Then, Yang Zhou examines the relationship between migration and precarity in the gig economy in the non-Western context of China. Experiences of China’s gig workers promise rich insights into this relationship because most of them were rural-to-urban migrant factory and service workers before they ‘migrate’ to platform-based gig work. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, the author argues that migrant gig workers in China are trapped in the platform by China’s state-led, tech-driven economic restructuring project, through a new mode of migrant labor differentiation comprising three factors, including changes in the labor market, hegemonic gender norms, and the reformed hukou system. Yet in the meantime, being migrants also contributes to ‘cultures of solidarity’ they develop among themselves, which provides the micro-foundation of solidarity for frequent yet often small-scale collective actions. The nature and strengths of this culture of solidarity will be examined, so do its potential to forge cross city/region solidarity and for institutionalization.
Finally, Dipsita Dhar, Soham Bhattacharya, and Ashique Ali T. focus migrant digital platform workers within the process of rapid urbanization or metropolitization that has gifted India. With the replication of the Silicon Valley model, India too started building Tech cities that pulled a large number of workers from outside. Along with a pool of whitecollar IT professionals, it brought in people who were required to fulfill the newly developed demand for domestic labor, transportation workers, and sanitation workers. Interestingly, these socially dispersed population of migrants were distinctive in their skill endowment, nature of occupation and social location. But there were two things common among them, their identity as outsiders and their exploitation on the hand of capital. The Karnataka IT employee Union, All India Gig Workers Union, and Inter-State Migration Federation of Karnataka are three unions affiliated to Centre for Trade unions that showed an exceptional trajectory of collaboration, solidarity, and what can be called a collective inter-union reciprocal relation. A large number of unskilled Bengali Muslims came to Bangalore as waste pickers, but their religio-lingustic identity have easily exposed them to different kind of racial and communal targeting, where they are called Bangladeshis, arrested by police and even their huts being demolished. The working-class vulnerabilities are coupled up with the question of citizenry, of being illegal, infiltrators (ghuspetia). The CITU used the leading Bengali workers from the IT unions to go and mobilize among these migrants on the basis of their linguistic commonality to form union. The network of the migrant union was then further used to track down the workers engaging in the digital labor platform and registering them with the gig union. The informal connection based on their cultural identity of migrant, enabled them in forming cross-occupation solidarity and a range of joint initiatives. Their collective actions ranged from providing aid during the calamities, protest against the harassment of police, and so on so forth. Specifically, the authors explore what made this reciprocal relation work, how they bring resolution to a conflict of interest, and whether this model can be an ideal to be replicated elsewhere.
1 INTRODUCTION: MIGRANT LABOUR IN THE PLATFORM
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