by JENNY CHAN
Abstract: This article analyzes labor informality in the Chinese platform economy. Drawing on participant observation at a parcel delivery station in Beijing, the author discusses how individual and family lives are impacted by the hectic world of logistics work, and indeed, how companies have increased cost competitiveness through driving exploitation into forms hidden within the household. Migrant family members frequently assist each other by calling customers and wrapping parcels while their unpaid labor is subsidizing the company’s business operations. Although the spheres of production and social reproduction can sometimes be integrated in cities, they confront precarious work and unequal urban citizenship.
During the November 11 “Double Eleven” shopping festival, Alibaba sold 5.8 billion USD in gross merchandise in 2013, 9.3 billion USD in 2014, and over 14.3 billion USD in 2015, generating far bigger sales than the United States’ Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined (Sun and Creech 2019: 234). Alibaba—not unlike Amazon—relies on subcontracted companies to deliver orders to consumers. Through an extensive network of logistics partners, Alibaba reduced the time to delivery of one hundred million parcels to three and a half days in 2016, as compared with nine days in 2013 (Ouyang et al. 2017: 26). With an eye on speedups of production and circulation in our digital economy, this article looks into the booming Chinese express delivery sector through the lens of the intersection of class, gender and migrant labor.
With high-speed internet connectivity and prevalence of smartphone usage, retail sales have been increasingly generated through various online platforms. Behind the hype of intelligent logistics, 3.3 million couriers deliver parcels to customers throughout rural and urban areas, and the Chinese delivery labor force has continued to grow amid the COVID-19 pandemic (Sun 2021).1 But how do companies manage couriers through service contracting rather than employment? How do couriers, who are mostly male rural migrants, organize their work individually and collectively on a daily basis? These questions are important to shed light on the decentralized, networked nature of logistics labor behind the e-commerce boom.
Between September 2017 and August 2018, I conducted participant observation by accompanying a team of couriers on their routes during three research trips to Beijing, the Chinese capital. In the face of the coronavirus pandemic and travel restrictions across the border between Hong Kong and the mainland, I have maintained contact with the couriers through WeChat social media since January 2020. In the intricate spheres of production and social reproduction, rural migrant workers handle parcel-delivery service on their own, without employer nor state protection. As individual contractors, couriers utilize their family and/or social networks to survive the market, and simultaneously fuel the growth of Alibaba and its logistics partners.
The next sections review global logistics studies and labor process literature to contextualize the changing work and employment relations in the sector, after which I describe access to the field site and data collection. This is followed by detailed analysis of the status of couriers (who are not classified as employees according to the Chinese labor law) and the challenges they face in making a viable livelihood, including geographical and temporal constraints on the movement of people and goods, provision of customer service, and tensions arising from parenting and caring for their families. The discussion section gives a wider perspective on the aspirations and frustrations of male migrants with regard to their incomes and family lives. Finally, the conclusion summarizes the consequences of labor informality in the Chinese platform economy and suggests directions for future research.