Work, labour and mobility: opening up a dialogue between mobilities and political economy through mobile work

Abstract

This paper demonstrates how mobilities perspectives might contribute to debates in political economy on labour and work, by interrogating mobility’s relation to work and labour. The paper makes four interventions. It offers (1) an overview of the literature on mobile work, working with mobilities concerns to develop a typology grounded in movement in geographical space. (2) It then examines how different types of mobile work are coordinated. Coordination is achieved by devices, some of which (timetables and algorithms) choreograph movement in space and time whilst others (e.g. signals, tachographs, apps) control, record and evaluate movement. Focusing on coordination devices allows for mobile labour to be differentiated from mobile work. In platform-mediated mobile work the governance of work through dashboards of mobility, and the consolidation and marketization of mobility data from mobile workers, turns mobile work to mobile labour, and the relation of labour and mobility from one of contingency to dependency. The paper further shows (3) how coordination devices shape the conditions of mobile work and the affective experience of working on-the-move in space and time. As a condition of more jobs is that they are done on-the-move, a consequence (4) is that labour activists recognise the conditions of mobility in employment.