Abstract

The globalization of platform work has had variegated effects on working conditions. However, the dichotomy between formal employment and informal economic activities still dominates academic research and policymaking. This division reiterates a colonial matrix of thought by taking the formal employment regime as developed during the 20th century in the Global North as a worldwide standard, while grouping together multifarious working conditions in the Global South under the negative container concept of “in-formal work.” We use the Weberian methodology of ideal-type construction to positively characterize the variegated informalities of platform work while respecting its heterogeneity. We describe three ideal-types for informal working conditions in platform-mediated transportation: in Argentina, platform work functions as an income-driven safety net for workers left behind by the formal labor market; in Indonesia, platforms are forces of selective (in)formalization that apply or lift formal work arrangements depending on strategic interactions with other stakeholders; in Kenya, debt-fueled informality gets workers trapped in debt to engage in platform work.

Introduction

When studying the globalization of platform work, a common assumption is that platformization in the Global North has led to an informalization of work because of companies evading traditional labor regulations (Fleming, 2017; Rosenblat, 2018; Schor, 2020). A common narrative of “Uberization” stresses how platform companies like Uber, Deliveroo, and Glovo are exempted from formal employer obligations by pushing for workers’ entrepreneurial self-responsibility. In the Global South, however, platformization is said to formalize working conditions in so-called “institutional voids” (Bertolini et al., 2023; Heeks et al., 2021; Uzunca et al., 2018; Weber et al., 2021). However, mapping the formal/informal-divide neatly unto the global North/South-axis comes with the risk of oversimplification. Informal work is, firstly, much more common in the Global North than sometimes imagined. Secondly, calling all labor in the Global South uniformly “informal” reveals very little of the heterogeneity of working conditions. By taking the Global North’s particular understanding of formal employment as the global standard for assessing all labor conditions, we repeat a colonial matrix of knowledge that divides the world into two uniform halves with the South defined solely through what it lacks vis-à-vis the North (Mignolo, 2011; Muldoon and Wu, 2023; Quijano, 2000; Sousa Santos, 2016).

We will focus on this second issue, the underdeterminacy of “informality” as a theoretical concept. It classifies working conditions based on their distance from formal employment but reveals little of the mutual heterogeneity across informal labor regimes. By calling all working conditions that deviate from formal employment merely “in-formal,” we capture that informal labor conditions are different without explaining what they are or in what sense they differ from formal employment or each other. This strategy has the advantage of keeping the concept open for the variety of working conditions and lived experiences of informal workers across countries and sectors (Breman and Van Der Linden, 2014) but comes at the cost of vagueness and retaining the formal employment regime of the Global North as unchallenged global standard (Tandon and Rathi, 2023; Thieme, 2018). “Informality” risks becoming a negative container concept for anything not fitting the standard employment model. Especially for policymakers like the International Labour Organization (ILO), this vagueness hinders adequate measurement, comparison, and analysis of working conditions in platform work. Our research question is hence how to describe the variegated impact of platformization on work across the world through a positive conceptual framework of informality.

We respond to this challenge by reviving the method of ideal-type construction. Max Weber originally devised ideal-typical comparisons to generate qualitative understandings of messy and dynamic social realities by abstracting key features from empirical case studies to construct artificial, purified conceptual images of these social phenomena that could serve as heuristic aids and comparative benchmarks. Later research on comparative capitalisms has taken this method to classify and contrast distinct types of capitalist development (Crouch, 2006; Hall and Soskice, 2009; Streeck and Thelen, 2009) and some have even used it to investigate different types of platform capitalism (Foster, 2024; Marrone and Pirina, 2024; Steinberg et al., 2024; Zhang and Chen, 2022). Ideal-types organize social reality according to constructed conceptual images so that the uniqueness of individual case studies can emerge through their contrasts with these ideal-typical descriptions. This methodology respects the heterogeneity of social realities, like the working conditions of platform workers across the globe, while still offering a conceptual framework that grants positive meaning and guidance in investigating these realities. The formal employment regime in the Global North is, in that context, not the standard against which all other working conditions are judged informal, but one among many types of coordinating work.

We propose replacing the generic concept of “informal work” with an approach of “variegated informalities” to capture the working conditions of platform workers across the globe. This approach avoids using “informality” as a negatively defined container concept and uses variable types of labor coordination instead as a heuristic tool for mapping the distinct ways in which platform work can be governed across regions and sectors. More specifically, we develop three ideal-types of informal labor based on case studies of on-location platforms for transportation services in Buenos Aires, Jakarta, and Nairobi: “income-driven safety-net informality,” “selective (in)formalization,” and “debt-fueled informality.” By juxtaposing three ideal-types of informal labor in platform capitalism, we offer a theoretical framework that describes informal working conditions without surreptitiously subsuming them under the Global North’s standard of formal labor coordination. We move beyond the implicit assumption of comparing “normal” working conditions hegemonic in the Global North’s labor imaginary to the “exceptional” working conditions actually existing in the Global South. Instead, we horizontally juxtapose income-driven safety-net informality, selective (in)formalization and debt-fueled informality as three variegated templates for researching labor informality that variably apply in both the Global North and South. These three ideal-types constitute conceptual templates that reveal a patchwork of variegated working conditions that cut across the North/South-divide. Moreover, since this paper has been co-authored by researchers either from the Global South or with extensive experience in the Global South, our paper allows to infuse research on labor informality with situated knowledges and lived experiences of informal labor in the Global South. In line with calls for epistemologies of the South (Mignolo, 2011; Sousa Santos, 2016), the ideal-typical approach to variegated informalities in platform work voices alternative understandings of labor informality.

Theoretical framework

Informal work

The concept of “informal work” dates from the early 1970s, when anthropologist Hart (1973) and researchers at the ILO (1972) simultaneously grappled with the measurement and qualitative description of labor conditions in Africa beyond traditional expectations of formal employment.1 This concerned “the marginal productive activities of such people as petty traders, hawkers and shoeshine boys” but also “the carpenter at work behind his dwelling, the tailor inside an unmarked mud and plaster hut, or the matatu driver who is out earning fares” (ILO, 1972: 225). They realized that many economic activities were “not captured in the statistics” (Marti, 2023: 51) and used the notion of “in-formality” to capture this variety of non-standard labor arrangements. Especially the ILO stressed that the “formal sector” constitutes just one area of economic development, while the “informal sector” accounted for the rest of economic activities not captured in standard statistical surveys. However, this dualist approach was still difficult to empirically operationalize (Charmes, 2019; Marti, 2024) and was heavily criticized for misleadingly suggesting that the formal and informal were uniform and mutually independent areas of the overall economy (Moser, 1978; Portes and Haller, 2010). Both sectors often intermingle, and workers usually straddle within the grey zones between both extremes. Today as well, platform workers often travel between formal and informal dimensions of the economy and make sense of their condition through tactics and imaginaries of hustles that opportunistically negotiate the lines between formal and informal, legal and illegal, or visible and invisible (Christiaens, 2025; Franco, 2021; Novianto, 2025). Formality and informality are, hence, not two separate sectors of the overall economy but two modes of coordinating productive activities and subjectively engaging with income opportunities.

