Algorithmic Work, Precarious Labor, and Everyday Resistance: A Comparative Socio-Cultural Study of Food Delivery Platform Workers in Canada and France

Abstract

This article examines how platform-based food delivery labor reshapes worker identity, social inequality, and collective action in contemporary urban societies. Focusing comparatively on Canada and France, the study analyzes how algorithmic management, migrant labor, legal classification, and communicative worker networks produce divergent patterns of labor precarity and resistance. The article argues that platform labor is not merely an economic transformation but a socio-cultural process through which workers negotiate dignity, belonging, surveillance, and collective agency under digitally mediated capitalism.

Using comparative sociological analysis, digital ethnography, labor policy analysis, and secondary labor datasets, the study compares two analytical dimensions: algorithmic labor control and worker collectivization. The findings demonstrate that Canadian delivery workers experience platform precarity through fragmented employment classification, racialized migrant labor, and weak collective bargaining protections, while French workers operate within a more conflictual but institutionally visible labor environment shaped by stronger labor traditions and regulatory debate. Across both cases, workers use digital communication channels to exchange information, contest platform opacity, and construct new forms of occupational solidarity.

The article contributes to social transformation scholarship by conceptualizing platform work as a site of algorithmic precarity and communicative resistance. It concludes that sustainable digital labor governance requires legal recognition, algorithmic transparency, migrant worker protection, and institutional support for collective representation.