Hence, while it is important to note that delivery workers are frequently exploited based on the kind of work that they do and their socio-economic conditions, it is also equally important to note that they play a critical role in creation of routinised everyday experiences that characterise contemporary urban spaces. Cities are spaces within which a diverse group of people, often abject strangers to each other, come together to form a common cultural norm, even if they are reluctant to do so (Harvey, 2012, p. 67). The dissemination of urban cultural norms and rites, pre-existing ones or newly formed, among immigrant populaces can be immensely helpful to the creation of communities and forms of social justice-based urbanism. The loss of these urban norms gets manifested in the ways in which certain facets of contemporary urban lifestyles get used against workers, as a migrant delivery worker states:
When I visit any apartment or any gated community, I first have to struggle against the security. Then you have all these apps today, where the owner or the customer has to give an approval or something. Then these security guards ask us to park on the road. All of these increase the propensity to get delayed which then results in lower customer ratings and then we get blasted by the managers and team leaders.
Gated communities are an important part of the contemporary urban way of life and coupled with the delivery services provided by numerous platform-based companies have been an integral part of the promise that urban spaces have projected to people in non-urban and semi-urban locations. Middle-class migrants to the city have often come to pride themselves in the kind of social mobility that they come to possess. But, the proportion of middle-class migrants, as Deb Roy (2024a) argues, is far lesser than those who come from the marginalised social backgrounds. The migrants who come from lower ends of the socio-economic and cultural hierarchy are more likely to be exploited under these circumstances because they are more likely to be affected by the potential precarity of gig work with no recourse to other forms of dignified employment. In a society where traditional occupations based on caste continue to be the most widely practised form of employment (Mosse, 2018), the loss of work within the gig economy means a return to more traditional and probably more exploitative forms of exploitative work.
130
S. D. ROY