The ILO has subsequently taken on these criticisms, which also shows in its publications on platform work (ILO, 2021, 2025). It has gradually adopted the language of “decent work” and “decent work deficits” (ILO, 2002, 2018a) to discuss workplace injustices and lacking regulatory oversight. Both formal and informal work can suffer from decent work deficits, so regulatory interventions should be less focused on the status of work and more on its contents. Secondly, the ILO has abandoned the dualistic language of formal and informal “sectors.” All work can rather be located on a spectrum between fully formalized and fully informal productive activities. Workers perform activities that are always regulated or un(der)regulated to a more or lesser extent. Workers’ labor conditions are usually not completely absented from formal regulatory regimes, but they can be more or less covered by formal arrangements. The ILO (2022) hence speaks of “informal productive activities” instead of “informal sector” with “informal productive activities” defined as “productive activities that are not covered in practice by formal arrangements” (ILO, 2022: 10). That definition affirms that even formal and informal work can intermingle as formal jobs can still contain activities not covered by formal arrangements, and it highlights how even if formal arrangements officially exist the work can still be informal if these arrangements are not enforced.

Despite the avoidance of dualism, this approach retains “informality” as a negatively defined container concept (La Hovary, 2014). While the formal pole of the labor spectrum is positively defined through the standards of formal employment, the informal pole groups together all potential ways labor conditions can deviate from the formal standard. For the ILO (2022), “informal work consists of productive activities performed by persons that are—in law or in practice—not covered by formal arrangements” (p. 46). While “formality” is positively identified with the regulations that have historically emerged in the Global North to ensure labor rights and social protections, “informality” acts as a container concept for anything that does not mimic the Global North’s regulatory standards. While this choice acknowledges the diversity of labor conditions experiences in the realms beyond formally arranged work, it does little to positively describe what these conditions are. It does not capture the agency of workers2 involved nor the diverse labor market features or government policies that render work informal. The formal/informal-divide as a spectrum still suffers from having one pole positively defined through the historical experience of ‘the West’ while the other acts as a negative container for ‘the rest’ (Bertolini et al., 2023: 16).

Alternative theoretical approaches have already highlighted variable overlaps between informal and platform work (Maury, 2024). Feminism and social reproduction theory, for example, emphasize how women’s experiences of work in platform work or the platformized care and domestic sectors provide a unique inflection to the informalization of work (Arcidiacono et al., 2026; Hunt and Samman, 2023; Pulignano et al., 2023). The flexibility of platform work often attracts women with care duties, but it comes with new gender-specific vulnerabilities (Gerber, 2022; Islam et al., 2025; Van Doorn, 2017). Labor process theorists (LPT) have also noted that the formal/informal-divide rarely captures what goes on at the point of production in platform work, especially in the Global South (Mensah et al., 2026; Novianto, 2023; Zhang, 2024). By researching the labor process itself rather than the regulatory regimes hovering over platform work, LPT shows highly unique and contested mixtures of formal and informal dimensions in workers’ labor conditions. This is also discussed in labor anthropology (Barbosa and de Oliveira, 2025; Franco, 2021) and political economy (Coletto and Dimitriadis, 2026; Murgia and Pulignano, 2021; Piletić, 2024), where researchers describe hybrid worker subjectivities and labor regimes that creatively mix elements from entrepreneurial self-employment, formal worker identities, and local cultural traditions to construct unique work identities. Missing from these literatures, however, is a methodology that describes geographical variation in formal and informal working conditions beyond the Global North/South-divide. If these publications draw geographical distinctions, they often remain bound to highlighting how different cases from the Global South are from the Global North’s.

Variegated platform capitalisms and informalities

A call for de-Westernizing and decolonizing platform studies has criticized studies of platform capitalism unduly focused on the US and Silicon Valley companies (Chen et al., 2024; Davis and Sinha, 2021; Davis and Xiao, 2021; Gómez-Cruz et al., 2023; Karhade et al., 2021). Recent research has subsequently broadened the geographical scope and discovered the variable effects of platformization on work. As formal employment has been historically exceptional in the Global South, platformization has been less clearly linked to practices of labor deregulation or informalization (Anwar and Graham, 2021; Anwar et al., 2023; Kaye-Essien, 2020; Shibata, 2020; Van Doorn et al., 2021). Platform companies often fill institutional voids in Global South labor markets where they themselves must introduce formal regulations to render their business strategies effective (Elias and Gómez, 2025; Heeks et al., 2021). A hasty generalization would then state that platformization in the Global North has an informalizing effect, while platformization in the South has a formalizing effect (Mallett, 2026). Yet the effects of platformization are more variegated. Case studies from the Global South reveal how differing structural conditions in labor markets and local institutions’ contingent actions produce variegated platformizations (Au-Yeung and Qiu, 2022; Graham, 2020; Marrone and Pirina, 2024; Sanchez Vargas et al., 2022). The subsumption and lived experience of workers under platform capitalism varies because platform companies must deal with institutional environments and political reactions. However, the concept of “informal work” has a confusingly broad scope that does not consider structural labor market features that pre-determine the terrain on which platform companies operate, nor the strategic reactions of stakeholders like local governments, unions, workers, or consumers to the introduction of new platforms.

The “variegated capitalism”-thesis (Peck and Theodore, 2007) conceptualizes these multiple geographically dispersed articulations of capitalism and platformization. Originally, this approach argued that capitalism is not a singular socio-economic regime but a geographically variable outcome of institutional and strategic factors. Instead of talking about neoliberalism as a uniform set of policies, for example, these researchers highlighted how “neoliberalization processes” generate distinct outcomes in different polities (Peck, 2010). This literature has also addressed the issue of variation in global platformization due to pre-existing institutional settings and strategic interactions between relevant stakeholders (Foster, 2024; Marrone and Pirina, 2024; Pirone, 2024; Steinberg et al., 2024). Depending on the pre-existing features of local labor markets and the actions of governments, unions, workers, and others, the regulatory regime of platform work varies considerably. The same kind of platform work is, for instance, sometimes legally classified as formal employment, self-employment, or through some form of third category of subordinate self-employment depending on the regulatory choices of politicians, the lobbying of platform companies, the decisions of judges, or union activism (Aloisi and De Stefano, 2020; Islam et al., 2025; Newlands et al., 2018; Ovetz, 2023). Platform capitalism is not one regime originating in the US that unilaterally replicates itself across the globe, but the outcome of complex interactions between market institutions and political strategies.

