Looking at the gig economy from the perspective of migrant labour also entails shifting the focus: From this perspective, low pay and precarity are nothing new or exclusive to digital platforms but have been the characterising conditions for migrant and racialized labour for centuries and the history of flexible and contingent labour are closely entwined with this history – and present – of mobile labour. Instead of addressing platforms only as innovative disruptors of standard employment, it becomes necessary to discuss how digital platforms are able to renew and reconfigure forms of contingent labour and how their important, new and specific digital qualities […] interact with stratified labour markets. Such a perspective allows a contextualised analysis of gig economy platforms in labour markets constituted and stratified by differential migration regimes including multiple vectors such as citizenship, language, visas, or work permits. (Altenried, 2024, p. 1115).
In a highly competitive market-based society, the survival of capitalism requires an extensive production of profits which demands an extension of wage labour relationship (Smith, 1982). This entails within itself the production of space as a corollary of the capitalist production of nature itself which becomes evident within the various contemporary processes of gentrification (Smith, 2011). Gentrification has come to dictate the spatial choices that people make (Deb Roy, 2024a), which in turn drive the preferences for occupying particular spaces drives the residential and employment patterns in the society (Smith, 1982). These preferences in most hyper-urbanised spaces depend upon the labour power that gig workers perform, with coverage by platforms such as Swiggy and Uber becoming a key point for various kinds of extractive processes such as higher rents and more maintenance charges in the form of security and outsider-parking spaces in certain gated societies. Most of these factors are important parts of the discourse focused on smart and global cities focused on the creation of simultaneously territorial and global processes of spatial accumulation (Sassen, 2005). The data-driven mechanism adopted in such spaces allows the inclusion of both native and migrant workers within the platform economy (Barns, 2020; Van Doorn & Vijay, 2024).
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