The Worker Behind the Icon: Platform Delivery and the Politics of Invisibility

January 2026. It was a rainy Wednesday afternoon in a weathered building on the outskirts of Hamra, overlooking Spears Street. On the top floor of the building, a performance space built from scratch gathers a group of delivery drivers. Several different delivery applications are represented, although Toters has a near monopoly in this sector. Laban Theatre, a playback and improv troupe, was facilitating a session with more than 40 drivers, most of whom were Syrian refugees.

This was part of a 5-year collaboration between two organizations – which I was part of – working closely with a grassroots workers’ movement. Many stories were shared during the session: a father hadn't seen his child in months or a son working tirelessly to send money to his aging parents. Worker after worker described being stripped of their dignity, by platforms, by clients, and by businesses.

What emerges is more than just a series of testimonials about difficult working conditions. There is also a larger story about how technology can make workers simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible.

Free to work? The ‘self-employed’ commodity

The rapid expansion of platform delivery work in Lebanon can be linked to two moments: the economic collapse that annihilated incomes and drastically shrank the job market, and the COVID-19 lockdowns that accelerated reliance on delivery services. Restaurants increasingly depended on deliveries for revenue, while workers entered the relatively accessible gig economy to secure livelihoods for themselves.

At the heart of the platform model is an attractive proposition: flexibility. This attribute has been central to how companies promote recruitment into the gig economy: the worker decides when to work and rest, logs in and out of work as he pleases, and has no boss standing over his shoulder.

However, fieldwork conducted during the 5-year collaboration described above revealed that – like the propaganda promoting ‘the American Dream’ in the USA – the reality of platform work is far from what is promised to workers. Once the application is switched on, workers have around 60 seconds to accept an order, sometimes before knowing exactly where it will take them. Most drivers who were interviewed or surveyed reported working more than 9 hours per day, and more than half of them confirmed that they worked at least two different jobs. Attaching the ‘self-employed’ label to gig economy delivery drivers camouflages the harsh working conditions and lack of accountability that define workers’ blurry contractual relationship with the platforms that ‘use their services’.

Platforms have created grading/ranking algorithms that classify drivers into categories such as red, silver, gold and diamond, with financial rewards attached to their performance and number of deliveries. Refusing orders could affect future work or the benefits associated with higher classifications, negatively impacting income. Researchers have described this contradiction as ‘sticky labor’’: work presented as flexible while algorithmic management increasingly limits workers' actual freedom. Platforms push workers to compete for the diamond rank as a reward, turning incentives into a means of controlling and dividing workers. What does freedom mean when exercising it can undermine your livelihood?

The promise of flexibility conceals one of the most pernicious trends of the neoliberal economy: the transfer of responsibility from the company to the worker. This transfer is not specific to the gig economy, but falls under a historical drive for capital to extract labour and make profit at the expense of dignifying and safe working conditions. The costs of reproducing labour are pushed onto those unable to refuse - typically unpaid care labour.  When it comes to delivery drivers, purchase and maintenance of the motorcycle is largely the worker's responsibility. So are fuel and mobile data costs. Workers carry their own cash, navigate unsafe roads, and absorb the time lost waiting for restaurants or customers. For one of the drivers we spoke to, this transfer of risk became painfully literal. After suffering an accident while working, he was left injured and without an income for months. Unable to afford the treatment he needed, he eventually borrowed money from his family to undergo surgery and physiotherapy. Still, when we spoke to him, he was planning to return to delivery work because finding another source of income in Lebanon is so difficult.

The flexibility is therefore uneven. Platforms retain flexibility over how work is distributed, evaluated and remunerated. They have surveillance power over their drivers while workers must navigate the instability and risk required to make the system function. But who watches the watchers?

Alone yet Together

The most powerful element of platform work is not simply that it organizes work differently. It organizes workers differently. A factory brings workers together; the platform disperses them. Drivers are moving constantly across the city, individually accepting orders, individually evaluated by customers and individually classified according to performance. Their colleagues are their competitors.

For Syrian drivers, this isolation intersects with racism, restrictions on movement and insecurity linked to legal and residency status. As more Lebanese workers entered the sector during the economic collapse, Syrian drivers also expressed concerns about being replaced or disadvantaged through platform incentives.

And when workers have attempted to break this isolation, the response from the platform companies has sometimes been directly damaging. In 2021, omnipresent platforms like Toters violently dismantled a strike organized by their drivers, who were demanding an increase in the delivery charge. Other strategies entail unilaterally deactivating accounts, pressuring workers to reveal the identities of organizers, and threatening colleagues with dismissal.

The contradiction is striking. Platforms depend on networks to function, yet workers forming networks of their own are perceived a threat.

Still, people find each other.

They meet while waiting for an order. They exchange information. They lend each other fuel. They warn each other about dangerous areas or police checkpoints. They create WhatsApp groups. They share experiences and, occasionally, organize.

For a workforce dispersed across streets and mobile phones, horizontal solidarity networks may offer an alternative to traditional union structures. The key is to provide the space and resources for drivers to co-design organizing efforts and structures that suit their reality and that address the systemic material challenges they face as workers.

There is something fundamentally human in this. A system can individualize workers, classify them, rank them, and place them in competition with each other. It can even make collective organization appear almost impossible. Yet workers persistently recreate spaces in which they can recognize themselves in one another.

Becoming Visible

We see delivery drivers everywhere, whether at traffic lights, outside restaurants, on our doorsteps, and sometimes almost crashing into our cars. We see them as a moving ad for the companies they work for. But do we really ‘see’ them, as workers, as fathers or sons, as persons with private lives?

It is precisely as workers that they remain remarkably invisible. Perhaps this is one of the most effective tricks of the platform economy. It has not made labour disappear, but it has blurred labour relationships to a point where they are nearly indiscernible.

The challenge, therefore, is not simply to make us feel more sympathy for delivery drivers, tip them better, or treat them more politely. These things matter, but kindness cannot substitute for rights, insurance, protection, or collective power. By blurring industrial relations under the guise of flexibility and freedom, platform operations leave workers with little protection under Lebanese labour law. Workers provide their labour without necessarily being recognized as workers, complicating accountability and further weakening their ability to organize.

The challenge is to look again at that motorcycle moving across our screens as we track our delivery and understand what it actually represents: a human worker who has rights and requires protection.

Conclusion

Back to January 2026. Ahmed is on stage sharing his experience with the improv team, who had asked him: ‘what do you want people to know about you?’ After a long moment of silence, he responds: ‘I want my children to have a better life than mine, and that’s why I accept to work in these conditions. My life is over, but theirs is still growing.’

Ahmed is 37 years old.

I have heard versions of this sentence many times over the past decade, across low-wage sectors. There is something painfully familiar in workers accepting the erosion of their own lives so that someone they love might have a better one.

Yet there is another similarity that gives me more hope. Workers who are made invisible have repeatedly found ways to become visible to one another. They meet, share experiences, build networks and eventually begin to name what is happening to them collectively.

The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.