Abstract
Drawing on a qualitative case study of migrant food delivery platform workers in Australia, this paper examines how workers anticipate the influences of algorithms, live with algorithms, and cope with algorithmic precarity. This paper also explores whether migrant gig or platform workers use their social networks to resist algorithmic governance and platforms’ exploitative mechanisms. Data for this paper include in-depth interviews with 55 platform workers about their efforts to interpret and manage algorithms as part of their everyday work practices. The findings reveal that migrant platform workers use their ethnic networks to resist algorithmic governance and platforms’ exploitative mechanisms. The findings of this paper contribute to platform studies and migration studies by showing that migrant platform workers are able to organise themselves based on their ethnicity and use their networks to resist algorithmic governance and bargain with platforms.