In Sweden, several trends intersect: the gig economy is growing rapidly; immigrants find it challenging to find work; and integration policies increasingly focus on the role of the first job as a benchmark for integration. This empirical study inserts an intersectional perspective into the exploration of the gig economy by examining immigrant women’s daily working experiences within a transactional gig platform, “Yummy”. This food app links home-based chefs to public consumers through online ordering systems. Through in-depth interviews with chefs, the app management team and participatory observations at firm training sessions and food festivals, we explore the complexity of gendered and racialized precarious work from inside the gig economy to consider daily gig life from a feminist economics perspective. The study shows the gig economy does provide entrepreneurial opportunities for new immigrants with these being based on gendered norms. We demonstrate how gendered narratives of idle capacities and women’s work in the home and family spheres are marketized and transformed through the platform. Our study widens the scope of understanding the gig economy by positioning gig work as part of broader social relations between a company, the workers and gender norms.

It is now widely held that a variety of intermediary actors, including recruitment and staffing agencies, multinational corporations and local brokers, shape labour migration. This paper argues that in order to better understand the global circulation of labour it is necessary to explore the involvement of these actors in the production of the regulatory spaces through which migrant labour is brokered. Indeed, migration intermediaries do not only navigate borders on behalf of their migrant clients. Nor is ‘the state’ primarily a backdrop against which the understanding of the role of intermediaries may be developed. Instead, we argue, regulatory spaces of labour migration are made and remade through direct and indirect exchanges and interactions between intermediaries and state actors. Through an analysis of three moments of regulatory change in Sweden, the paper shows that such interaction does not take place in an even landscape but, rather, that the ability of migration intermediaries to influence the regulation of migration lies in the capacity to form close relationships or establish a powerful presence. A focus on the dynamic co-production of regulatory spaces by intermediaries and state actors, in our view, offers a more nuanced account of how labour migration currently is brokered and regulated.