The same lesson can be applied to the labor conditions of platform workers. What this work is like and how it is regulated is the outcome of pre-existing labor market conditions and the actions of relevant stakeholders. While the literature on variegated platform capitalisms has mainly focused on the regulation of platforms in general, they have paid little attention to the meaning of informality and work in this context. We propose the term “variegated informalities” to capture the diverse ways in which working conditions under variegated platform capitalisms can differ from traditional formal employment standards. The exact contours of labor regulations and the lived experiences of platform workers depend on the pre-existing state of the labor markets in which platform companies enter and the ways in which different stakeholders act upon the platformization of work. However, the observation of variety in labor conditions does not yet offer us a methodology to positively describe that variety beyond its deviation from the formal employment standard. To establish a conceptual framework that informs the thesis of variegated informalities with positive contents, we suggest constructing ideal-types of different informal working conditions under platform capitalism.

The method of ideal-types and variegated informalities

The literature on variegated platform capitalisms often restricts itself to either investigating one case study or letting variations proliferate without grouping them together in broader classifications. While those choices do justice to the heterogeneity of informal working conditions across platform capitalisms, they do not contribute to comparative analyses of platform work. One could potentially list the working conditions across platforms and across geographical areas indefinitely, leading to an overwhelming amount of data without conceptual clarity. This approach contrasts with its precursor, the literature on “varieties of capitalism” (VoC), where variations in capitalist organization were grouped and classified according to Max Weber’s method of ideal-typical descriptions (Mulé and Walzenbach, 2024).3 Hall and Soskice’s (2009: 35) seminal study of VoC, for example, used the cases of Germany and the United States to construct Coordinated and Liberal Market Economies as two distinct types of regulatory regimes as templates for studying varieties of capitalist organization across the globe.

According to Weber (1949: 111), empirical social reality is too complex and dynamic to be grasped in its full multifarious totality. He started from the same observation of insurmountable heterogeneity as the “variegated platform capitalism”-approach, but attempted to introduce conceptual order in his empirical data through sociological concept-formation. Unlike the natural sciences, which can describe universal natural laws that subsume all potential physical phenomena under one formula, the social sciences can only generate understanding (Verstehen) by constructing conceptual images (Gedankenbilder) that offer heuristic guidance in the chaos of social life. According to Weber’s (1949, 2019) original formulation, social scientists construct concepts by synthesizing key traits from exemplary case studies with potentially wider applicability. In Weber’s (1949: 90) own words, “an ideal-type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified conceptual image (Gedankenbild).” He offers a methodology of first describing exemplary case studies from a particular point of view (depending on the scientist’s research interest) and subsequently extrapolating key features that offer a purified yet artificial picture of a particular social phenomenon (Aspalter, 2020; Gerhardt, 1994; Hearn, 1975; Papineau, 1976). This image aims at conceptual consistency rather than empirical accuracy to grasp what unifies a social phenomenon across distinct cases. This conceptual image can then be used as heuristic device to study new empirical cases (Nefzger, 1965; Watkins, 1952).

However, because the selection of case studies, the scientist’s research orientation and the identification of key features are variable and contingent, there are also potentially multiple ideal-typical descriptions of the same social phenomenon (Weber, 1949: 91). One can read the history of capitalism or the predicament of platform workers differently depending on which case studies one investigates and how one interprets their tenets. Weber’s approach to concept-formation hence facilitates giving positive descriptions of variegated phenomena, like informal work, without having to reduce these realities to a single standard. Even formal employment can be considered just one ideal-type of labor coordination among many. Multiple ideal-typical representations of informal work can co-exist to capture distinct features of platform work across the globe. When studying variegated informalities, we can hence extract multiple ideal-types from key case studies to map out distinct pathways for the platformization of work.

In this paper, we construct three ideal-types of labor informality from Global South case studies of on location to-consumer platforms for transportation services, like taxi and (food) delivery: “income-driven safety-net informality” in Buenos Aires, “selective (in)formalization” in Jakarta, and “debt-fueled informality” in Nairobi. Our selection of these cases is based on long-term collaboration between researchers who provide insider perspectives on local labor conditions. Over the past 2 years, our writing process has involved continuous exchanges of perspectives and dialogues across the Global South and North, ensuring a nuanced understanding of these contexts with insight into local concerns and motivations. Through back-and-forth interactions, we have abstracted key features from our case studies as accentuations of particular types of informal labor. By developing three ideal-types of informal labor in platform capitalism, we offer a theoretical framework that describes informal working conditions without surreptitiously subsuming them under the Global North’s formal labor standard. We horizontally juxtapose income-driven safety-net informality, selective (in)formalization and debt-fueled informality. These three ideal-types constitute conceptual constructions that reveal a patchwork of variegated working conditions that cut across the North/South-divide.

Methodology

Our analysis builds on previous fieldwork and literature review conducted by co-authors, utilizing qualitative methods such as interviews, participant observations, and document analysis. This mix of methods and data sources offers a rich perspective on the differences between working conditions across the world. The data has been collected by four co-authors in Argentina, Indonesia, and Kenya over an overall period of 3 years, spanning the pre-COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. Focusing on this timeframe lets us capture geographic variations to a global event that affected workers worldwide unevenly mainly due to variegated response to local economic disruption by the state and other market actors.

