{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"ce325a04-5bc9-4819-a776-439d90410b32","title":"Migrant Labour in the Gig Economy The Intersection of Migrant Labour, Platform Capitalism, and Resistance","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9783031912610","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"ce325a04-5bc9-4819-a776-439d90410b32","id":"ce325a04-5bc9-4819-a776-439d90410b32","uuid":"ce325a04-5bc9-4819-a776-439d90410b32","title":"Migrant Labour in the Gig Economy The Intersection of Migrant Labour, Platform Capitalism, and Resistance","normalized_title":"migrantlabourinthegigeconomytheintersectionofmigrantlabourplatformcapitalismandresistance","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9783031912610","isbns":["9783031912610","9783031912627"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":270,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/ce325a04-5bc9-4819-a776-439d90410b32","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Migrant%20Labour%20in%20the%20Gig%20Economy%20The%20Intersection%20of%20Migrant%20Labour%2C%20Platform%20Capitalism%2C%20and%20Resistance","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/ce325a04-5bc9-4819-a776-439d90410b32/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/ce325a04-5bc9-4819-a776-439d90410b32/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/ce325a04-5bc9-4819-a776-439d90410b32","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/ce325a04-5bc9-4819-a776-439d90410b32/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/ce325a04-5bc9-4819-a776-439d90410b32/search"},"page":{"printed_page":132,"pdf_page":145,"physical_index":145,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"be05f1b5a4416ca92bb3c806142484624c4bf3fbc5db61f5e8e6c61ad98bdf19"},"chapter":"Dynamics ofVirtual Work","content":"Platforms and the migrant labour that they employ, in this context, fulfil an important role for capitalism in furthering the material and structural violence that characterises the peripheries in most capitalist societies (Ness, 2023). Like a monument, arguing along the Lefebvre (2003), these platforms bring people close to each other and tend to create a controlled social fabric around themselves through standardisation and routinisation. In the context of the platform economy, algorithmic management has come to play a crucial role in this process producing dehumanised methods to measure work (a starting point for profit expansion), standardise it and bring in forms of invisiblised soft control (Woodcock, 2020). However, as the chapter shows, the attempts at standardisation often have heightened the crisis that these workers face with regard to their belongingness to the urban space. These issues have remained unaddressed because most governments in India, and globally, have adopted a very nuanced and pragmatic approach towards platforms (Lenaerts et al., 2018; Nair, 2023) in such a way that they have remained unable to address the basic issues that these workers face (Parwez & Ranjan, 2021; Nair, 2022). Under these circumstances, the mere promotion of these workers as employees only addresses a part of the problem because it does not change the capital-labour relationship within it (Katta et al., 2024). Marx (1843) had argued that in order to counter exploitation one needs to work one’s way through the various false imageries that capitalism produces.\n\nPlatforms in this context enable a distinction to arise between people working similar kinds of jobs.<sup>27</sup> In India, it becomes easier because the social construction of the bourgeoisie in India goes beyond mere economic considerations and rests upon other socio-cultural factors— such as caste, race and gender—that gets bolstered by the stagnancy faced by the marginalised populace of the country (Mukherjee & Mukherjee, 1988; Patnaik, 2016). The accumulation structure under capitalism today depends on a two-fold model which engages with the organisation of more productive production processes and a promotion of the extractive logic of capitalism (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2019). Platforms and their associated processes of management and control affect the general skill level and working conditions in the society, through which they become a part of the urban social reality affecting the entire society rather than only those who are directly affected by it (Huws, 2020). The analysis of society and its contradictions is a part of the analysis of human society’s struggle for the achievement of freedom (Dunayevskaya, 1958). The struggle for freedom of migrant workers cannot take place within a separate realm in itself but has to be analysed as part of the broader class struggle that ensues within the society. The definition of class however, in this context, needs to be broadened that does not remain restricted to the ‘industrial’ working class, but rather goes beyond the contours of narrow economic definitions.\n\n132\n\nS. D. ROY\n\n<sup>27</sup> Gig workers especially who work for physical stores or franchises which have their own delivery fleet such as Dominos and Pizza Hut. These workers are frequently accorded a contradictory status among delivery workers. This is because they are ascribed to a higher","previous_page":131,"next_page":133}