Fragmentation and Unstability of the Labor Order: the Narrative Logic of Cab Workers

• In Event: 20881 - Section on Labor and Labor Movements Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 7: The Materiality of Labor

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore the impact of the platform's digital economy on the labor ecology of the cab industry, which is reflected in the instability and fragmentation of the labor order and manifested through the identity and professional narratives of its workers. The intervention of the platforms and their interaction with the managers, in the process of changing the cab drivers' labor process, labor control, and power pattern, have adjusted, fragmented, and reconstructed the cab drivers' imagination of the labor order they are facing, and in doing so, have shaped their new occupational positioning and legitimacy narratives under this order. When “legal operation” becomes an ambiguous term, and when the tension between the formal and informal systems is repeatedly shifted, workers develop a sense of mobility in the face of an “unstable labor order”. Through the change of the cab driver's narrative logic, we can find the fragmentation of the labor order and its labor consent in the process of urban cab management, which means that the consistency of the laborers' imagination of the “legitimacy” of the labor order is challenged, and that the divided and fragmented identity of the order is the basic characteristic of the ecology of its public management.

Author

• Tao Qin, Peking University