--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" 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" library_document_id: "ce325a04-5bc9-4819-a776-439d90410b32" source_sha256: "47c7c08da0933a56a20193e0938b4f864c4eee2c4d93e47abe99898e2ac4b485" pdf_physical_page_count: 270 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 120 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/ce325a04-5bc9-4819-a776-439d90410b32?start=120&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/ce325a04-5bc9-4819-a776-439d90410b32.md?start=120&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/ce325a04-5bc9-4819-a776-439d90410b32.md?start=110&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/ce325a04-5bc9-4819-a776-439d90410b32.md?start=130&limit=10" --- # Migrant Labour in the Gig Economy The Intersection of Migrant Labour, Platform Capitalism, and Resistance > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=120 | PRINTED_PAGE=107 The company does not discriminate, it is the local team leader and the other workers who do it. They sometimes intentionally make it difficult for us by creating blockages, sometimes they will just talk uselessly on the road, which delays the deliveries, or at times, they will just say that we have come here and are looting them and their land by earning more than them. Although I can attest for sure that we are earning the same amount, we have more expenses. Many migrant workers struggle extensively to make entry into the gig economy. Take for example, the issue of getting vehicles. While most delivery workers in general make deliveries on rented vehicles, most migrant workers struggle to get a vehicle because they often do not have local documents or do not have sufficient money. Even if some of them have vehicles at home, as some of them informed, it is too expensive to transport it to their ‘work-city’. However, such issues rarely get highlighted. The struggle between migrant workers and local workers on the point of employment is an old one, which goes back to the struggle between English and Irish workers during the times of Marx, and which is kept alive by the manipulation of ideological and popular discourses (Marx, 1870). The struggle between the two sections of the workforce mainly stems from the policies that always favour the developed regions’ bourgeoisie more than the underdeveloped regions (Wilson, 2017). To do this, contemporary capitalism has come to rely increasingly on technology to extend its sphere of socio-economic and cultural influence. Technology is an important part of contemporary society. However, technology cannot be viewed as having an autonomous agency in its own right because its usage and the effects of those uses depend upon the dominant dispensation in the society and the trajectory of historical progress (Harvey, 1978). The effects of science and technology under capitalism always remain restricted by the power that the ruling and powerful classes possess over the financially and socio-culturally deprived sections of the populace. The conditions of neoliberalism, characterised by a shrinking public sector and social welfare, bring forward a massive shift in social policy which constantly neglects the needs and demands of the marginalised (Brenner & Theodore, 2005; Harvey, 2003). Delivery workers, often coming from marginalised social backgrounds, remain excluded from the mainstream labour markets and protections, the effects of which get accelerated because the practices within the platform economy have wideranging effects promoting extreme forms of work organisation (Huws, 2016a). Within such extreme changes, the issues faced by migrant workers become important because the situations faced by migrant workers in the gig economy provide a window into the extent of exploitation that resides within the totality of the gig economy. As Altenried argues: 5 MIGRANT GIG WORKERS OF INDIA’S CONSUMERIST CITIES 107 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=121 | PRINTED_PAGE=108 Looking at the gig economy from the perspective of migrant labour also entails shifting the focus: From this perspective, low pay and precarity are nothing new or exclusive to digital platforms but have been the characterising conditions for migrant and racialized labour for centuries and the history of flexible and contingent labour are closely entwined with this history – and present – of mobile labour. Instead of addressing platforms only as innovative disruptors of standard employment, it becomes necessary to discuss how digital platforms are able to renew and reconfigure forms of contingent labour and how their important, new and specific digital qualities […] interact with stratified labour markets. Such a perspective allows a contextualised analysis of gig economy platforms in labour markets constituted and stratified by differential migration regimes including multiple vectors such as citizenship, language, visas, or work permits. (Altenried, 2024, p. 1115). In a highly competitive market-based society, the survival of capitalism requires an extensive production of profits which demands an extension of wage labour relationship (Smith, 1982). This entails within itself the production of space as a corollary of the capitalist production of nature itself which becomes evident within the various contemporary processes of gentrification (Smith, 2011). Gentrification has come to dictate the spatial choices that people make (Deb Roy, 2024a), which in turn drive the preferences for