Authors

Discussion

This qualitative research project investigates the emergence of a new labour regime at the Wolt food delivery platform in Budapest that relies on migrant workers and outsources their management to intermediary fleet companies. The novelty of the labour regime is the combination of new legal arrangements for contracting labour entailing tighter control mechanisms aimed at workers and the reliance on vulnerable groups like migrants. This transformation of the labour market has unfolded amid a general shortage of low-skilled labour in Hungary, which has triggered an unprecedented wave of labour migration from the Middle-East and South Asia, facilitated by the Hungarian state. The research is based on participant and non-participant observation and semi-structured interviews.  Conducted between January and April 2025, this study centres on the way migrant workers experience this labour regime and how they respond to the pressures it creates. The outsourcing of migrant labour to platforms via third-party staffing agencies fragments labour discipline and tightens control over these workers. Combined with the structural conditions of transnational migration – including state regulation and limited social embeddedness in the local context – this process contributes to the cheapening of migrant labour. Moreover, the risks carried by the labour process are pushed onto these workers and the labour regime is continuously reconfigured based on the seasonal interests of the platform. This new labour regime has been instrumental in cutting costs for the Wolt platform and exerting a downward pressure on the income of the rest of the workforce. Cutting costs corresponds to the business model of digital platforms as they tend to aim for rents once their market position becomes sufficiently entrenched. Despite the fragmentation of the workforce that the platform and the subcontractors actively nurture, migrant workers form solidarities and pursue collective as well as individual strategies aimed at improving their position. While these strategies do not challenge the general structure of the labour regime in question, they do provide various resources to migrant workers to help negotiate their place. The study contributes to our understanding of how digital labour platforms attempt to develop new techniques of labour disciplining and the worker subjectivities this process produces. It is part of a growing body of literature that aims to understand the transformation of food delivery platforms following the initial boom that the industry went through during the COVID-19 pandemic and the various ways platforms try to tap onto the labour of marginalized groups.