Tearing social safety net: platform fast-fashion and marginalization of garment workers

Existing research on platform labour has predominantly focused on service-sector gig workers under direct algorithmic control, leaving manufacturing workers who face indirect algorithmic pressure unexplored. This study investigates why informal garment workers in China’s fast-fashion industry remain excluded from social insurance system. Rather than blaming weak government enforcement, it argues that the platform-driven production regime systematically decouples the production-welfare nexus. First, highly flexible production fragments employment into daily spot-market transactions, dismantling the stable labour relations that employee-based social insurance requires. Second, algorithmic pricing squeezes profit margins, leaving workers’ wages too thin and volatile to sustain fixed social insurance contributions. Third, the industry’s ultra-fast turnover relies on urban villages, where informal spaces make the workforce administratively untraceable to the statutory social insurance system. Together, these three mechanisms accelerate garment workers’ marginalization from existing social insurance system, revealing a fundamental clash between fluid platform capitalism and rigidly status-based East Asian welfare regime.