From Legacy to Social Media: The Making of Singapore’s Platform Workers Bill

Singapore’s Platform Workers Bill (2024) is among the first regulatory measures adopted at the national-level to safeguard and ensure the rights of platform workers, particularly those who service on-demand food delivery and ride-hailing. In enacting this measure, the Singapore government acknowledges that on-demand food delivery riders are deserving of regulatory protection. In this paper, I examine how on-demand food couriers are portrayed in legacy and social media (in English) from 2012 to 2024 when the Platform Workers Bill was proposed, debated, and adopted. The paper reveals how a shift from framing on-demand food couriers as “safety menace” to “hardworking everyday Singaporean” could be identified in both legacy and social media. In so doing, legacy and social media provided a discursive platform for the Bill to be introduced and adopted.