Gig workers are neglected in terms of their job stability and security and are vulnerable to lower customer ratings. Migrant gig workers become a part of neoliberal governmentality whereby they are inculcated within a neoliberal career developmental framework which prefers flexible work rather than secured jobs as they promote leaner systems of production and circulation (Abkhezr & McMahon, 2022; De Neve et al., 2023). The entrenchment of migrant workers within such modes affects their everyday life which becomes constituted by a growing precarity and social insecurity. Everyday life, as Lefebvre (2002, p. 41) had defined is the omnipotent reality within human existence such that ‘we are inside it and outside it. No so-called elevated activity can be reduced to it, nor can it be separated from it’. Under capitalism, the everyday life comes to be defined by the production and consumption of commodities that create a consumer-oriented citizenship in the society, whereby the ability to consume becomes the basis of manifesting one’s belongingness, both legally and socio-culturally. Any capitalist socio-economic structure is based on the production of commodities through structures and ideologies which convert everything, including emotions, into tradeable commodities (Marx, 1867/1976; Illouz, 2007). The algorithmic management which is used to control the delivery workers, works through surveillance and monitoring and often attempts to dehumanise these decisions concerning their lives and working conditions that workers have to take (Huws et al., 2019).
The satisfaction that is generated with a quick and efficient delivery becomes an important dimension of the middle-class consciousness surrounding the urban spaces that they come to inhabit. The growth of capitalism has resulted in a general commodification of the society, where entities which had been previously categorised as essential entities have begun to be exploited as profitable entities, like all other commodities. During Covid-19, the profits of these platforms exceeded all limits with many of these platforms deemed essential services and earning huge profits while leaving the workers completely bereft of social and job security.<sup>24</sup> Under these circumstances, the belongingness to the urban spaces for migrant gig workers has suffered tremendously because the boundaries between their working day and workplaces have eroded significantly (Risi & Pronzato, 2021) constituting a fractured everyday experience for most of these workers (Huws, 2006). The social existence of these workers gets reduced to the experiences that they bring to the middle class, as one delivery worker from Assam who has been working as a delivery worker for more than five years in Bengaluru explains:
5 MIGRANT GIG WORKERS OF INDIA’S CONSUMERIST CITIES
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