The Argentine case is based on secondary sources, that is, academic papers and surveys carried out between 2018 and 2021 (Beccaria et al., 2020; Garaviglia, 2022; Haidar et al., 2020; Lopez Mourelo, 2020; Madaragia et al., 2019). In 2018, the first Platform Workers Survey was conducted at the national level (Madaragia et al., 2019), and its second edition in 2021 focused on delivery, transportation and domestic work mediated by platforms in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires (Garaviglia, 2022). In 2019, two surveys were conducted on platform-mediated delivery workers in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area (Lopez Mourelo, 2020). The following year, against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new survey was conducted, in this case by telephone, whose sample was composed in about 50% by delivery workers who had already been surveyed the previous year (Beccaria et al., 2020). Also, during the pandemic, a survey of platform delivery workers was conducted in Buenos Aires City (Haidar et al., 2020). As for Indonesia, the data was collected between 2018 and 2024, covering both the pre-pandemic and pandemic/post-pandemic periods, using semi-structured interviews and follow-up focus group discussions for a total of 60 individuals. Finally, the Kenyan case study is based on both primary and secondary sources. Fieldwork took place in Nairobi in three stints between 2018 and 2021. It mainly consisted of semi-structured interviews with drivers, trade unionists, and representatives of ride-hailing platforms for a total of 40 participants, a third of whom were repeatedly interviewed during and after the pandemic. Moreover, policy papers and industry reports were reviewed to validate information provided by the drivers

Variegated informalities

The platformization of work is a variegated process modulated by geography, sector, gender, migration status, and so on (Chen et al., 2024; Van Doorn, 2017). The variegated informalities of platform work showcase diversity on many levels of analysis, but we need to start somewhere. To reduce this complexity and construct ideal-types of informal platform work across the globe, we focus on-location transportation services in Buenos Aires, Jakarta, and Nairobi. That highlights the factor of geography, while leaving other factors of variation as constant as possible. We study in each case what structural market features and strategic stakeholder actions have determined the working conditions of platform workers, leading to three ideal-types of informal platform work: income-driven safety-net informality (Buenos Aires), selective (in)formalization (Jakarta), and debt-fueled informality (Nairobi).

Argentina: Income-driven safety-net informality

The ride-hailing and food-delivery sectors of Buenos Aires showcase a dynamic of income-driven safety-net informality. Workers are attracted to platform work as a safety net for formal job loss or lack of access to formal employment. High revenues if one works long hours in these sectors make platform work extra attractive, despite the work suffering from defective labor protections and illegality. In terms of structural market features pre-determining the terrain for platform companies entering the Buenos Aires region, volatile and crisis-ridden labor markets are an important factor. Argentina has suffered multiple economic crises affecting employment drastically, rendering digital platforms a helpful resources for workers’ income security. While Uber arrived in Argentina in 2016, a significant influx of labor platforms into the country was registered in 2018 with the arrival of delivery platforms. In the early years, delivery and ride-hailing platforms primarily helped recent migrants and male workers affected by unemployment to rapidly integrate into the labor market (Lopez Mourelo, 2020; Madaragia et al., 2019). However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, platform work gradually became a long-term source of relatively sufficient income for several social groups, at the expense of maintaining intense workdays with limited social protections and labor rights (Beccaria et al., 2020; Garaviglia, 2022; Haidar et al., 2020).

The Argentinian tax and social security systems form a second structural factor. Platform workers in the delivery and ride-hailing sector in Argentina register as independent contractors under the Simplified Regime for Small Taxpayers, that consolidates tax obligations, health insurance and retirement pension into a single monthly payment done by the workers themselves. Under this regime, workers are excluded from family allowances, unemployment benefits, paid leave, and occupational risk insurance. The lack of this last component is particularly relevant for delivery and ride-hailing, where workers in Buenos Aires are vulnerable to robberies and traffic accidents (Peterlongo, 2023). In sum, a first characteristic of informality in platform labor is workers’ self-employed status, resulting in inadequate social protection and labor rights. However, this misclassification is not a recent phenomenon in Argentina, where non-registered waged labor and self-employed contracts within salaried relationships are long-standing, even within state bodies.

Although this social security system looks like a mechanism for slightly formalizing the working conditions of recent immigrants or the unemployed, it entails a decline from formal employment protections, in particular, for ride-hailing workers. This extremely regulated taxi industry forms a third structural factor influencing the platformization of work in Buenos Aires. Any talk of platforms filling “institutional voids” in the Global South decidedly does not apply to ride-hailing in Argentina. Public taxi services constitute a highly regulated labor market with a strong labor union representation. Taxi drivers without their own license must be registered as employees and are subject to union-mandated collective bargaining agreements. According to these agreements, taxi drivers are assigned determinate working hours, a regular salary, sick leave and access to social security. Platform-mediated drivers do not fall under this regime. In this sense, while Uber in Argentina seems to formalize the jobs of individuals who were unemployed immediately before joining the platform, this appearance may in fact conceal a labor trajectory of formal salaried jobs in the taxi sector interrupted by recent unemployment (Filipetto et al., 2024). This decline from formal employment in the taxi sector to formal self-employed platform labor with a period of unemployment in between suggests a blurring of boundaries between informality and precarization. In Buenos Aires, Uber did not formalize an institutional void but had to first draw workers away from a more highly regulated taxi sector.

This leads us to the strategic actions of key stakeholders in the Buenos Aires platform sector. In 2016, taxi unions in Buenos Aires organized vehement protests against Uber’s arrival, initiated collective legal action accusing the company of various abuses and violations, and prompted a city judge to immediately ban Uber (Del Nido, 2022; Kasparian and Sunico, 2022). In 2023, the court of Buenos Aires City declared Uber illegal; however, the company has continued its operations to date. It has had to subsidize wages tremendously to convince workers to operate for a nominally illegal company. In this respect, the legal instability of Uber, resulting from the strong labor union representation and the social pressure made by taxi drivers is a distinctive characteristic of the Argentine case in comparison with the cases that follow in this paper. The strategic actions of unions, local governments, court judges, and Uber itself have created a unique mix of circumstances that have made ride-hailing a precarious yet lucrative venture for workers searching for a safety net during times of economic distress. Rather than offering new employment to excluded workers, Uber probably precarizes the taxi driver workforce by drawing taxi employees away from formal employment into a more precarious labor regime. In contrast to especially Indonesia, the existence of a regulated taxi sector is a salient element of the Argentine case and prompts the question of how this platform has been able to thrive in this context.

In contrast to Uber’s illegality-framed informality, platform-mediated food-delivery services in Buenos Aires City are regulated since 2020 by Law 6.314, which introduced the figure of digital delivery platforms into the Code of Transit and Transportation (Beccaria et al., 2020). The law establishes the possibility for companies to incorporate couriers as self-employed workers, whereas beforehand delivery companies had to guarantee employment status for at least some workers. It establishes a series of obligations on delivery platforms, such as to provide occupational risk insurance as well as road and health safety elements to workers. However, 80% of couriers surveyed in 2021 stated that the platform does not pay for any of the health and safety elements, nor for their work tools (Garaviglia, 2022). This situation may be attributed at least in part to the fact that, in comparison to taxi unions’ high level of organization, couriers have less organizational and structural bargaining power.

