Organizing China's Delivery Workers

In 2022, the ACFTU chartered its first formal trade union branches for food-delivery riders in Shanghai — a move that received almost no attention outside specialist circles but represents one of the more consequential experiments in platform-era labor policy anywhere in the world.

The riders themselves — many of them internal migrants, working under algorithmic dispatch for Meituan and Ele.me — had organized informally for years, using WeChat groups to coordinate slowdowns and share information about pay rates. The formal union status changes the register of that organizing: platform companies now have a state-recognized counterparty when disputes escalate.

It is too early to call this a template. But it is a live case against the assumption that gig work is inherently unorganizable, and it deserves closer attention from anyone thinking about the future of platform labor beyond China.