The gig treadmill: Urban-rural exclusion and the overwork of China's couriers

作者：Donghao Liu, Hao Dong, He Gao · 发表于：Cities · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1016/j.cities.2025.106358 · 被引用次数：2 · 研究领域：Digital Economy and Work Transformation、China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance、Employment and Welfare Studies

This study investigates how spatially reproduced urban–rural exclusion within Chinese megacities drives structural overwork among migrant gig workers—and how targeted social-security access can dismantle these exclusionary dynamics. Employing a mixed-methods design—a large-scale survey of daily working hours and insurance coverage, over 40 in-depth interviews, and a choice-based conjoint experiment—we find that basic social insurance reduces weekly overwork by an average of 5.6 h, with commercial-insurance supplements yielding an additional 1.2 h of relief. Crucially, insurance preferences vary significantly by gender, health status, traffic-accident history, and contract formality, underscoring the need for subgroup-tailored benefit designs. Theoretically, we embed urban–rural exclusion within a spatial-justice framework, extending welfare-regime analyses by showing how territorially bounded eligibility criteria perpetuate “insider” versus “outsider” divisions inside city boundaries. Methodologically, our integration of survey and conjoint methods provides a replicable blueprint for measuring spatially contingent policy demands. Policy recommendations include mandating universal social-insurance enrollment with formal contracts, implementing portable benefit schemes, and requiring platforms to fund contributions directly. Our findings offer empirically grounded strategies for inclusive gig-economy labor protection, with broad relevance for rapidly urbanizing regions worldwid...