Platform workers often experience isolation in their work. They use online forums to connect, but their moderation remains underexplored. Article 20 of the EU Platform Work Directive requires digital labour platforms to provide workers with a “communication channel” and leaves interpretation for how to design it up to the platforms. To inform this issue, we qualitatively analyse community rules and moderator comments across 28 worker subreddits. We show how moderators work to reduce harms such as racism and doxxing, cultivate their community through curation, and decide whether to enforce or resist work platform policy. The discussion presents implications for design for worker communication channels. The channels should be spaces with independent moderation and data protection-by-design that enable workers to safely build collective knowledge without fear of platform monitoring. Future work should follow implementations during transposition and test which governance and interface choices produce trust and capacity for collective action. Our contribution is to surface the governance dimension of worker communication and to translate these insights into design implications for future channels.

This paper explores flexibility in platform-mediated work through a multi-sited ethnographic study of delivery workers' "flexible scheduling"in three European countries: Denmark, Finland, and Malta. While workers generally value the ability to schedule flexibly, this flexibility is constrained by structural factors such as piece-rate remuneration, demand fluctuations, surge pricing, and income dependency. The constraints result in markedly different experiences across the different instantiations of the same, standardised delivery platform: workers in Denmark benefit from the system, in Finland workers face seasonal precarity, and in Malta workers endure exploitative cycles of long hours and low pay. The findings demonstrate how the same platform's standardised design can produce divergent outcomes in local contexts. The paper highlights the need for platform designers and regulators to balance the benefits of flexible scheduling with its trade-offs, ensuring that flexibility supports worker well-being as the flexible platforms manifest locally.

In this paper, we present the results of an ethnographic study focusing on food deliveries for the digital platform Wolt. The platform manages food transport ordered by customers to be delivered at home from restaurants, and subcontracts the transport to workers called 'couriers', who act as independent firms or entrepreneurs. The paper is based on six months of participant observation, during which time the first author worked as a courier, as well as on ad-hoc conversations and semi-structured interviews with other couriers. We describe couriers' work for the platform and discuss our findings using Möhlmann and Zalmanson's definition of algorithmic management. We found both similarities and differences. It was noticeable that the couriers were positive about their work that no penalties or wage reductions were enforced, and that human support complemented the platform's algorithmic management. Thus, the algorithmic management we observed is neither harsh (as it has been described on other platforms including Uber), nor like the algorithmic despotism present on Instacart, for example. Hence, we refer to it as 'lenient algorithmic management' and underline the importance of adding new perspectives to our understanding of what algorithmic management can be, as well as looking at the context in which it is practised. To complement this finding of lenient algorithmic management, we present a set of strategies couriers must engage in to be effective on the platform: Thus, couriers must 1) schedule their work for peak hours to limit the amount of time they waste, 2) bundle orders to increase their payment per tour, 3) make use of support to handle customers and cancel orders involving delays, and 4) make use of the ecology of local support structures. The contribution of this paper is to add new perspectives to the way we perceive algorithmic management by presenting a lenient form of algorithmic management and indicating the importance of looking at the context in which it is practised, while describing what it takes to be an effective worker on the Wolt platform.

CSCW holds a valuable set of notions and tools for future granular inquiry into the work practice on food delivery platforms and pertinent questions from the field of food delivery resonate with research agendas within CSCW. This argument is based on a synthetic literature review that identifies characteristics of food delivery work and connects them to previous scholarship within CSCW. With few exceptions, the food delivery workers in the papers included are typically young, male and of immigrant background. The work practice the papers describe typically relies on algorithmic management, flexible scheduling, pay-per-delivery, and while food delivery workers work solitarily, workers repeatedly organize in both formal and informal groups. Finally, the review shows that while these characteristics are common, the local environment where the work is done has a significant impact on the workers' practice, resulting in meaningful differences between places and platforms that should be considered. The discussion brings forth salient issues and outlines two alleys of future work.