Delivery platform work in a Turkish context: Exploring the experiences, challenges and struggles of esnaf-kurye

This dissertation explores the lived experiences, challenges, contradictions, and coping mechanisms of platform delivery workers, identified as esnaf-kurye, operating in Istanbul and engaged with three major platform companies in the food and grocery delivery sector: Getir, Trendyol, and Yemeksepeti. The research delves into how these workers experience, make sense of, and enact their esnaf-kurye position. It involves participant observation, in-depth interviews, and engagements spanning various contexts and timeframes, including workers' meetings, collective actions, internal discussions, and ongoing digital media research. The critical examination of these experiences uncovers a complex interplay with broader social (re)production relations, examining the intricate social, organizational, and gendered mechanisms in the reproduction of work, workers, and labor movements. Arguing against technological determinism and the notion of a fully digitalized work control system, the dissertation underscores the essential control exerted over the workers through the predominant use of piecework as the payment method. Adopting a social reproduction lens, the study probes into the gendered dynamics of this predominantly male-driven service sector, asserting that workers' reliance on women's unpaid reproductive labor acts as a precondition for platforms offering only a partial solution to social reproduction. The findings highlight the challenging work conditions within Turkish delivery platforms, characterized by extensive working hours, heightened risks of accidents and fatalities, low earnings, limited autonomy, arbitrary dismissals, diverse labor control methods, and a lack of protection, resulting in workers relying on their families for support. Consequently, the dissertation aims to draw attention to key issues such as labor subordination, lack of autonomy at work, demanding working hours limiting workers' social life and organization, and the absence of collective mechanisms for worker solidarity. These considerations are argued to be pivotal not solely for the organization of esnaf-kurye workers but more widely for building a resilient and powerful labor movement capable of countering the deepening precarization of labor. Keywords: Platform Labor, Delivery Workers, Automation, Labor Control, Precarity, Social Reproduction, Esnaf-Kurye, Labor Movement, Istanbul, Turkey.