As studies worldwide have highlighted, place-based platform work is predominantly carried out by migrant and/or racialized workers. By tracing the migration trajectories of Chilean and Argentinian gig workers on Working Holiday Visas (WHV) in Germany, we shed light on how platform-mediated work fits into the larger life trajectories of these migrant workers. Applying a lens of time and temporalities, we conceptualize migration as a process of becoming that involves the temporalities of particular visa regimes, wider scales of institutional and social temporal ordering, and progression through an individual's life course. We find that the temporal horizons of the visa and the transient nature of platform work foster distinct worker subjectivities that make platform work acceptable despite its precarity. We therefore argue that the temporariness of the WHV is a crucial factor in explaining why highly educated young people engage in low-status and low-waged platform work.

中文翻译：

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成为“平台工人”：零工经济中临时签证和工人主体性的传记探索


正如世界各地的研究所强调的那样，基于地方的平台工作主要由移民和/或种族化工人进行。通过追踪德国打工度假签证 （WHV） 的智利和阿根廷零工工人的移民轨迹，我们揭示了平台介导的工作如何融入这些移民工人更广泛的生活轨迹。应用时间和时间的视角，我们将移民概念化为一个成为的过程，它涉及特定签证制度的时间性、更广泛的制度和社会时间秩序以及个人生命历程的进展。我们发现，签证的时间范围和平台工作的短暂性培养了不同的工人主体性，这使得平台工作尽管具有不稳定性，但仍然可以接受。因此，我们认为 WHV 的临时性是解释为什么受过高等教育的年轻人从事低地位和低工资的平台工作的关键因素。