Growing together and drifting apart: on the emergence and fragility of social bonds among food delivery riders

Research on platform labour often portrays food delivery work as spatially dispersed and socially isolating, framing fragmentation as a key obstacle to solidarity and collective organising. While this literature has generated important insights into the complex conditions of workers' resistance, less attention has been paid to the social significance of shared logistical spaces such as hubs and warehouses. This article addresses this gap by examining how social bonds among food delivery riders emerge, evolve and disintegrate in everyday work settings. The paper critiques conflict-centred accounts of solidarity and instead develops an interactionist perspective on the topic. Based on 22 autobiographical narrative interviews with food delivery riders in Hamburg, it reconstructs different forms of social bonding that are, however, fragile and subject to erosion through organisational change; competition; ageist, ethnic and class-based boundary making; and gendered vulnerabilities. By uncovering how intersectional inequalities shape riders' everyday interactions, this article contributes to the feminist understandings of platform labour and care.