Extended Summary

The Turkish platform economy demonstrates how contemporary labor regimes operate through the paradoxical intersection of rights discourse with precarious practices. The right to work, presented through vocabularies of freedom and opportunity, becomes an instrument framing precarious work as legitimate employment. This analysis contributes to understanding how neoliberal capitalism maintains legitimacy while systematically dismantling labor protections, revealing the disciplinary function of rights discourse in contemporary capitalism.
The intersection of labor process theory with discipline analytics necessitates rethinking the theoretical position of the right to work. The right to work is neither purely emancipatory nor simply ideological illusion. Rather, it represents a contradictory site within capitalist production relations where protection and precarity, freedom and control, rights and discipline coexist and mutually constitute each other.
Income insecurity is not an individual choice or work ethic issue but a structural outcome of platform economy wage structures and juridical status regimes. Algorithmic performance-based bonuses and commissions deepen insecurity while creating competition among workers that undermines solidarity. The intensive work tempo required to achieve livable income has documented health effects, with survey data showing couriers experience physical strain, sleep deprivation, and stress-related conditions.
The denial of worker status deepens this structural risk regime. Excluded from the scope of Occupational Health and Safety Law (6331), couriers cannot access employer obligations for preventive measures and institutional responsibility for workplace accidents. The right to work thus transforms from a protective mechanism into a regulatory field that normalizes high-risk and precarious employment.
The right to work in the platform economy contains a fundamental paradox. Platform companies promise flexibility, freedom to set one’s own schedule, and unlimited earning potential. In practice, couriers face occupational accidents (dozens die each year in Turkey), income insecurity (fluctuating earnings below minimum wage after expenses), and intensive working conditions (12-16 hour days to achieve livable income).
These mechanisms operate not only as external control but also as technologies of subjectification. Workers internalize performance metrics, constantly monitoring their own ratings, delivery speeds, and acceptance rates. The gamification of work—through levels, badges, and performance tiers—transforms discipline into self-discipline, creating subjects who optimize their own exploitation.
The study documents specific mechanisms in Turkish platform companies. The ‘slot system’ in Yemeksepeti Express automatically assigns working hours and routes. The ‘batch/level system’ classifies couriers by performance, with different batch numbers determining when workers can schedule their weekly slots. Automatic account suspension mechanisms enforce discipline immediately and without appeal for infractions such as late package acceptance or GPS inconsistencies.
Algorithmic management in the platform economy represents a digital evolution of Taylorist scientific management. However, the separation of knowledge from workers and its transfer to management is now mediated not by human supervisors but by algorithms. This creates what can be understood as a digital panopticon: workers know they are constantly monitored through GPS tracking, delivery time measurements, customer ratings, and acceptance/rejection rates, but they cannot fully understand the algorithmic logic governing their evaluation.
This juridical manipulation has severe material consequences. Workers are excluded from labor protections including minimum wage guarantees, social security, occupational health and safety regulations, and collective bargaining rights. They must bear all costs of production (motorcycles, fuel, maintenance, insurance) while their income depends entirely on algorithmic allocation of orders. The discourse of entrepreneurship and ‘being your own boss’ masks the reality of structural dependency and precarity.
The platform economy represents a crucial site for examining these dynamics. In Turkey, the delivery sector exemplifies how platform capitalism reconfigures labor relations through the ‘self-employed contractor courier model.’ This model, analyzed through ethnographic research and union reports, reveals the juridical construction of precarity. While couriers perform work that meets all criteria for employee status under Turkish Labor Law—dependency, following orders, providing labor for wages—they are legally classified as self-employed contractors.
The theoretical framework builds upon three interconnected traditions. First, Marx’s analysis of the labor process reveals how the formal freedom of labor power as a commodity conceals relations of domination in the production process. Second, Braverman’s examination of monopoly capital demonstrates how management science systematically intensifies capital’s control over labor through the separation of conception and execution. Third, Foucault’s analysis of discipline and governmentality shows how modern power operates not merely through prohibition but through the production of subjects who internalize norms and self-regulate according to performance metrics.
The transformation of labor relations in the 21st century has brought fundamental questions about the nature and function of the right to work. This study investigates how the right to work operates not only as a protective mechanism but also as an integral component of disciplinary regimes within the labor process. By synthesizing Marx’s and Braverman’s labor process theory with Foucault’s analytics of discipline and subjectification, the research demonstrates that rights discourse and control mechanisms are not opposed but rather mutually constitutive in contemporary capitalism.