ABSTRACT
This chapter examines what moves migrants in the Global North to take up gig work and stick with it for various periods of time despite its by now well documented precarious conditions, by investigating the role that gig platforms play in their life-building trajectories. It offers a discussion of how the topic of precarity has been taken up in the gig economy literature and brings this research into conversation with some recent scholarship on migrant workers’ precarity and agency. The chapter analyses a series of ethnographic vignettes that narrate the experiences of six migrant gig workers. It discusses the main findings and introducing the notion of ‘liminal precarity’ to rethink the ambiguous space between precarity and agency in these workers’ lives, followed by some broader concluding reflections. The agency of low-wage migrant workers has received less scholarly attention than their precarity.
