Too fast to work, too slow to belong: platform acceleration and migration bureaucracy shaping platform workers’ time

What the paper says

This article investigates how migrant platform workers experience temporal dislocation, a concept we propose as the condition in which time is fragmented and externally governed by algorithmic management and immigration bureaucracy. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research with South Asian food delivery couriers in Lisbon, the study identifies four core mechanisms through which time is structured and controlled: algorithmic temporal governance, suspensive short-termism, spatial-temporal displacement, and recursive waiting. The article extends on the work of Arendt (1958), Rosa (2013), Wajcman (2015), and Povinelli (2011) by introducing the concept of temporal dislocation to theorize time as a fundamental political right, entailing the right to rest, plan, refuse, and project a future. Building on existing literature on working time in platform work (Heiland, 2022), this article shows that platform workers are managed through time, and caught between the hyper-demand of digital labour and the inertia of migration bureaucracy, resulting in a suspended existence without temporal autonomy. This article contributes to the emerging literature on platform capitalism and migration by demonstrating how temporal governance intersects with legal precarity to shape migrants’ exclusion from both the labour protections and civic life. In doing so, it reframes time as a terrain of control and a locus of political dispossession, expanding the concept of working time beyond the workplace and forming it as a contested space of inclusion/exclusion.