occupying particular spaces drives the residential and employment patterns in the society (Smith, 1982). These preferences in most hyper-urbanised spaces depend upon the labour power that gig workers perform, with coverage by platforms such as Swiggy and Uber becoming a key point for various kinds of extractive processes such as higher rents and more maintenance charges in the form of security and outsider-parking spaces in certain gated societies. Most of these factors are important parts of the discourse focused on smart and global cities focused on the creation of simultaneously territorial and global processes of spatial accumulation (Sassen, 2005). The data-driven mechanism adopted in such spaces allows the inclusion of both native and migrant workers within the platform economy (Barns, 2020; Van Doorn & Vijay, 2024). 108 S. D. ROY ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=122 | PRINTED_PAGE=109 The smart city discourse is a critical inspiration for the development of platforms, because it encourages the conceptual formation of humanity, as Galloway (2017) argues, as an urban species where data-driven structures are used to render urban spaces as more controllable and knowable. It has become an important part of the discourse focused on technologically mediated urban spaces that have come to dominate contemporary forms of neoliberal urbanism (Hlongwa, 2020). With the end of the Second World War, the usage of technology globally proliferated with an increasing number of economies moving towards various forms of capitalist development that depend on the usage of technological artefacts for improving the efficiency of the services provided (Srnicek, 2017). Technology and its implications for the society cannot be neutral or analysed in isolation from the broader socio-economic and political questions that remain relevant or functional in the society. Despite being massively unequal in terms of its socio-economic and geographical distribution, the labour market based on technology has grown in parallel with the expanding usage of technological and digital transformative practices in the society (Huws, 2020). Most of these technological developments take place within specific historical, social and geographic contexts which determine their short-term and long-term effects. Under global neoliberal capitalism, technology has become a tool at the hands of capital to further capitalist accumulation processes. A key role in this regard has been played by various service and commodity-provisioning platforms such as Zomato, Swiggy, Amazon, Flipkart, Urban Company, ChefKart and the like. The growth of platforms in India has occurred through a gradual dismantling of the traditional structures and massive disruptive mechanisms in the organisation of the means of production. In the context of digital platforms, the major global disruption was brought by the growth of Uber. Abílio (2017) has argued that the growth of Uber has resulted in a situation where the functioning within Uber had become the model for other platforms to follow as well, a major part of which was the standardisation of labouring processes and a constant suppression of the diversity that works within these platform-based gig work structures (Ticona & Mateescu, 2018). The standardisation of the services that they offer becomes critical because standardisation becomes a critical requirement for the creation of streamlined urban spaces most commonly represented by the bourgeoning fetish for smart cities. Standardisation becomes a process through which the accumulation of big data is accelerated which in turn produces an algorithmic governmentality in the society (Kitchin, 2017; Rouvroy et al., 2013). Algorithmic governmentality operates on the basis of standardisation and does not recognise the inequalities that exist subjectively within different working individuals such as the ability to communicate, or one’s acquaintance with local roads. The implications of these issues are commonly faced by migrant gig workers in cities, as two migrant workers explain: 5 MIGRANT GIG WORKERS OF INDIA’S CONSUMERIST CITIES 109 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=123 | PRINTED_PAGE=110 It is a 24 7 job with no holidays, unless you want to take it. But then nobody wants to take a holiday because once you do, you start getting lesser orders, and then the team leader also often makes you feel unwanted and will curse you with slangs. If you want to earn sufficiently, then you will have to work nights also. I get lot of new boys who come into the sector and say that they do not work nights. For them, I always say that they should not join only. Then there are issues concerning standardisation. We do not know the roads that well as a local worker, neither do we know the local language, so obviously we will need some more time to deliver. But neither the company nor the customer who are migrants themselves understand this. We are the most important parts of all these hi-tech smart cities. But we ourselves do not get any protection. We are not even considered to be workers. They say we are partners, what partners, we are just disposable entities to them. One goes, hundreds will be queuing up, who are all evaluated equally although the system knows that everybody comes from different social conditions. I come from a village and do not know English, but then some customers and even the team leader do not understand this issue. Speak in broken Hindi, I can understand