and writing this paper, I have had my preconceptions challenged. I had to reassess my attitudes towards disease and illness, particularly around HIV/Aids, the colonial context of which I found honestly mind-blowing.
There is (as far as my research has taken me) no political ecological analysis of the zoonosis leading to the current pandemic like that of HIV/Aids outlined in this paper, and this paper does not do this (nor does it attempt to). This is a weakness of this paper, as there is a hole in its argumentation around the human, and very likely economically motivated, cause of the outbreak. Still, the political ecological analytical lens applied to labour issues has been particularly eye-opening in the way that existing structures of precarity have been utilised by capital in an ecological and economic crisis in order to externalise risk and increase the rate of profit. This area represents enormous future research potential.
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