Neither Employee nor Contractor: A Case Study of Employment Relations between Riders and Platform-Based Food-Delivery Firms in Taiwan

Bo-Yi Lee
Additional contact information
Bo-Yi Lee: National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan

Work, Employment & Society, 2024, vol. 38, issue 1, 122-139

Abstract: There have been numerous legal battles in Western countries concerning employment relations between platform-based food delivery firms and their riders; however, no such legal battles have occurred in Taiwan. This qualitative case study applies the theory of institutional logics to examine the reason such legal action is absent in Taiwan, focusing on how different stakeholders apply different logics to employment relations in Taiwan’s platform-based food-delivery sector. Through this investigation, this article shows that most stakeholders in this sector quickly came to a consensus that the ‘quasi-employee’ hybrid logic should be applied to riders, and that this was due to a convergence of worker and capitalist theories of profit, motivation to maintain the profitability of these platform firms (who are regulatory entrepreneurs performing symbolic compliance) and the techno-developmentalism of the Taiwanese government.

Keywords: employment relations; platform-based food-delivery; platform economy; platform workers; Taiwan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170221103147 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:woemps:v:38:y:2024:i:1:p:122-139

DOI: 10.1177/09500170221103147

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Work, Employment & Society from British Sociological Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().