Stop Telling Me Flexible Employment Is a Benefit

  Who Are the Gig Workers?

When Professor Zhang Dandan at Peking University said that “flexibility in itself is a benefit”, I was deep in the remote mountain forests of the Greater Khingan Range, struggling forward with several gig workers who were picking pine cones. Their job was to carry the nearly 100 jin of pine cones out along the mountain path.

I cannot forget what a woman worker said to me at the time: “Do you have any long-term, stable job you can recommend to me?”

She was from Honghe, Yunnan, and was born in 1995, but was already the mother of two children. Making the long journey to the Northeast to harvest pine cones was just one of the many jobs she did as a gig worker in a year. She said it made it easier to take turns with her husband at home looking after the children.

I had gone to the Greater Khingan Range to interview these gig workers who travel far afield for the seasonal mountain harvest. The conversation on the way kept turning to what practical conditions had left her with no choice but to do gig work, but I had never considered that she actually did not want to do gig work.

That was why Professor Zhang’s words sounded especially harsh to me.

As someone who has long followed the gig worker community and who once worked full-time doing food delivery, I of course knew what Professor Zhang meant by “benefit”.

For example, one of my fellow gig workers at the time, a Northeastern guy in his 50s, came to Beijing during the summer agricultural off-season to do peak-season food delivery, then went back in October for the autumn harvest. When it was time to stay indoors for the winter, he came back again to keep doing food delivery.

As for me, that summer, I finally won a place in Peking University’s postgraduate programme. During the few months before I enrolled, I wanted to earn some money for living costs, and food delivery had the lowest entry requirements and allowed me to work for just a few months.

For me and that man from the Northeast, flexibility was indeed a “benefit”: the gig economy allowed a gig worker to arrange their work and life flexibly, without being tied down by a fixed job.

But it is precisely because I have actually done food delivery that I cannot, like Professor Zhang, glibly call flexibility a benefit for workers. For most gig workers, their work is, like Professor Zhang’s job at Peking University, a choice each person makes to make a living. The only thing is that gig workers face a full-time job with long hours, many constraints, a low hourly rate and limited protections, and they have no Peking University platform or status that would let them talk grandly to the media—even their voice has to be ceded to Professor Zhang.

Although Professor Zhang carefully used academic language to express a seemingly objective view, behind it lay value judgments about what ordinary people actually want in their work and life, which is also why her remarks sparked such heated debate. Academics who do not understand the actual working and living conditions of gig workers, and who adopt the standpoint of companies, or even a broader macro-level standpoint, rather than the standpoint of workers, have no right to speak for them.

 Is the Gig Economy a Step Forward or a Step Back for Gig Workers?

In my view, before we discuss whether gig workers are freer, the question truly worth asking is: Is gig work ultimately a means of making a living freely chosen by people such as food delivery workers and ride-hailing drivers, or an employment model deliberately designed by platforms to cut labour costs and shift risk?

Let us first look at the story of 19th-century British dockers. Although separated by more than a century, they were strikingly similar to today’s platform gig workers, caught in unstable, high-risk employment relationships.

At the time, goods from the colonies had to be shipped into Britain, and the arrival and departure of ships would generate large amounts of uncertain labour demand at the docks in a short period, so an adequate supply of labour had to be available immediately. At the time, two-thirds of dockers were regarded as an informal reserve army of labour. But in the end, after a prolonged struggle, workers won rights to higher wages, overtime pay, and guaranteed minimum working hours. By the late 1960s, all dockers in Britain had permanent contracts.

At the moment they resolved to fight, no standard employment relationship, the kind we take for granted today, was waiting for them. Rather, a fairer and more reasonable employment relationship was itself created in the repeated back-and-forth of workers’ struggles against capital’s control, and was further improved and protected by law.

As a socialist country led by the working class, our country has, since introducing the Labour Law in 1995, amended it twice and has continued to improve workers’ rights and interests at the legal level. Therefore, any attempt to stoop and search for progress in the gig economy is, in my view, an act of reversing the course of history. I also wonder whether, in Britain more than a century ago, there was also a labour economist called Dandan Zane who tried to tell those dockers: “Whatever you do, do not fight for permanent contracts! Flexibility is a benefit, because you are free to arrange your own time.”

