‘Anyway, i’m stuck here’

This article, based on an ethnographic study of food delivery drivers in Paris, examines the role of the mobile phone in the work of these migrant men. This tool represents both a job opportunity by connecting them to a food delivery platform – on which the organization of work keeps them in a precarious situation –, and the production of absence through interaction with family members in their home country. The article therefore seeks to understand how the organization of work produces emotional and institutional absences by keeping delivery drivers in a precarious administrative and economic situation and by fixing them in time and space. It examines how delivery work thus acts as a means of retaining workers in time, space and administrative status.