Despite such difficulties, delivery platform workers’ incomes in Argentina are high for couriers who use the platform intensively, both in comparison with the minimum living wage and non-platformized delivery work (Del Bono, 2023). Couriers gain relatively sufficient incomes when they are capable, available and willing to work many days a week, with long working hours and intense pace, even under bad climate conditions. The lack of collective bargaining and unilaterally imposed updates in platforms’ pricing systems under circumstances of high inflation have compelled couriers to extend their working hours in order to maintain the purchasing power of their incomes. This also shows that working through platforms constitutes a necessary income source for many workers: platform work is the main source of income for 85% of the delivery workers and 75% of them do not have another job. This similarly applies ride-hailing platforms, since for 69% of the workers the platform is the main source of income, and 61% of them do not have another job (Garaviglia, 2022). This dependency leads to increased vulnerability.

Multiple studies highlight how the Pandemic turned platform work from a temporary gig into a permanent “shelter” for unemployment (Del Bono, 2023; Garaviglia, 2022; Haidar et al., 2020). This would nuance the emphasis on flexibility and entrepreneurship found in hegemonic narratives about platform work. In the wake of the Pandemic and the aforementioned crisis-prone Argentinian economy, platforms have consolidated themselves as prominent safety nets for workers under duress.

The Argentine case reveals income-driven safety-net informality as a first ideal-type of informal platform labor. Informalization encompasses different work trajectories linked to the heterogeneity of the Argentine labor market and economic structure. On the one hand, for workers in Buenos Aires who previously held access to formal registration, platform-mediated work functions as a “safety net,” that is, a source of work during periods of increased unemployment and economic unrest. This step-down from formal employment may be masked if research only compares platform work to episodes of unemployment immediately preceding the step toward platform-mediated work. Platforms also function as a safety net for those with difficulties of accessing formal employment, who find in this job the only available source of work, like recent immigrants. On the other hand, the choice for platform work constitutes an “income-driven” strategy because of the relatively high earning opportunities it offers if workers work long hours. In this sense, the trajectories and perceptions of platform workers in Argentina might be more heterogeneous than in other countries, making this a distinctive feature of platform work in the country.

Indonesia: Selective (in)formalization

In contrast to Buenos Aires, Jakarta does not showcase platform work as a highly lucrative safety net for workers (temporarily) out of a formal job, as fieldwork conducted by one of this paper’s authors between 2018 and 2020 suggests. The transportation market’s starting position aligns much more with the traditional image of institutional voids (ILO, 2018b). Over 56% of the workforce, as of 2020, operates in informal sectors, encompassing roles that lack formal contracts, worker protections, and social security benefits (BPS, 2021). This reliance has traditionally attracted millions of Indonesians unable to access formal jobs. Once platform companies arrive, they straddle between formalizing some aspects of workers’ labor conditions while keeping others informal, leading to a fluctuating process of selective (in)formalization. Platform workers’ conditions are subjected to or exempted from formal arrangements through a highly volatile process of negotiations between platform companies, workers, and local governments.

In terms of structural market features influencing the variegated platform capitalism of Jakarta, before the arrival of platforms like Gojek and Grab, Indonesia’s taxi services were split between formal car taxis and informal motorcycle taxis. Car taxis operated under a permit system, typically within corporations or cooperatives, offering regulated services with limited competition. In contrast, motorcycle taxis (ojek pangkalan) were technically illegal but socially accepted. The introduction of Gojek and Grab disrupted this structure, blurring lines between formality and informality. Car taxis faced increased informality as some drivers bypassed traditional permits to join platforms, while motorcycle taxis encountered heightened competition and conflicts as platforms formalized yet precariously managed their operations. This transformation reshaped Indonesia’s transport sector, amplifying opportunities and vulnerabilities.

The structural feature of highly unregulated inner-city labor markets influences the strategic actions of platform companies lobbying for their services with local governments. In contrast to Argentina, where Uber met a very resistant local government back up with union resistance, Indonesian governments have enthusiastically embraced homegrown platform companies like Gojek as vectors of formalization and urban job creators. Platform companies present themselves as solutions to the lack of jobs and highly unregulated labor market of Jakarta. Home-grown platform companies subsequently benefit from government cooperation, leveraging their alleged role in reducing unemployment. This relationship grants Gojek regulatory advantages, convincing government officials to turn a blind eye to the persistent informality of platform labor. Unlike in Argentina, where platform companies faced strong opposition, Gojek’s embedded position ensures that workers remain stripped of formal labor protections, hindering the expected trend towards formalization to take place. The promise of formalizing the local labor market rarely comes to pass because platform companies feel little government pressure to follow up on these promises. Workers, classified as mitra or “partners,” bear the costs of vehicle ownership and maintenance, mobile phones, internet, and fuel, while being managed by performance-based algorithms.

Companies’ entrepreneurial rhetoric also masks the precarious conditions under which workers operate (Ford and Honan, 2017; Nastiti, 2017). This framing actually resonates with Global North scholarship on the informalization tendency of platform work but remains striking in Indonesia, given the pre-existing informal labor market structures (Fitri, 2020). Digital platforms have not displaced this informal economy but have absorbed it, and even reintroduce informal elements when convenient. Rather than creating new jobs, platforms like Gojek reorganize existing informal workers under algorithmic management without improving conditions. Informal labor remains constant, but is now split between those working via platforms and those unable or unwilling to join platforms. The informal sector remains but is now split in a digital and non-digital variant. “Ojek pangkalan” (traditional motorcycle taxi drivers), now face asymmetrical competition from platform-based drivers, or “ojek online/ojol,” compelling many ojek pangkalan drivers to join the platform economy as a survival strategy to find access to clients online. This shift has heightened tensions between the two groups and reinforced structural inequalities (Mustika and Savirani, 2021).

Digital platforms also create new dependencies with the shift from physical to technologically mediated labor. Traditional informal workers had a degree of autonomy that platform workers now lack (Woodcock and Graham, 2020). While in the Global North workers may experience more flexibility when no longer working for a boss (Sundararajan, 2017), Indonesian platform workers coming from informal sectors face greater oversight than before (Frey, 2020), since they did not have a boss to begin with. Algorithmic decisions around pricing or routes lead to unpredictable earnings, and digital payment systems expose all transactions, removing workers’ ability to navigate payment off the books. The Indonesian government’s stance on platform work is ambivalent. Policymakers celebrate platforms like Gojek as symbols of innovation (Ministry of Communication and Information, 2020), but regulations have not kept pace, leaving workers in a legal grey area (Yuana et al., 2020). While platforms are lauded for progress, the government’s inaction reveals tensions between modernization and equity (Setiawan, 2024). “Splintering precarity” (Malin and Chandler, 2017) characterizes how platforms offer flexibility and access but also introduce new vulnerabilities. Drivers are subject to algorithmic control, unpredictable earnings, and lack basic protections. They compete for rides, and algorithms dictate their incomes.