but I know only a few words of English. Capitalism underlies, as Smith (2011) and Anderson (2020) argue, most of the processes related to social stratification and also desires to create a homogenised market for better profitability. While uneven development disrupts the homogenising logic of global capitalism (Prudham & Heynen, 2011), algorithmic management helps global capitalism to maintain its drive towards homogeneity that is a key part of capitalist expansion (Anderson, 2020). Standardisation allows platforms to make better inroads into urban everyday lives because it emphasises reliability, uniquity and in most cases, ubiquity (Marrone & Peterlongo, 2020; Van Doorn, 2019). The delivery workers fulfil a critical part of the urban infrastructure because they make it easier for the middle class to get access to commodities that make the urban spaces look enticing and promising to them (Banerjee, 2024). Platforms and the rapid growth that they have seen in recent times have changed the associated structures and dynamics of online ordering and servicing providing more convenience and avenues for expressing social privilege (Deb Roy, 2019). The eruption of dark kitchens and dark stores—created for facilitating last mile deliveries from parent restaurants and stores—16 has brought forward an entire ecosystem focused on catering to urban spaces possessing an upwardly mobile customer base (Huws, 2020). 110 S. D. ROY ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=124 | PRINTED_PAGE=111 The rise of algorithmic governmentality creates the ground for people familiar with technological usage to garner an increasing power in the society by controlling governmental mechanism and the state often aided by the private bodies. David Harvey (2005) argues that under neoliberalism, such an enmeshment of the State and the market becomes natural and often necessary with the former aiding the latter; and India was no exception to this general hypothesis (Bhambhri, 2016; Patnaik, 2007). The middle class, amidst these socio-political conditions, becomes one of the greatest assets of the market-based forces because Being middle class in India is related to the ability to consume certain cultural and material commodities in a particular way that exhibits the cultural and social capital that an individual possesses to become a part of ‘the new middleclass modernity in urban India’ (Ganguly-Scrase, 2022, p. 98). For the middle class, the experience that the platforms provide is an important part of their urban lifestyles, as a middle-class IT worker from Bengaluru states: These platforms have made life so much easier for many like me. Threefour years ago, it was unthinkable that you could get something within ten fifteen minutes, but today it is so easy. I click and it is there. It is almost like magic. I feel like a king, sometimes. 5 MIGRANT GIG WORKERS OF INDIA’S CONSUMERIST CITIES 111 16 See Hayward, T. (2019). “Dark kitchens” spell trouble for the restaurant trade. Financial Times, March 29, https://www.ft.com/content/755ddc1c-50bc-11e9-8f44-fe4 a86c48b33 [Accessed 04.07.2024]. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=125 | PRINTED_PAGE=112 Such conditions (and expectations) created by the platforms have had an important effect on the labour and employment relations (Zukerfeld, 2022), especially because of the destabilising effects that they have on the formal structures of employment (Huws et al., 2018). The delivery workers fulfil an essential requirement for the domination of the commodity form. Commodities, under capitalism, as Marx (1867/1976) had pointed out, have become the axis within which the society structures itself.17 Commodities and the ability to consume become the most important part of the middle class ontology that technologically mediated urban spaces create and propagate in the society (Deb Roy, 2021). For most of the middle class, the delivery workers thus play a critical role in providing a sense of belongingness within the urban space because belongingness within the urban space today gets constituted not only through one’s ability to possess commodities but also through the processes in which one gets access to the commodities. This produces the ideal circumstances for the schema of expanded reproduction that contributes to the growth of capital accumulation in the society (Marx, 1885/1992, 1973/1993). Logged labour, comprising labour processes where individual skills are broken down into distinct and separate smaller tasks (or units of work), plays a key role in this process of deskilling (Huws, 2016a). One migrant worker from Assam, who was previously an agricultural worker, and now works as an Amazon delivery worker stated: I used to work in my family’s field. Came here to make a life and also thought that with so much technology, I will also get some work after leaning some skill, but after coming here I have realised that things are not so simple. I have been working as a delivery worker only, and now even have forgotten field work. It will take me months to readjust myself. Could not learn any new skills also. I also have a 10.000 rupees debt which I am finding difficult to repay. Deskilling under capitalism has been an important part of the network of capitalist exploitation. It has been an instrumental force in the creation of seamless service mechanisms put forward by the platforms.18 Platforms use a diverse range of tactics to encourage a gradual deskilling of the workforce, whereby a greater