Nobody Can Speak for Gig Workers

The struggle is for a better life, and for dignity and fairness; essentially, it is also about reordering power relations. Why did Britain’s dockers a century ago insist on making history and transforming employment relationships? Why did they not know how to sit back and enjoy the benefits of “flexibility” and “freedom”—working as a docker today, a match worker tomorrow, and a picking worker in the countryside the day after? Not only could they earn money, but they could also travel far and wide.

Perhaps Professor Zhang, who is “lacking in freedom” while working at Peking University, did indeed long for such a life, but I also know that many Chinese gig workers today must surely have hoped, in their hearts, for the day when they would no longer have to take on a rushed, insecure gig, but a job that brings dignity, growth and a sense of belonging.

When I first started, my mentor was a young man five years younger than me. Although he did not dare tell his family that he was doing food delivery after university, he thought being a gig worker was pretty good: “Proper jobs are hard to find now, and they don’t pay well either.” A year after I had stopped doing food delivery, when I saw him again, he had changed his tune. He “showed off” to me that he would be promoted to a formal management post at the delivery station. At the time, he was smoking, looking at the moving food delivery rider icons on the algorithm backend, and said rather nonchalantly: “Even if I earn a bit less, it’s still better than being out on the main roads in wind and rain, isn’t it?” A year later, I met him again, and he was back on the road doing food delivery. I cannot forget his embarrassed expression and evasive eyes at the time.

It is clear, then, that even if the gig economy does indeed offer workers a greater degree of freedom, that does not mean they like this drifting, unstable work-and-life situation. Rather than a benefit to be enjoyed, flexibility is a stopgap measure that is just about tolerable for the time being. Gig workers may quietly endure the status quo, even be content with it, but they would never praise it, and outsiders are even less qualified to speak for them and claim that it is a benefit.

Gig Workers ≠ Freedom

If one merely argues, from the standpoint of the work cycle, that flexible employment is a benefit, there is still room for debate. But Professor Zhang’s statement is even more unreasonable: “Although our jobs come with protections such as the five insurances and one fund, they come at the cost of our time and freedom. What flexible workers want is flexibility and self-management, so the level of protection in areas such as social insurance would naturally be somewhat weaker.”

Put aside the fact that the entire income earned by the vast majority of workers in flexible employment through overtime and hard work may be lower than the five insurances and one fund that a Peking University professor has gained by “trading” time and freedom (not to mention Professor Zhang’s actual take-home cash income and the other material wealth and cultural capital obtained through a platform such as Peking University), this view, which defines fragmented labour processes as freedom and flexibility while ignoring platforms’ methods of control, is untenable in its own right.

Who naively thinks that the working hours of food delivery workers and ride-hailing drivers depend only on how much they want to earn? Just talk to taxi and ride-hailing drivers a few times, and you will discover that extremely long working hours are very common among drivers in big cities. Even when exhausted, they must meet the required daily hours and stay online during peak periods, otherwise the algorithm will reduce order dispatch to them.

The same applies to food delivery workers. The station and squad they belong to have the power to force them to come online during peak periods and in bad weather, and impose corresponding penalties if they do not. Some stations also stipulate that if they fail to meet the relevant KPI, the unit price for the entire month will be lowered. I clearly remember that during the May Day holiday in 2021, order volume in Beijing was very low. One evening at around 10 p.m., a food delivery rider was still on the road waiting for orders because he was one order short of completing the day’s KPI. I transferred one of my orders to him. He said to me, “Thanks, that gets me home.”

Compared with people in fixed nine-to-five jobs, food delivery workers are subject to more, not less, control; indeed, they work longer hours, at greater intensity, and bear more risk.

Besides food delivery workers and ride-hailing drivers, emerging platform gig workers such as pickers in fresh-food supermarkets are also under the control of algorithms and piece-rate systems. To meet the platform’s 30-minute delivery requirement, they must finish picking an order within 3 minutes, while for each item picked they earn only a few mao. Their work is extremely fragmented, but the labour intensity is extremely high. Many pickers work six days and rest one, putting in at least 12 hours a day, carrying heavy loads and walking tens of thousands of steps, with only one chance to eat each day.

