Articles | Volume 81, issue 3
https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-535-2026
https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-535-2026
Standard article
 | 
30 Sep 2026
Standard article |  | 30 Sep 2026

Landscapes of precarious labour: on the long prehistory and contingent future of digital platforms

Moritz Altenried and Mira Wallis

Cited articles

Adamek, S. and Göbel, J.: Verdacht auf Steuerhinterziehung mit System in Berliner Mietwagen-Branche, rbb24, 17 July 2024, https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2024/07/mietwagen-taxi-branche-berlin-steuerhinterziehung-system-verdacht.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com (last access: 21 January 2026), 2024. 
Alkhatib, A., Bernstein, M. S., and Levi, M.: Examining Crowd Work and Gig Work Through the Historical Lens of Piecework, in: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, 4599–4616, https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025974, 2017. 
Altenried, M.: The Digital Factory: The Human Labor of Automation, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL/London, ISBN 978-0-226-81548-0, 2022. 
Altenried, M.: Mobile Workers, Contingent Labour: Migration, the Gig Economy and the Multiplication of Labour, Environ. Plan. A, 56, 1113–1128, https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X211054846, 2024. 
Altenried, M. and Niebler, V.: Latent Conflict, Invisible Organisation: Everyday Struggles in Platform Labour, in: Capitalism in the Platform Age, edited by: Mezzadra, S., Cuppini, N., Frapporti, M., and Pirone, M., Springer, Cham, 353–371, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-49147-4_20 (last access: 11 September 2026), 2024. 
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Short summary
Digital platforms are often seen as innovative, but our research argues that they build on long-standing forms of precarious work. By tracing historical examples of home-based labour, task-based pay, short-term hiring, and labour middlemen, we show that today’s gig economy builds on older practices of precarious labour while reconfiguring them through digital technologies. This perspective reveals that platform work is part of a wider landscape of precarious labour.
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