Abstract
This study examines the precarious working conditions of migrant food-delivery couriers in Johannesburg, South Africa, employed by UberEats, MrDFood, and BoltFood. Using Standing's (2011) framework of labour insecurity and drawing on in-depth interviews with Black African male migrants from Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Uganda, the research reveals complex tensions in platform work. While digital platforms offer advantages like flexible scheduling, multiple income streams, and enhanced earning potential, they also generate new forms of precarity. Couriers face physical risks from crime, economic burdens from rising operational costs, and social insecurity through customer harassment, all while lacking basic employment protections. Although workers develop informal coping mechanisms through WhatsApp networks and support groups, these individual strategies cannot address structural insecurities. The findings demonstrate how platforms create racialised and gendered patterns of precarity among migrant workers, pointing to necessary policy interventions to regulate platform labour and protect vulnerable workers. By examining how platform capitalism intersects with migrant vulnerability in post-apartheid South Africa, this study advances critical debates about platform labour regulation and worker protection in Global South contexts.