The native workers rarely treat us as equal. Sometimes, they also threaten us that they will beat us. These are all very difficult circumstances under which we have to work in. In most cases, it is fine financially, there is no difference between payments and all. But when it comes to job satisfaction, the native local workers are more satisfied than us. We have to work long hours, pay rents and all, and it is very difficult with this income.
The team leader in the area speaks in the local language, now although he is also a gig worker like I am, there is an issue of linguistic efficiency. He sees me just as a migrant and says that I should go home and not come here to irritate them. They should inform the company if they do not want migrants, why harass us?
The migrant workers’ narration about a struggle between local and migrant workers leads one back to the critical role that Marx (1870) had designated to capitalism, which was to create a rift between local and migrants to suit its own benefits. Marx (1870) had argued that the differences between local and migrant workers are kept alive by capitalist forces to keep the workers segregated among themselves, which dampens their potential to rebel against the system. Migrant workers are often used by capitalism to create a deteriorated standard of living for local workers which enable them to keep the general level of wages low, increase competition and heighten dehumanisation.
Crisis in the lives of the workers has both objective and subjective aspects. The exploitation of migrant gig workers within urban spaces is a manifestation of the ways in which neoliberalism constrains the employment avenues available for the poorest of the poor and produces the requisite conditions of desperation that capital requires to bring in further control in the society. Their subjective experiences make them form their class identity mainly through a combination of their objective financial positioning and their subjective self-identification measures. Such a state of subsumption makes them unable to possess a right to the urban spaces that they occupy. David Harvey noted that the right to the city is a right that allows people to change the urban environment. The right to the city is about negating the process in which individuals lose the connection to the urban space which produces a notion of being lost without a community, which results in individuals ‘[recognising] their areas less clearly, evaluate them less highly, and become less attached to them’ (Hunter, 1974, p. 173).
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<sup>25</sup> Names changed due to privacy concerns.