Precariat in the Social Factory: Exploitation and Resistance among Food Delivery Platform Workers in an Industrial City
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Abstract
This article applies Mario Trontithe’s concept of the social factory to examine the labour and everyday lives of food delivery platform workers (riders) in an industrial city. It explores how the industrial city is constituted as a social factory, how riders participate in value production and are subjected to exploitation through the extraction of surplus value, and how they resist these power relations. Utilizing an action research approach combined with quantitative and qualitative methods, the study draws on a survey of 65 riders, in-depth interviews with 12 riders and 2 trade unionists, and both participant and non-participant observations of riders’ daily lives in the Bo Win Subdistrict of Chonburi Province between September 2024 and March 2025. This article shows that riders represent a clear case of “precarious workers within the social factory.” They are situated within insecure employment conditions, compelled to bear risks displaced onto them by capital, and, at the same time, produce value within the circuit of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption under contemporary capitalism, in which the logic and relations of factory-based production have expanded to dominate society as a whole. The article therefore proposes Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a policy agenda and a mechanism for redistributing wealth and reducing social inequality, aimed at protecting riders and other groups of precarious workers.
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