Efforts to regulate Indonesia’s platform economy face challenges due to the transnational nature of some platforms and the lobbying power of home-grown platforms like Gojek (Yuana et al., 2020). Union efforts to establish minimum tariffs encounter resistance from companies and the fragmented workforce itself, which depends on platform-generated earnings. The pre-existing labor market complicates collective action. Platform workers are “mitra” or partners, discouraging collective organization in favor of individualistic tactics of making do (Novianto, 2023). While platforms also promote individualism in the Global North, its articulation differs in Indonesia, where kinship-based support networks are more common. In the absence of unions, community networks like “paguyuban” (community groups) have become key sources of solidarity. These groups provide support but their influence remains local and lacks political leverage (Novianto, 2023; Yasih, 2023). They act as a support buffer for individualistically minded workers so that the latter do not feel the need to turn to formal institutions, like unions, for support. Community support enables emergency coping, but not structural improvements. Nonetheless, local communities have initiated episodic resistance. For example, GoKilat drivers in 2021 mobilized via Facebook and WhatsApp for wildcat strikes against reduced earnings. Actions included boycotting high-demand areas and using banners and flower bouquets to voice grievances. These temporary, leaderless actions reflect both dissatisfaction and distrust of formal organization. While paguyuban enhances individual resilience, strikes show untapped potential for collective action. However, their short-lived nature and lack of institutional support often limit long-term impact on working conditions (Mustika and Savirani, 2021).

This leads us to the concept of selective (in)formalization, where certain workers experience the ambiguous impact from limited formalization via digital platforms amidst a background of persisting informality, while others remain entirely excluded. Platforms rely on pre-existing regulatory gaps but also impose their own regulations via algorithmic management where previously informal workers would have been freer to conduct themselves. On the other hand, those lacking access to platform work are even more vulnerable than before. This selective (in)formalization creates a stark divide between online taxi workers who benefit from platforms’ digital systems and those offline taxi workers like ojek pangkalan who are left outside the platform economy, further perpetuating inequality in an already fragmented labor market. While Argentina somewhat confirmed the Global North assumption of declining formal employment, Indonesia reveals different dynamics. In Indonesia, platform economies do not represent a shift from formal to informal work or a clear turn in the opposite direction, but instead blur the lines between the two, creating a hybrid form of labor that combines both formal and informal dimensions. While platform work offers digital tools and payment systems that make certain aspects of informal work more efficient, it does not fundamentally address the underlying issues of labor insecurity. In Indonesia, platforms like Gojek operate in a regulatory vacuum, where government oversight is limited, and labor rights are poorly enforced. Unlike in the Global North or Argentina, where labor reforms and workers’ rights campaigns have pushed for better protections in the gig economy, the Indonesian government has not yet implemented substantial policies to address the risks of digital labor platforms.

Kenya: Debt-fueled informality

While platform-mediated transportation services in Argentina operate as an income-driven safety net for workers left behind by the formal labor market and in Indonesia as a selective force of (in)formalization depending on platform company interests, the Kenyan variation on this sector highlights the importance of debt in rendering labor informal. The Kenyan version of Uber is highly intertwined with local financial services and moneylending practices. Workers must borrow money to buy or lease a car that conforms to Uber’s vehicle standards, but these loans make them financially dependent on continuing with ride-hailing. Kenyan platform workers experience their labor as informal insofar as they are trapped in debt, keeping them in ride-hailing despite falling revenues.

One key structural feature setting the stage for platform work in Nairobi is the national government’s enthusiastic embrace of the tech sector. Featuring a strongly pro-business, pro-innovation policy environment, Kenya is a leading digital economy in Africa and a major recipient of foreign investments for innovation hubs and start-ups. Since the launch of the mobile money platform Safaricom M-Pesa in 2006, the country has built a reputation as living laboratory for socio-technical innovation and launching pad for products and services across other markets in Africa and the broader Global South (Mann and Iazzolino, 2021; Ndemo and Weiss, 2017). In contrast to Argentina and Indonesia, Kenya displays a government position that combines a hands-off approach to platform companies’ activities with an emphatic celebration of digitalization and entrepreneurship as strategic economic policy goals (Friederici et al., 2020; Graham and Mann, 2013).

Nairobi exemplifies this commitment to digital entrepreneurship, branding itself “Silicon Savannah” to highlight its burgeoning tech sector. This moniker evokes techno-solutionist ideals of digital disruption, connectivity, and entrepreneurial youth (Poggiali, 2017; Pollio and Cirolia, 2022). Silicon Savannah has become an ideological space shaped by tech-savvy Kenyans, foreign entrepreneurs, and institutions fostering value creation through ICTs. Nairobi’s transportation sector, a focus of fieldwork and interviews from 2018 to 2021, illustrates this. This informal network includes taxis (often operating in a legal gray area), unreliable city buses, and numerous minibuses called matatus (Mungai and Samper, 2006). Matatus, mainly privately owned, have resisted government regulation attempts (Rasmussen, 2012), unlike Argentina. Driver organizations in Kenya actively lobby against government oversight. Despite government efforts to formalize the matatu sector through required cooperatives, vehicle branding, safety standards, and digital payments (Klopp et al., 2017), matatus largely remain outside regulatory control. Uber launched in Nairobi in 2015, mainly advertising its services to consumers looking for an alternative to underregulated and unsafe transportation options. Foreigners and Nairobi’s middle/upper classes oftentimes distrust existing transportation services, allowing Uber to leverage its user-friendly interface and global brand trust. The campaign targeted market segments wary of crime and fragmented urban planning (Iazzolino, 2023).

Another structural feature mediating the platformization of work is pre-existing traditions of “polyemployment” (Ravenelle, 2023) among Kenyan workers. Much more than in Argentina or Indonesia, Kenyan workers traditionally take on a portfolio of both formal and informal jobs to make ends meet and continuously readjust their time investments in these ventures to maximize their income opportunities. As confirmed by data collected by Uber in 2018, and shared with the authors of this article, 51% of Uber drivers already had a salaried job, muddling assumptions that Uber and other digital platforms would lead to the formalization of a previously largely informal sector such as urban transport. For these car-owners, ride-hailing mostly constituted a supplementary income for workers used to combining multiple jobs to make a living. Moreover, 63% of the total driver pool was previously working in the transport industry, confirming that, rather than creating new jobs, the platform’s onboarding strategy mainly consisted of cannibalizing local taxi firms.

