It is a 24 7 job with no holidays, unless you want to take it. But then nobody wants to take a holiday because once you do, you start getting lesser orders, and then the team leader also often makes you feel unwanted and will curse you with slangs. If you want to earn sufficiently, then you will have to work nights also. I get lot of new boys who come into the sector and say that they do not work nights. For them, I always say that they should not join only. Then there are issues concerning standardisation. We do not know the roads that well as a local worker, neither do we know the local language, so obviously we will need some more time to deliver. But neither the company nor the customer who are migrants themselves understand this.
We are the most important parts of all these hi-tech smart cities. But we ourselves do not get any protection. We are not even considered to be workers. They say we are partners, what partners, we are just disposable entities to them. One goes, hundreds will be queuing up, who are all evaluated equally although the system knows that everybody comes from different social conditions. I come from a village and do not know English, but then some customers and even the team leader do not understand this issue. Speak in broken Hindi, I can understand but I know only a few words of English.
Capitalism underlies, as Smith (2011) and Anderson (2020) argue, most of the processes related to social stratification and also desires to create a homogenised market for better profitability. While uneven development disrupts the homogenising logic of global capitalism (Prudham & Heynen, 2011), algorithmic management helps global capitalism to maintain its drive towards homogeneity that is a key part of capitalist expansion (Anderson, 2020). Standardisation allows platforms to make better inroads into urban everyday lives because it emphasises reliability, uniquity and in most cases, ubiquity (Marrone & Peterlongo, 2020; Van Doorn, 2019). The delivery workers fulfil a critical part of the urban infrastructure because they make it easier for the middle class to get access to commodities that make the urban spaces look enticing and promising to them (Banerjee, 2024). Platforms and the rapid growth that they have seen in recent times have changed the associated structures and dynamics of online ordering and servicing providing more convenience and avenues for expressing social privilege (Deb Roy, 2019). The eruption of dark kitchens and dark stores—created for facilitating last mile deliveries from parent restaurants and stores—<sup>16</sup> has brought forward an entire ecosystem focused on catering to urban spaces possessing an upwardly mobile customer base (Huws, 2020).
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