peer reviewed
This commentary aims to investigate the parasitic link between the mushrooming of delivery-based services and digital-based platforms in a post-pandemic, post-port explosion and crisis-ridden Lebanon and its over-reliance on migrant workers’ labour and existing labour regimes for this expansion. In order to do so, this commentary will showcase two recent labour strikes within the largest digital-based delivery platform in Lebanon, Toters. It argues that algorithmic management and racialised control through a techno-sponsorship system nexus has allowed the proliferation of digital-based platforms and delivery-based services in Lebanon. While most of the literature emphasises that the gig economy often reconfigures labour arrangements, this commentary will argue that the proliferation of the gig economy has also found ways to utilise existing labour relations to its own advantage. The Lebanese gig economy has utilised rather than reconfigured existing labour arrangements and relations in the shape of the Kafala system. The consequences of acknowledging that the gig economy builds on existing labour regimes rather than reinventing them are many and far-reaching. If it is true that ‘the adaptability’ and the ‘flexibility’ that the gig economy has branded itself with does not actually trickle down to its workforce but rather is an adaptability and flexibility to mould itself as an ad hoc extension of existing labour regime, then the self-branded innovative tag that accompanies gig economy outputs is nothing but an innovation on novel ways to exploit old labour regimes and allow said regimes to reproduce themselves and weather internal and external crises.