Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

Spring 4-14-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

April 2026

Department

Sociology

College Granting Degree

Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

Department Granting Degree

Sociology

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Phillip A. Hough

Abstract

This study examines how Bangladeshi freelancers use digital platform work to cope with precarious local labor markets and how this strategy both mitigates and reproduces insecurity. In this form of work, freelancers compete for short-term, skill-based remote jobs posted by global clients. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews and virtual ethnography, this study challenges dominant Western understandings of the precariat that assume workers fall from stable employment into insecure work. Instead, the findings show that many freelancers enter platform labor strategically as a way out of already unstable and limited local opportunities. While freelancing carries a promise of foreign income, flexibility, and mobility, reinforced by state promotion, workers remain constrained by poor infrastructure, weak social protection, gendered burdens, opaque algorithms, and AI-related disruptions. The study argues that platform labor reshapes rather than resolves precarity, layering new forms of insecurity onto existing structural conditions in a developing economy like Bangladesh.

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