Many people who feel bound down in fixed jobs are prone to projecting their idea of freedom onto gig workers, as well as small producers such as market stallholders and small shop owners. Especially when someone does not understand the real labour processes of gig workers, they simply assume, off the top of their heads, that gig workers truly have freedom. But in fact they are not free; or rather, what they originally wanted was not the negative freedom to escape from work at any time, but more reasonable working conditions and pay.

Back to that earlier question, which so easily muddies the issue: Is gig work, after all, a way of making a living actively chosen for the sake of freedom by groups such as food delivery workers and ride-hailing drivers, or an employment model deliberately sought by platforms in order to cut labour costs and transfer risk?

According to Professor Zhang, both of these facts exist at the same time and are bound up with each other. But in my view, as the food delivery wars have intensified over these past few years, and in response to demands for capacity and delivery efficiency during peak periods, the platforms’ control over food delivery workers has clearly tightened compared with before. Order dispatch is prioritised for dedicated delivery, Le Pao and Chang Pao riders, who are easier to manage, while crowdsourced riders, who enjoy greater freedom, have gradually become less prominent.

Since the platforms themselves are actively shrinking riders’ freedom and tightening appraisal and control over riders, the natural next direction is to provide riders with the social protection they are entitled to, on the same terms as full-time employees. Even where implementation encounters various institutional obstacles, those are precisely the problems scholars should be thinking through and seeking to solve, rather than continuing to live in their own fantasies and, once again, most inappropriately, equating gig work with freedom and presuming to speak for gig workers by declaring that “flexibility is a benefit”.

The True Social Cost of the Gig Economy’s Gig Workers

On the issue of social insurance, Professor Zhang mentioned in another context: “Some platforms have proposed measures to further expand the coverage of the five insurances and one fund. This has disrupted the existing market structure and created pressure on labour costs. Rising labour costs may lead platforms to reduce full-time posts, cut gig workers’ wages, or even pass costs on by raising delivery fees.”

This has once again helped me understand her labour economics perspective: she is accustomed to thinking about the problems of platforms and gig workers from the standpoint of supply-and-demand matching across the entire labour market. But a scholar’s mind cannot be filled only with abstract labour and employment.

Providing social insurance for food delivery workers may lead to a reduction in the number of posts, but while improving their protection, it can also curb the platforms’ current destructive model of cheap food delivery: capturing market share by keeping delivery fees low, then extracting high commissions from the food and beverage industry to make profits, thereby squeezing the livelihoods of small and medium-sized restaurants, forcing merchants to cut ingredient costs, and producing unhealthy food-delivery products for consumers.

Earlier, Southern Weekly ran the following calculation in a report: if Meituan were to pay social insurance for the 1.2 million riders who meet the full-time definition, the cost would be 21.6 billion yuan. But Meituan, Taobao and JD have burnt through more than 100 billion yuan in the recent food delivery wars. Therefore, although the rise in labour costs brought about by social insurance would squeeze the room for small enterprises to survive, for these platform giants the added cost does not compare with the money they spend to compete for market share.

What is even more ironic is that Meituan’s 2025 financial report shows that the company’s R&D spending on drones, autonomous delivery vehicles and AI reached a high of 26 billion yuan. In other words, the technology R&D spending by a food delivery platform on trying to replace food delivery workers has already been enough to cover the social insurance costs of full-time riders.

Professor Zhang Dandan is also researching the impact of AI on employment and claims to have policy influence. Her judgements about gig workers make it hard not to worry whether the same unfounded assumptions will recur in research on AI and the employment relationship, misleading both the public and policy.

In short, there are still many questions we need to consider when it comes to platforms and the gig economy, and the relationship between technology and workers. Employment is, of course, important, but that does not mean that workers must unconditionally support it simply because someone can provide them with jobs. After all, platforms and workers are, so to speak, skin and hair; which is skin and which is hair, and who depends on whom to survive, is still worth debating separately. Even in the most extreme case, no worker simply wants a job bestowed on them as a favour; we merely want, through our own labour, to achieve a better life and better work.

– This is Foodthink’s 835 th original article –

Editor: Tianle

Layout: Xiaoshu

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