task is divided into a multitude of smaller tasks which makes it difficult for workers to gain a control over the larger labour process (Huws, 2020). The growth of network enterprises and platforms that build on networks—both technological and human—have come to dominate the informational phase of capitalism, that characterises the modern phase of capitalism (Castells, 1996). Gig workers in this context provide services to a growing consumer base of informational goods as well as act as mediators of the service delivery systems (Zukerfeld, 2022). These gig workers have increasingly begun to be composed of migrant workers who have been constantly put under the growing financial and social duress that have come to characterise rural India. Rural-to-urban migration has been a key feature of capitalist development since the early 1990s in India. The growth of such migration has mostly rested on the growth of distress migration that has followed the neoliberal economic policies since the late 1980s and more so, since its formal institutionalisation in 1991. 112 S. D. ROY 17 Marx had argued that any commodity is ‘[an] external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference. Nor does it matter here how the thing satisfies man’s needs, whether directly as a means of subsistence, i.e. an object of consumption, or indirectly as a means of production’ (Marx 1867/1976, p. 125). ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=126 | PRINTED_PAGE=113 These issues again reiterate the point that the agrarian question in India is a critical part of the development of the capitalism in India because of the disproportionate land holdings within Indian agrarian capitalism (Patnaik, 1986). The present characteristics of capitalism in India, including platform capitalism, draw its most important qualities from the historical trajectory of capitalist development in India determined by colonial exploitation (Bagchi, 1988; Blaut, 1989) which has facilitated a process of capitalist development based on the transplantation of western capitalist modes of production in India and not in accordance with the specific localised contradictions that capital faces in India (Maitra, 1989). Through a constant reduction of welfare schemes, and a growing domination of the market, successive Indian governments have created a state of primitive exploitation for the people in India’s hinterlands. The introduction of new technology—the fetish with which had begun most prominently during Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure as the Indian Prime Minister— 19 affected the ways in which individuals analysed their possibilities of upward or downward by changing the overall income distribution and the general cost of labour in the society (Harriss-White, 2011) which always has an effect on the socially necessary labour time the key element in the exploitation of labour power and in the social construction of norms surrounding the working day (Marx, 1867/1976). 5 MIGRANT GIG WORKERS OF INDIA’S CONSUMERIST CITIES 113 18 For example, one of the major reasons for the success of Amazon is its focus on micro-tasking, whereby a very elaborate and detailed division of labor exists between the technical workers, the warehouse workers and the delivery workers, which makes the process faster and more seamless. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=127 | PRINTED_PAGE=114 The growth of technological interventions in the workplaces, most of which are employed to increase the productivity of the workers either through co-operation or coercion under contemporary capitalism cannot be negated, especially after the technological dependence rendered mainstream by the Covid-19 pandemic (Deb Roy, 2024b). With Covid-19, the platforms received a tremendous boost within the country’s general psyche, such that many of them—such as Zomato, Swiggy and Amazon— have come to be recognised as bearers of essential commodities, which have furthered their popularity and profitability in the society. Under such circumstances, most of these platforms have come to enjoy a growing profitability, which can be seen in the cases of many of these platformbased companies now actively competing with brick-and-mortar retail giants. Naturally, such platform-based employment to many workers today reflects the possibility of a vertical social mobility. However, with decreasing wages and increased social insecurities, most of these possibilities have relinquished their practical applicability for most migrant gig workers (Katta et al., 2024; Nair, 2022). The International Labour Organisation (n.d.) had noted that decent work has four main pillars: job creation, working rights, social protection and social dialogue.20 The gig workers in India, as many studies show, continue to remain bereft of all these rights. The introduction of technology often does not affect the wages of the workers lower down the hierarchy in a positive manner (Lee & Clarke, 2019). This is because despite technological innovations often being heralded as being autonomous, they remain contingent upon the ruling dispensation in the society which in the case of India has almost always been in favour of a ruling class that focuses on economic nationalism (Ram, 1975; Marx, 1867/1976). Such a characterisation often does not acknowledge the importance that the effects of technological changes bring in as long as those changes increase the overall economic returns enjoyed by the country. 