New faces of work, new faces of resistance: Instant delivery work in Istanbul

This thesis scrutinizes the work experiences and resistant subjectivities of instant delivery workers, based on interviews with 19 individuals with platform work experience, including a small subset of labor activists, and brief participant observations conducted in a warehouse and at small-scale public demonstrations in Istanbul. Platform-mediated instant delivery work is nested within the specific sector of delivery work and in the trends of the global political economy. By investigating the power relations and mechanisms of control specific to instant delivery work, this study brings insights into the emerging labor landscape and the types and implications of employment relations that are becoming increasingly prevalent. The experience of instant delivery workers hinges on multiple, entangled regimes of power that cannot be reduced to the economic domain but rather intersect with it to generate, sustain, and sometimes challenge a multi-level hierarchy of power relations. Therefore, this thesis further explores how past frameworks of familial and intimate networks of responsibility urge workers to take risks and accept precarious conditions to make what they perceive as a decent living. In this context, characterized by the stark power imbalance between the platforms and the workers, the prospects for pushing for work-related demands through conventional ways of workers' organization and representation are minimal. However, workers consult novel, sometimes tacit, forms of resistance that would complement or, at times, even replace collective outright defiance. Attending to the processes in which workers oscillate and blur the line between individual and collective, explicit and non-explicit forms of resistance, this thesis suggests taking the resistant subjectivities of the workers as a starting point to think about the modalities of power in the contemporary labor landscape in Turkey.