Nairobi’s uniqueness, however, lies in the pivotal role of debt. Uber’s strict vehicle requirements (cars less than 3 years old with 1500cc or 1300cc engines) limits the driver pool, as most taxi drivers own older vehicles (Iazzolino, 2023; Zollmann, 2024). Drivers also bear the cost of mandatory licenses and insurance. These financial barriers lead aspiring Uber drivers to seek loans for Uber’s requirements and vehicle purchases. A strong banking sector and local moneylenders facilitate access to credit, but at a high cost. For those with collateral, banks and microfinance institutions offer capital. Uber also launched its own vehicle financing with Barclays Bank, for example, significantly increasing driver numbers. Those unable to borrow from official financial institutions turn to “platform entrepreneurs” who rent cars for 2000 KSh daily. Others use hire-purchase schemes from coastal car dealers, relying on trust and an upfront payment (at least a third of the car’s value). No interest is applied but the dealer keeps the logbook and installs a tracker until repayment is ensured, typically within 1–2 years.

Despite the substantial investment requirements, a thousand drivers registered within 17 months of Uber’s launch in 2015. High initial consumer demand and limited driver supply, coupled with Uber-financed wage subsidies, led to significant profits. This significantly altered the pre-existing tradition of polyemployment among Kenyan workers. Many part-time drivers transitioned to full-time ride-hailing, shifting away from traditional Kenyan job portfolios. A class of platform entrepreneurs emerged of car owners (often civil servants or executives) who rented vehicles to car-less drivers. The car owner was the official partner, receiving all payments, and could add drivers to their account. These informal arrangements, however, shifted risk to drivers, who paid a fixed rent (around 2000 KSh per week) and bore all expenses like fuel. Car owners gained steady income, while drivers faced market uncertainty.

Yet while workers were getting into debts to drive Uber-approved cars, revenues did not stay that high. Due to the entry of competitors like Taxify (Bolt) and local firms like Little Cab, market saturation eroded Uber’s competitive edge, with drivers bearing the brunt. Those who quit stable jobs for ride-hailing regretted it as rising fuel costs further reduced earnings. Driver organizations emerged demanding Uber reduce its 25% commission, increase fees, improve communication (e.g., rider bonuses), and offer employment contracts (Zollmann, 2024). As a local Uber executive explained in an interview, acknowledging workers’ requests would imply an employment relationship. Instead, Uber doubled down on locking workers into ride-hailing through debt. Corroborating Fleming’s (2017) notion of radical responsibilization, which puts the onus of responding to market downturns on individuals, Uber responded with policies that would support individual drivers to continue working for Uber, even if these simultaneously pushed drivers further into debt. Uber partnered, among others, with financial institutions like Jubilee, a Kenyan insurance provider, to offer affordable insurance to drivers, reducing barriers to entry (since insurance is a requirement) and protecting them from potential risks. They also partnered with California-based fintech firm Branch to provide qualified drivers with starter loans of up to 30,000 KSh at a 1.2% interest rate to cover business permits, NTSA stickers, or to purchase new phones and data plans. Moreover, Uber intervened in the car-owner/driver relationship by partnering with banks, fintech companies, and car dealerships to help drivers purchase their own cars on credit. To qualify for these Uber-brokered schemes, drivers could provide alternative evidence of 3 months’ earnings of at least 300,000 KSh, a 4.6-star average rating and 500 trips. Using these metrics, Kenyan banks such as Stanbic and Sidian offered full vehicle financing between 1 and 1.5 million KSh at interest rates oscillating between 10.5% and 14% over 3 years (compared to the average interest rate at national banks of 18%). To further support drivers, Uber offered financial literacy training with the stated purpose of helping drivers manage their finances more effectively. Uber helped drivers to limit the harms of lower earnings but at the cost of encouraging workers’ overall indebtedness. In January 2018, Uber reiterated this strategy by launching Uber Chap Chap, a hire-purchase scheme targeting drivers who wanted to wean themselves off the car-owners. Initially partnering with Sidian Bank and later with Barclays, Uber offered qualified drivers unsecured loans to purchase fuel-efficient 800cc Suzuki Alto’s. Repayment of debts involved daily payments of 1000 KSh for 3 years, after which drivers would own the car. Despite the seemingly attractive offer, many drivers rejected the hire-purchase scheme, considering it a scam. Over 3 years, borrowers would pay over 800,000 KSh for a car worth 500,000 KSh. Additionally, the car’s value would depreciate significantly after 3 years, forcing drivers to seek new loans. Some drivers subsequently referred to the program as a “debt trap on wheels.”

To express their frustration with deteriorating working conditions, many drivers described working for Uber as “Jua Kali with taxes.” Jua Kali is a Kenyan term for informal make-do entrepreneurship. The phrase suggests that Uber combines the worst of both worlds: the uncertainty of the informal sector with the tax burdens imposed by the Ministry of Transport. As one driver stated, “If Jua Kali means that I don’t know how much I’ll make at the end of the day, then yes, Uber is Jua Kali.” This perspective reflected a middle-class understanding of the informal economy while, paradoxically, drivers previously earning a living in the informal economy proved able to expand their social capital and exploit cutthroat competition to their advantage. The COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 exacerbated the situation. A nationwide lockdown and halted international flights brought the Kenyan ride-hailing sector to a standstill (Anwar et al., 2023). Debt fatigue became a common issue among both Chap Chap and Uber X drivers and a major exit barrier preventing the drivers from quitting the platform en masse.

In the Kenyan case, in sum, debt constitutes a major mediator of informal working conditions. Formal arrangements fail to take hold on working conditions because workers are so financially dependent on platform work to pay back loans that they abstain from organizing for better working conditions or leaving platform work in search of better-paying jobs. However, this exposure was not the effect of a decline in formal labor relations nor a supposedly “natural” feature of institutional voids in the Global South. Debt-fueled informality is a social relation revolving around the ‘indebted individual’ “restricted to managing, according to the terms of business and competition, its employability, its debts, the drop in wages and income, and the reduction of public services” (Lazzarato, 2012: 94). It was the product of strategic alliances between Uber, car-owners, financial institutions and supportive governments that first facilitated workers to take on debt to pursue lucrative work on Uber’s platform, but subsequently locked them in this type of work even when revenues sharply declined.

