Navigating Precarity Between Law and Profit: Migrant Riders in Italy, Poland, and Spain

Francesco Pasetti, Eleonora Celoria, Gianluca Iazzolino and Katarzyna Rakowska
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Francesco Pasetti: CIDOB—Barcelona Centre for International Affairs, Spain
Eleonora Celoria: University of Turin, Italy
Gianluca Iazzolino: Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, UK
Katarzyna Rakowska: Centre of Migration Research, University of Warsaw, Poland

Social Inclusion, 2026, vol. 14

Abstract: This article examines how platform‐mediated food delivery work shapes the socio‐economic inclusion and exclusion of migrants in Italy, Poland, and Spain. Drawing on 60 in‐depth interviews with migrant riders in Turin, Warsaw, and Barcelona, the study adopts a comparative ethnographic approach to examine how distinct regulatory models—Italy’s “dual‐track,” Poland’s “contractual bricolage,” and Spain’s “regulated exclusion”—shape migrant inclusion in platform labour markets. Despite these differences, the findings reveal a striking convergence: migrant riders across all three contexts face legal ambiguity, economic insecurity, and algorithmic control, which together entrench their marginalisation. Theoretically, the article engages with scholarship on platform capitalism, migration governance, and informality to show how digital infrastructures and stratified legal regimes co‐produce new forms of labour exploitation. Migrants respond with informal strategies to navigate the contradictions between denied rights and urgent needs. These practices expose how platform logics of outsourcing and opacity align with state‐driven hierarchies of legal status to corner migrants into the most vulnerable segments of the labour market. The article concludes that the convergence of precarity is not incidental but structurally embedded in the interplay between digitalised labour regimes and exclusionary migration policies, calling for a rethinking of protections that address both technological and legal dimensions of inequality.

Keywords: comparative ethnography; digitalisation; exclusion; food delivery; gig economy; irregular migration; migrant integration; migrant workers; migration governance; platform capitalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:socinc:v14:y:2026:a:10959

DOI: 10.17645/si.10959

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