The thesis examines the work practice of platform-mediated food delivery. Combining ethnographic studies in India and Sweden, it highlights the friction between the platform’s representation of work and the ground realities shaping workers’ situated actions, including their economic concerns. The thesis contributes to the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, with an emphasis on worker-centered design and the critical role of human labor in gig work.

The concept of ‘bodywork´ refers to the work individuals undertake on their own bodies and the bodies of others. One aspect is attending to bodily needs, which is often overlooked in the workplace and HCI/CSCW research on work practices. Yet, this labour can be a significant barrier to work, consequential to work, and prone to spill over into other aspects of life. We present three empirical cases of bodywork: gig-based food delivery, shift work in hospitals and bars, and office-based knowledge work. We describe what attending to bodily needs at work entails and illustrate tactics employed so that work can be carried on, even when the body (or technology optimising it) breaks down. Arguing that all systems are bodily systems, we conclude with a call to acknowledge the centrality of bodies in all work and the roles technologies can play in supporting or constraining bodywork differently for different workers.

Food delivery platforms are designed to match on-demand workers with jobs and then manage, monitor, and assess their performance. These platforms provide workers with a digital representation of delivery work. Once a worker accepts a delivery job they need to deal with the complexities of an unsettled urban landscape with varied infrastructures, traffic, and regulations. In particular, the Global South presents a demanding context for this type of work, given less clearly mapped addresses alongside other socio-cultural intricacies. In order to understand how food delivery workers bridge gaps and mismatches between the demands of the app and the realities encountered in situ, for this paper we shadowed six delivery workers over the course of their working day delivering food in Pune, India. The six workers included a complete novice and more experienced riders. We used helmet mounted cameras to record the delivery work, and how our participants managed the extra demands of food delivery work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our moment-by-moment analysis of the video data is informed by the methodological traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. While the food delivery platform imposes a detailed workflow expected to be performed alone by the worker, our detailed video analysis reveals the collaborative nature of delivery work. We highlight how workers draw upon their ability to participate in ‘fleeting alliances’ and produce ‘frugal collaboration’ with co-located others, such as other delivery workers or security guards. This allows them to resolve everyday troubles, often learning or imparting ‘the tricks of the trade’ in the process. While gig platforms have commonly been presented as disruptive technologies for coordinating, regulating, and assessing gig workers individually and independently, our findings highlight collaboration as a critically important aspect of food delivery work.

Food delivery platforms are location-based services that rely on minimal, quantifiable data points, such as GPS location, to represent and manage labor. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of food delivery work in India during the COVID-19 pandemic, we illustrate the challenges gig workers face when working with a platform that uses their (phone’s) GPS location to monitor and control their movement. Further, we describe how these, along with the platform’s opaque, location-based logics, shape the delivery workflow. We also document how the platform selectively represented workers’ bodies during the pandemic to portray them as safe and sterile, describing workers’ tactics in responding to issues arising from asymmetric platform policies. In discussion, we consider what we can learn from understanding gig workers as ‘infrastructure’, commonly overlooked but visible upon breakdown. We conclude by reflecting on how we might center gig workers’ well-being and bodily needs in design.

This SIG calls for a global conversation around platform (in)justice. By focusing on the experiences of people residing in the Majority World (also known as Global South), we aim at creating a space for international and interdisciplinary exchange on socio-economically, politically, and culturally sensitive platform design and operation. The following topics motivate the SIG: concerns about equal access, structural discrimination, global inequities, and the desire to find solutions to those challenges. We invite the CSCW community to explore how attention to power relations, colonial residual, geopolitical tensions, and historical specificities can lead us to more sustainable and just platform designs. Through our SIG, we aspire to shape a research agenda for platform (in)justice that centers best practices and solutions to mediate some of the harms previously identified in the CSCW community. Going beyond this individual event, we will identify strategies of action that center the needs and assets of people residing in the Majority World when it comes to designing, upholding or challenging the frameworks enabling contemporary platforms.

This paper considers food delivery work as a form of piecework that is conducted via a particular workflow system -- the food delivery platform and its delivery app. We offer an ethnographic account of food delivery labor during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Indian city of Pune. Our inquiry is focused on (1) the workflow that structures food delivery work and (2) how economic considerations shape how workers work with and around the workflow. Our findings depict both the workflow that structures the delivery work and the efforts workers make beyond it to deal with contingencies and unexpected requirements they encounter on the ground. We recognize the workers' efforts as essential to make the workflow work but also to make the piecework arrangement work for them. We highlight how, in this setting, money is not just the motivation for engaging in gig work; rather, economic considerations infuse every aspect of the work process. Acknowledging the distinct shape gig work takes in a Global South context, our study highlights the value of in-depth,in situ understandings of how gig workers' economic considerations are entangled with their interactions with the technology that structures their work. Our key contribution lies in mapping outthe workflow of piecework andthe work to make piecework work, specifically in a Global South setting, by drawing upon classic CSCW themes around workflows and piecework to strengthen the contemporary scholarly discussion concerning gig work.

The European Union announced recently that Europe should be a global hub and leader in the development of Artifcial Intelligence (AI) that guarantees safety and fundamental rights (European Commission (2021)). In this workshop, we investigate how we can approach this challenge from the perspective of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Starting with a general conceptual focus on algorithmic systems and their increasing role in society, we are particularly interested in such systems in and as organisations, and the questions that come up when investigating them as part of complex, cooperative work practices. The full-day workshop, designed for up to 20 participants, advances a CSCW-perspective on algorithmic/AI systems by bringing together researchers within (and where possible beyond) the CSCW community who study algorithmic systems, with the aim of sharing ongoing research and connecting participants with others who share their research interests.