Highly educated migrants in platform-mediated food delivery work in the Netherlands: The absent presence of skills and its social effects

This chapter discusses the absent presence of skills in relation to platform-mediated food delivery work by highly educated migrant riders in the Hague, the Netherlands. The case presented can be understood as a manifestation of the Global South in the north. In public and legal discourse, platform-mediated food delivery work is considered unskilled. This is reinforced by platform companies themselves. In their efforts to eschew suggestions of an employment relationship, platform companies underemphasise the skill requirement that is nonetheless there, and for migrant riders especially. Ethnographic research with riders made visible several skills riders had to develop to become better at the work and thereby increase their earnings. Since few riders desire to remain in food delivery work long term and consider the knowledge and skills acquired through the work largely irrelevant to occupations they desire, riders themselves also contribute to representing platform-mediated work as unskilled. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the social effects of skills. The relatively poor pay of platform-mediated food delivery and its particular interplay with Dutch visa regimes leads some migrant riders to acquire skills and knowledge that, in the eyes of fellow riders, affect the collective image of the work and its workers negatively and can be said to skill certain groups of riders into further precarity.