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Flexibility is the defining promise of the gig economy, yet also its central contradiction. Often framed as a benefit, flexibility operates dialectically, as both a mechanism of control and a potential site of agency. Workers’ ability to navigate or resist precarity is shaped by their position within segmented labour markets, their subjectivities, and broader socio-economic structures. The gig economy is not a single labour market, then, but a stratified one in which conditions vary drastically across sectors and worker groups. This paper examines two differently situated workers in distinct segments of gig work to explore the determinants of precarity. It identifies three key dialectical tensions: (1) flexibility as both freedom and control; (2) gig work as promizing autonomy but delivering insecurity; and (3) the gig economy as simultaneously embedded in and excluded from Sweden’s labour market model, undermining protections whilst reproducing exclusion. Through digital mediation, task atomization, and misclassification, gig work entrenches inequality in new ways. In Sweden, Europe’s most segregated labour market, the gig economy exacerbates existing divisions. Whilst some workers benefit, others, particularly racialized migrants, face deepened precarity and algorithmic discipline. Rather than disrupting hierarchies, Sweden’s gig economy reinforces them through new forms of segmentation and spatio-temporal discipline.

This paper concerns migrants in Sweden working in various types of on and offline gig work. It explores how the temporal and spatial flexibility afforded to gig customers is predicated on temporal and spatial inflexibility for workers. The argument moves discussions beyond relational space by promoting a more fully dialectical view of space that understands it as simultaneously relational, relative, and absolute. Without such a view of space-which understands that space is not always open and fluid but just as often closed and fixed-it is impossible to understand the specific relations of labour that structure gig work, particularly offline gig work in such ways as to provide maximal flexibility for customers. This paper shows that the Marxian adage concerning how, in capitalism, space is annihilated by time, does not always hold. For workers doing cleaning and delivery gig work, the converse is oftentimes truer: time is annihilated by space. Gig workers-and even more so migrant gig workers crowded in the above-mentioned industries-experience the annihilation of time by space through the dual mandate that they must be available "just-in-time" and "just-in-place" to produce the spatiotemporal flexibility upon which the gig companies base their model and their success.

This paper examines labour agency in Sweden’s gig economy through a spatio-temporal reading of resilience, reworking, and resistance. Drawing on qualitative interviews with platform workers and union representatives, alongside policy, media, and observational material, it argues that worker agency is not absent under platform capitalism, but fragmented and unevenly organised through the spatial and temporal logics of platform work. Building on Katz’s framework of the 3Rs, the paper shows how resilience emerges under conditions of temporal compression and spatial isolation; how reworking becomes possible through partial decompressions of these pressures; and how resistance depends on fragile moments of synchronisation, when dispersed workers are able to recognise shared grievances and act collectively. Focusing on platform labour in Sweden, the paper demonstrates that these forms of agency are unevenly distributed across lines of migration status, race, gender, sector, and access to institutional support. In doing so, it contributes to labour geography and platform labour studies by developing a spatio-temporal account of disaggregated agency, while also showing how platform labour exposes the limits of collective representation within the Swedish model.

This paper develops the concept of spectral infrastructures to examine how platform capitalism reorganises visibility, labour, and value in the contemporary city. Drawing on debates across urban theory, labour geography, logistical urbanism, and the infrastructural turn, it argues that the fulfilment city is sustained by infrastructures that are simultaneously ubiquitous and elusive: dark stores, ghost kitchens, platform interfaces, automated delivery systems, and the workers whose movement keeps these circuits in motion. Through empirical exemplification from Stockholm, the paper shows how these infrastructures appear unevenly across urban space, from branded façades and containerised ghost kitchens to vacant shopfronts, digital traces, dark stores, and delivery robots. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the phantasmagoria of commodity culture, the paper conceptualises spectrality not as absence, but as a regime of selective appearance in which labour is made visible as movement, service, or spectacle whilst remaining socially and politically obscured. By tracing how logistical rationality mediates visibility, value, and everyday urban experience, the paper contributes to debates on urban infrastructural politics and the changing geographies of work. In doing so, it re-embeds labour within analyses of infrastructure and urban form, showing how the apparent smoothness of platform urbanism depends on the uneven organisation of work, visibility, and friction.