Remote work, social inequality and the redistribution of mobility
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Author | Biao Xiang |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.13085 |
280 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/imig Int Migr. 2022;60:280–282.
Remote work, or more precisely work from home, is widely expected to become a new normal (Raghunath &
Tan, 2020). The popularization of remote work has two important backgrounds, in addition to technological advance-
ment. The first is the COVID-19 pandemic, which made remote work a necessity for many people. The second is
the worsening socio-economic inequality across gender, ethnicity, income and working conditions. Some people
are free to choose to work remotely, others are not allowed to do so, and yet others are forced to work remotely. In
understanding the relation between remote work, the pandemic, and inequality, population mobility can serve as a
useful lens. In particular, I propose that the perspective of the ‘redistribution of mobility’ offers new analytical power.
Remote work and the pandemic are related to each other not only because they reduce mobility but also because
they both redistribute mobility. Work from home without commuting relies on the intensification of mobility of
others. Certain populations have to move more in order to deliver food, dispatch medicine and maintain the commu-
nications system. The redistribution of mobility was evident in China's first epicentre, Wuhan. Wuhan is the first
major city in the world that was put under total lockdown in early 2020, and remote work became a default for the
12 million residents. According to data from Alibaba Research Academy (2020), during the first phase of lockdown (23
January 2020 to 8 April 2020), delivery orders jumped fivefold; and the average distance of riders' daily travel more
than tripled. Meituan – the largest meals delivery platform in China that facilitated nearly 40 million food delivery
transactions every day in 2021 (China Internet Watch, 2022) – received nearly 4 million orders in Wuhan during the
same period (China Federation of Logistics and Group Purchase, 2020). This trend continued since. The market size
of the online food delivery business expanded from 578 billion RMB (approximately 84 billion USD) in 2019, to 665
in 2020, 812 in 2021 and an expected 942 in 2022 (Statista, 2022). The rapid growth of such mobility services was
indispensable for implementing the lockdown and remote work. Persons engaged in remote work ‘outsourced’ their
mobility needs to a new army of specialist mobility labour. Alibaba Research Institute (2020) estimated that a single
rider enables 24 residents to stay at home.
In the redistribution of mobility, platform-based technology companies played a key role. These companies redis-
tributed primarily effectively by drawing in low-pay labour at marginal positions with weak bargaining power. Meituan,
the Chinese shopping platform mentioned above, for instance, recruited 336,000 riders between the end of January
2020 and mid-March. Many of the new recruits had lost jobs recently due to mobility restriction. Reflecting the precar-
ious nature of labour relations in the gig economy, companies provided minimum training, no regular salaries and no
COMMENTARY
DOI: 10.1111/imig.13085
Received: 16 October 2022 Accepted: 17 October 2022
Remote work, social inequality and the
redistribution of mobility
Biao Xiang
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany
Correspondence
Biao Xiang, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany.
Email: xiang@eth.mpg.de
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
© 2022 The Author. International Migration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of International Organization for Migration.
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