Work, life, and the everyday realities of migrant platform workers: an introduction

Our introduction situates this Special Issue (SI) within current debates on work, life, and migrant labour on digital platforms, emphasizing how they reorganize time, mobility, and everyday life for those who work with them. Using ‘Souleymane’s story’ from the 2024 movie as paradigmatic, this introduction illustrates how migrants experience the platform economy at the intersection of border violence, legal precarity, and algorithmic management. It highlights three central dynamics shaping contemporary labour in the digital platforms: the production of ‘liminal legality’ through restrictive migration regimes, the structural invisibility of migrant work enabled by informal account renting and subcontracting, and the fragmented temporalities that define platform labour, where speed, unpaid waiting, and constant evaluation permeate daily routines. By linking these dynamics to broader scholarship on precarity, social reproduction, and racialised labour markets, the introduction shows that platform economies do not simply offer flexible work, but absorb and intensify long-standing inequalities. It then outlines how the SI’s contributions examine these issues across different regional and sectoral contexts, tracing how migrants negotiate, endure, and contest the conditions of digitalised labour. Together, the articles position migrant platform workers as central to understanding contemporary transformations of work time and life-time, while also revealing the everyday tactics and collective efforts through which they reshape their experience in this sector.