From Rickshaw pullers to Delivery riders: The Politics of Urban Precarity

Jul 12, 2025

Before it became a cultural cliché, the rickshaw—from the Japanese jinrikisha (人力車, “human-powered vehicle”)—was a ubiquitous fixture of colonial cities across East and Southeast Asia. Invented in Japan in the 1860s and rapidly exported through imperial trade routes, the rickshaw became both a tool of mobility and a marker of inequality. It enabled the movement of elites, bureaucrats, and tourists while tethering the men and women who pulled them to an economy of colonial extraction. In Singapore, Hanoi, and Seoul, rickshaw pullers were overwhelmingly rural migrants pushed into cities by agrarian crisis and locked into daily rental schemes that mirrored indenture. Subject to harsh regulation, police surveillance, and public disdain, the rickshaw puller became a disposable component in the machinery of colonial urbanism.

Lao She’s (pronounced laow shuh) Rickshaw Boy (1937)1 draws directly from this world. Set in Republican-era Beijing (1912-1949), the novel follows Xiangzi (pronounced shyahng-dzuh), an ambitious young man who dreams of owning his rickshaw as a path to dignity and independence. But as the story unfolds, Xiangzi becomes emblematic of a the impossibility of self-determination under conditions shaped by structural poverty, urban exploitation, and social contempt. His labor is visible, even essential, but his personhood is disposable. Xiangzi's trajectory—from hopeful striver to broken man—mirrors the rickshaw puller (known colloquially as rickshaw men or rickshaw boys): at once hypermobile and immobile, free in name but bound by every other measure.

Listen to Rickshaw Boy on Audible

Like Xiangzi, the Uber Eats delivery rider has been celebrated by neoliberal narratives for their supposed flexibility, independence, and entrepreneurship. Yet that independence is contingent on owning or renting equipment, accepting algorithmically assigned jobs, and navigating invisible systems of control. Despite different settings and technologies, the structural position of these riders—precarious, atomized, extractable—resonates with the figure Lao She constructed nearly a century ago.

What emerges in this comparison is not a simple continuity of poverty but a repeated structural logic. The transformation of laboring bodies into mobile service units, regulated by opaque systems of power and always at risk of collapse. Both Xiangzi and the Uber Eats rider operate within multi-layered structures of subordination in which unequal relations are embedded within other unequal relations. The illusion of autonomy masks the overlapping dependencies of rented tools, coercive intermediaries, and disembedded urban economies. They are not only economically exploited but also socially stigmatized. Xiangzi, as a rickshaw puller, is treated as a vagrant and nuisance. Similarly, the contemporary delivery rider (for platforms like Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, Deliveroo, Just Eat, Wolt, Demae-can, or Food Panda) is often framed as disorderly, unlicensed, or out of place in the aesthetic order of the city. Both are tolerated as an urban convenience but despised as an urban feature.

Colonial Circuits

From the late 19th century through the mid-20th century, the rickshaw was a ubiquitous feature of urban transportation across East and Southeast Asia. Historian David Strand argued that the rickshaw pullers of 1920s Beijing were essential to the daily movement of city residents, yet marginalized by law, custom, and class. Strand (1989) documents how these workers were concentrated in urban districts yet excluded from full civic participation, and subject to police regulation, licensing fees, and moral scrutiny. Their labor was intimate but transactional; their presence was public yet undesired. The rickshaw puller thus became an emblem of the urban friction that Strand identified as “an emblem for a disordered age.” The rickshaw puller was a human interface in a city attempting to modernize without resolving its underlying social contradictions. Strand’s portrayal of the rickshaw pullers of Beijing echoes across East and Southeast Asia, where colonial and nationalist regimes alike extracted mobility from rickshaw pullers while denying them social acceptance, legal rights, and economic stability.

In Japanese colonial Korea and Taiwan, rickshaw pullers were surveilled under strict labor codes and police controls. In British Malaya and Hong Kong, municipal authorities imposed fees and movement controls while undermining attempts at unionization. With some local variations, the colonial city extracted mobility from disenfranchised men and women while denying them rights or recognition. What linked the rickshaw puller across these imperial spaces was not so much the machine itself as the moral economy of labor it instantiated. The puller was permitted to move goods and people, but without dignity or respect.

Riders of the Platform City

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, Tokyo, like urban centers worldwide, saw a dramatic expansion of app-based food delivery services. Uber Eats Japan and its market rivals like Demae recruited thousands of riders, many of whom were students, freelancers, laid-off service workers, or non-Japanese residents excluded from mainstream employment. Riders were drawn by the promise of autonomy and daily earnings, but found themselves at the mercy of fluctuating demand, pay cuts, and algorithmic control. By 2021, Tokyo’s Uber Eats workforce was composed largely of workers classified as “independent contractors.” This legal fiction denied them access to labor protections such as minimum wage, accident insurance, or bargaining rights. As deliveries rose in demand, especially during lockdowns, many riders increased their hours dramatically, averaging 8–12 hours daily to meet subsistence levels.

But as the pandemic receded, the food delivery boom contracted. Companies scaled back incentives and introduced algorithmic optimizations that reduced rider compensation. Complaints of “ghost orders” and app deactivations without explanation grew more common. In 2022, the Tokyo Labor Relations Commission ruled in favor of the Uber Eats Union, granting its members the right to collective bargaining. Though legally significant, the ruling has had limited impact on day-to-day labor conditions. Organizing remains difficult in a system designed to isolate and depersonalize workers. Like the rickshaw pullers of colonial East Asia, Tokyo’s delivery riders confront a system that promises freedom while delivering exhaustion. The app does not beat them, but it routes them; it does not extort them, but it pays them less than yesterday; it does not command them, but it makes refusal economically irrational. The human body becomes the point of flexibility, bearing the costs of volatility, so the system can remain frictionless.

Across global cities, app-based couriers have responded by organizing through independent unions that reject the premise of flexibility without rights. In London, GMB represents Uber Eats couriers in disputes over pay and deactivation. At the same time, the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) offers a more confrontational alternative, criticizing Uber’s engagement with GMB as insufficient and non-binding. In Tokyo, the Uber Eats Union, founded in 2019, became one of the first to win formal recognition, securing the right to collective bargaining under Japanese labor law. In Taiwan, the National Delivery Industrial Union (NDIU) mobilizes riders from multiple platforms in response to declining compensation and algorithmic opacity, staging walkouts and demanding legal reform. In New York City, grassroots collectives like Los Deliveristas Unidos pushed successfully for minimum wage guarantees, only to face retaliatory scheduling restrictions from the platforms. These unions and worker associations are not partners in platform governance; they are antagonists struggling to reclassify riders as workers in systems designed to deny them that status. Their emergence marks a global turn toward collective resistance in an economy built to prevent it.

Allegory as Analysis

Rickshaw Boy remains a vital text not because it explains modern technology, but because it dramatizes the relationship between aspiration and subjugation. The Uber Eats rider, like Xiangzi, exists at the junction of autonomy and control, visibility and disposability. The colonial rickshaw puller—emblem of modernity and marginality—has reappeared in a new form, regulated not by colonial officials but by metrics, maps, and stars. To see today’s platform labor through the lens of Rickshaw Boy and colonial urban history is to question the fundamental assumptions we often make about labor and laborers. Technologies shift, juridical categories evolve, but the laboring body remains the interface through which capital extracts value from the city. Literary allegory and historical inquiry together illuminate a crucial truth: autonomy, when denied structural support, becomes another word for abandonment (or, as Janice Joplin sang, ‘nothing left to lose’).2

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