Citizen-rentier-ship: Delivering the Undocumented to Labour Platforms in Paris

Abstract

Platform food delivery workers have been under much scrutiny over the last couple of years. Undocumented riders, and their recent strikes and protests in France, have not received as much attention as other issues regarding platform labour (contract work, algorithmic control, surveillance). This article follows fieldwork conducted in Paris and interviews with food couriers. Building on work by critical urban studies, migration studies and science and technology studies, this research puts forward citizen-rentier-ship, a tool to understand how multiple parties profit from aspects of precarious status. Interviews with undocumented couriers who worked in Paris highlight how the subletting of accounts, the complicit role of the state, the hypocrisy of employers and the interdependency with the “regularised” put undocumented couriers in hyper-precarious situations. This article concludes that labour laws, misclassification and migration policies are at the centre of the struggles of Paris’ delivery workers and that they need changes.