Discussion and conclusion

The advent of platform work has had variable effects across the globe, but the formal/informal-dichotomy fails to capture and synthesize variations of informal work in platformized labor markets. We propose a theory of “variegated informalities” that uses ideal-types derived from exemplary case studies to construct positively defined templates of platform work. We contribute to literature on variegated platform capitalisms that has shown how pre-existing labor market structures and the strategic interactions of relevant stakeholders like unions, governments, and platform companies themselves, influence the working conditions of platform workers. The latter vary geographically depending on previous labor market features and how institutions react to the introduction of new platform companies. By using ideal-types, we offer templates for the qualitative description of these varied outcomes. That puts the otherwise infinitely heterogeneous working conditions of platform workers across the world in comparative perspective and grants positive contents to the notion of “informal work” without reducing the concept to one single type of work. Looking at the case studies of Buenos Aires, Jakarta, and Nairobi, we have identified three ideal-types of informality: (1) Argentina: income-driven safety-net informality, (2) Indonesia: selective (in)formalization, (3) Kenya: debt-fueled informality. In other words, there is not just one negatively defined “in-formality,” but variegated informalities with each their own distinctive features.

The methodological strategy of formulating ideal-types of labor informality has two key advantages. Firstly, it integrates decolonial research standpoints into the theorizing of labor conditions on equal footing with conceptual frameworks from the Global North. Simply calling working conditions under platform capitalism “in-formal” relieves researchers from considering foreign working conditions on their own terms. It suffices to notify deviations from the Global North’s formal labor regime. The construction of ideal-types, on the other hand, is rooted in situated standpoints that determine which case studies are exemplary and which of their features are relevant. When we identify Argentinian platform work as an income-driven safety net, we articulate workers’ motivations for joining the platform economy as part of the theory of platform capitalism itself. The promise of a safety net with relatively high incomes explains how workers experience their predicament under the platform capitalism of Buenos Aires. Similarly for debt-fueled informality in Kenya, the focus on the lock-in effect of car loans and leases expresses workers’ own standpoint on informal labor in Nairobi’s ride-hailing economy. The key features of debt-fueled informality emerge from workers’ own considerations–mediated, though, via our own interpretations as researchers of local labor markets. The methodology of ideal-types enriches the concept of informal labor by encouraging South-based research to inform the standpoint from which concepts are constructed.

Secondly, the methodology of ideal-types enables researchers and policymakers to redraw the global map of labor. The formal/informal-divide in its traditional format tends to reproduce what Sousa Santos (2016: 70–71) has called the “abyssal line” between Global North and South. While the Global North’s labor markets are homogenously defined as “formal,” the Global South is homogenously defined as lacking such formal labor markets and hence as uniformly “in-formal.” The literature on variegated platformization has already shown this assumption to be too simplistic, as platformization evolves in uneven and interactive ways across the globe. The methodology of ideal-types promises to produce a more horizontal approach to comparative analysis. It does not identify informal labor under platform capitalism as one big group primarily located in the Global South and hierarchically subordinate to the formal employment regime of the Global North. Rather, it constructs a multiplicity of labor coordination types that can be discovered across the globe, independently of the dividing line between North and South. While debt-fueled informality is illustratively exemplified in Nairobi’s ride-hailing labor market, similar dependencies on debt can also be identified in other platform markers across the world. Uber drivers in New York or Brussels have also gone into debt to lease or buy high-end cars, for example (Christiaens, 2023; Rosenblat, 2018). Selective (in-)formalization denotes the production of an ambiguous grey zone between formal and informal labor when platform companies engage with an already pre-existing informal labor market in Jakarta, but also recent immigrants in the Global North, who previously did not had access to formal employment and operated in the black market instead, experience the advent of platform-mediated labor as a mixture of formalization and informalization (Schaupp, 2022; Van Doorn, 2023). The construction of ideal-types hence redraws the global map of platform capitalism without reproducing the abyssal line between Global North and South. The distinct ideal-types of informal labor co-exist on a horizontal plane as distinct exemplars of working conditions under platform capitalism without internal hierarchy.

While we have focused on the Global South, the methodology of ideal-types also reveals variation in the Global North. In the Global North, platform companies are often portrayed as uniformly informalizing working conditions for platform workers. Not only does that say very little about what specific rights or protections from the standard formal employment regime are being lost, but it also ignores how platform work is qualitatively experienced from the workers’ perspectives. On a macro-perspective, labor market observers might argue that labor platforms accelerate a push from formal employment towards more precarious or informal job arrangements, but individual workers do not necessarily experience the same evolution. Platform workers in the Global North often come from populations that did not have access to formal employment before, like recent immigrants or students. These “newcomers” to the labor market experience not a slide from formality to precariousness but rather roam outside formal employment from the start (Gebrial, 2022; Van Doorn, 2023). Moreover, the assumption of formal employment as the norm for Global North labor regimes ignores informal labor practices in marginalized sectors like domestic cleaning or babysitting. In these sectors, labor platforms like Helpling, Charly Cares or TaskRabbit have actually had a formalizing effect, though this effect varies according to governments’ regulatory initiatives, (non-)unionized collective action or platform companies’ business strategies (De Becker et al., 2024; Franke et al., 2023). In the Global North as well, the variegated interplay between structural conditions and stakeholders’ strategic actions determines the working conditions of platform workers. Rather than focusing on formality, informality or precarization as catch-all categories, an ideal-typical approach brings these variations to light. Focusing on variegated informalities allows researchers to not only more accurately describe platform work from non-hegemonic perspectives but also somewhat refocus platform studies to traditionally underresearched sectors that have never achieved the formal status that the Global North has traditionally regarded as the regulatory standard (Gruszka et al., 2024; Yin, 2024).

Lastly, our brief overview of ideal-types of informal platform work is far from complete. We have focused only on geographic variation to target the abyssal line between the Global North and South. But we have downplayed other factors of variation, like platform type or gender. In terms of platform sectors, the well-studied domains of ride-hailing and food-delivery showcase distinct challenges from other sectors, like crowdwork (Altenried, 2022; Tubaro et al., 2022) or care and domestic work platforms (Arcidiacono et al., 2026; Franke et al., 2023). Women with domestic care duties might gravitate toward crowdwork thanks to its flexibility but end up juggling gendered forms of informalization (Shibata, 2020), while transgender individuals have sometimes moved into remote online work to avoid harassment or render sex work safer (Kirdnark, 2025; Rogers and Christian, 2026). A broader survey of ideal-types of informal work in the platform sector should also consider variations in gender or sectors in the articulation of ideal-typical informalities.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the participants at the 2026 International Labour Process Conference in Leeds, where we presented an earlier version of this paper, and Rafael Grohmann for his comments. We are also grateful to our many research participants who have taught us so much about the lived experience of platform work.

Ethical considerations

No ethical approval was required for this project.