114 S. D. ROY 19 Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure as Prime Minister was instrumental for the growth of technology-based services in India. For more details see https://www.indiatoday. in/india/story/5-ways-how-rajiv-gandhi-changed-india-forever-1318979-2018-08-20 [Accessed 04.07.2024]. 20 See ILO (n.d.). Decent work, Geneva: International Labour Organization. Geneva: International Labour Organisation. Available at: https://www.ilo.org/topics/decent-work [Accessed 04.07.2024]. ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=128 | PRINTED_PAGE=115 3 Algorithmic Management and Migrant Workers Migrants have become an important part of the socio-economic and political fabric of the country, but without much reliable data regarding its economic and spatial distribution. Migration of marginalised populace in India mainly occurs because of conditions of agrarian crisis, a growing debt crisis and a change in the economic relations in rural (or broadly non-urban) India (Gopalakrishnan & Sreenivasa, 2009; Gopalakrishnan et al., 2018). Most of them work for lower wages and remain unprotected by most labour and social welfare schemes and programmes run by the government. Under global capitalism, migration has become central to the process of capitalist accumulation and exploitation changing the social relations and relationships of production therein (Arnold, 2012). It has become one of the tools by which capitalism ensures a certain biopolitical control over the people (Tazzioli, 2020). In India, migration is often juxtaposed with failed developmental projects, or with failed policies of the state during times of crisis. Writing about the exceptionality of the Indian scenario, historian Chinmay Tumbe writes: What makes the Indian case unique is the sheer persistence and magnitude of [the phenomenon of migration], one that has lasted for well over a century now. It is also a phenomenon that affects regions cover- ing at least 20 per cent of the Indian population, currently comprising over 200 million people. I call it the ‘Great Indian Migration Wave’, and it ranks among the largest and longest migration streams for work in documented history. It led to the rise of cities like Kolkata and Mumbai in India and Yangon and Dubai abroad. (Tumbe, 2018, pp. 39–40). Platformisation on a global level allows for an assetisation of migrant labour and also helps platforms garner more venture capital, a critical part of their pricing policy (Surie, 2020; Van Doorn & Vijay, 2024). The algorithmic management of workers by the platforms is a part and parcel of the platformisation of everyday life that accompanies the growth of digital platforms. Algorithmic management-based processes are the most important aspect of the domination that platforms have come to inflict on the urban spaces. These strategies have enabled many platforms to compensate the lack of fixed labour with footloose labour21 whereby the hypermobility of some workers has been used to replace those who are immobilised due to alterations within the technical division of labour under capitalism (Huws, 2006, 2020). For migrant workers, the question of livelihoods amidst these circumstances gets entwined with a constant devaluation of their self-esteem—which has a deteriorating effect on their performance (Baumeister et al., 2003)—which also affect the workers’ job satisfaction and organisational commitments (Watson et al., 2021). 5 MIGRANT GIG WORKERS OF INDIA’S CONSUMERIST CITIES 115 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=129 | PRINTED_PAGE=116 The rapid digitalisation of the society has enabled the development of a wide range of platforms which have served the cause of the growing service class and new middle class providing them with more comfort and convenience. Most of them come from the middle classes because the middle classes are more capable of taking benefits of the opportunities that neoliberalism provides (Jha & Pankaj, 2021). The growth of the service sector has been a crucial factor in the development of the Indian middle class (Dickey, 2016; Fernandes, 2006), which has been an instrumental force in the creation of the social circumstances necessary for the decline of the welfare state, which was in synchronisation with the western bourgeois values, that the middle class adhered to in urban India (Chakrabarti, 2010; Chattopadhyay, 2022). The development of the middle class in India was characterised by its growing support for market-driven policies replacing the welfare state which has led to a massive growth of a new kind of middle class. Jha and Pushpendra note: The post-Liberalisation period [witnessed] the highest rise in the middle segment of the new middle-class households … mainly from the professional and managerial white-collar job holders placed at the mid-level salary brackets, or [from] the business class, have considerable income, mostly [having] more than one earner, are conscious consumerists, and spend a part of their money on maintaining a lifestyle … informed and influenced by advertisements and images of the glitterati (Jha & Pushpendra, 2022, p. 4). 116 S. D. ROY 21 Footloose labor here refers to those workers who remain unprotected from mainstream labor laws and reforms (such as sick leave, job security, and various forms of social security) and are highly likely to be migrants and/or from marginalized communities (Huws, 2006). 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/ce325a04-5bc9-4819-a776-439d90410b32.md?start=130&limit=10)