Attuning to uncertainty: Enacting health in platformised taxicab driving

Increasing use of digital platforms for coordinating and organising work processes has drawn research interest in and policy concern about conditions of labour and employment in global and local contexts. Studies of platform work consistently associate it with work insecurity, unpredictability, low wages, and income insecurity. Such conditions have also been directly linked to experiencing poor health, including stress, depression, and anxiety. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with taxi and private hire drivers in the North East of England, we outline a practice-based thematic map of how these workers experience, understand and relate between different stressor conditions in their daily working lives. Comparing across different types of taxicab driving in our data, we identify how, in a traditionally ‘unhealthy’ occupation, the configuration of stressors inhabited by these drivers has shifted in the wake of intensified forms of uncertainty brought about by platformisation, and how they attempt to pragmatically respond to these shifts. By adding an insiders' perspective on the issue of autonomy and control, this paper provides key insights into how workers affected by platformisation navigate constraints to living healthily in uncertain conditions.