Migrant Labour in the Gig Economy The Intersection of Migrant Labour, Platform Capitalism, and Resistance

Digital platforms have played a critical role in the maintenance of the ‘images of the glitterati’ not only because of the convenience that they offer, but also because of the sense of belongingness and satisfaction that they invoke among the customers often becoming a part of their idea of citizenship itself. They have become a critical part of urban kinship networks and have been important parts of the urban development-based social imagination that the middle class prides itself in. Two customers of platforms, one from Bengaluru and one from Hyderabad, stated:

They have helped so much in allowing me to be a part of family functions and celebrations. Some years ago, it was a very difficult job to get something to someone’s birthday or a celebration, but these days, you just need a [credit] card, and you can get something. The greatest thing is that you can know exactly when and how it will be delivered.

Without these apps, it is impossible to live these days. The neighbourhood shops have shut down, and all across you only have malls which often take a lot of time to get to. Moreover, price is also an issue. The ones that they sell on those apps are cheaper and you do not have to go out also.

That pricing, reliability and convenience are an important of these platforms’ positioning in the society has been noted by scholars such as Huws (2016a, 2016b) and then Surie (2020) in the Indian context. These factors help to generate a sense of belongingness for middle-class consumer and contribute to the development of a middle-class consumer base for the platforms in urban spaces (Banerjee, 2024). Such a sense of belongingness however is absent in the case of the workers who make these experiences possible, and who suffer because of the algorithmic management techniques that are used by the platforms. These kinds of management strategies contribute to a gradual dehumanisation of the workers and make them a part of the production process creating impoverishment and converting the individual worker ‘into a mere cog in the machine’ (Dunayevskaya, 1958, p. 94).

Algorithmic management processes dictating online platform-based employment structures and digitally mediated jobs have a great effect on the everyday lives of people creating distinct consumer behavioural models that are designed to further capitalist power and its influence in shaping social reality (Chen, 2018; Sun, 2019). These algorithmic management processes make the workers’ subjectivity a redundant element within the labour process—much like typical industrial capitalism—where the objective idea of them being ‘delivery partners’ dominates over their subjective selves within which many of them consider themselves to be employees of the company that they work for. For migrant gig workers, algorithmic management comes to mean an increase in the extent of alienation that they face. The introduction of technology alters the production mechanisms and creates the conditions under which new and low-skilled workers suffer considerably, especially if they need to provide for other facilities such as housing and health (Lee & Clarke, 2019). Such circumstances compel many gig workers to work multiple jobs. Such kind of gig workers who simultaneously work different kinds of jobs for different platforms are usually referred to as being platform amphibians or slashers (Ichino, 2018).

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Working as platform amphibians becomes an attractive terrain of gig employment for migrants because most of them come to cities with the hope of increasing their familial income. These workers do not only earn for themselves but rather have to earn sufficiently enough to provide for their lives in the cities, as well as provide for the lives of their families back in their native places. Two migrant workers, Raman from West Bengal and Ashraf from rural Bihar²² who now work in Delhi and Bengaluru, respectively, narrate:

The amount of money that I get on Swiggy—I work mainly on Swiggy only—is not sufficient at all. It rarely covers the expenses. Now I also work on Urban Company as an electrician. It is a difficult life. Sometimes, I feel that staying back in Bihar would have been better. These fancy roads were not there, but at least food and other sustenance goods was there in plenty.

I have been working on Dunzo for more than 2 years now, but I have not yet received more than 15.000 rupees in a month. When I came here, I thought I would send money home, but now I am finding it difficult to even survive myself. Returning home is also not an option because there are no avenues for employment there. I would have to work maybe as a daily wage worker. Here at least I have some dignity.

A key aspect that the worker has highlighted above is the lack of developmental initiative present in the country’s poorer regions. The growing uneven development in the country, with the country’s hinterlands— the major source of migrant gig workers—suffering the most due to the lack of developmental initiatives and geopolitical backwardness (Deb Roy, 2024c). This was accompanied in India in the early 1990s with a constant decrease in the funds allocated to programmes which used to directly benefit the poor and the marginalised, along with reduced public expenditure, rural development funds and employment generation programmes. Following this, the state in India promoted the formation of ‘primitive accumulation in an anticipatory sense as compared to actual dispossession’ (Adnan, 2014, p. 32). Primitive accumulation in India has produced the basis for the transition of the agrarian economy to a neoliberal one, and as such has decimated the agrarian relations of production in the country resulting in a growing reserve army of labour for capital in the urban spaces to exploit (Gopalakrishnan, 2009). The growth of gig work through these methods reflects the constant relevance of primitive accumulation as an important part of capitalist exploitation even today. The capitalist social structure demands that the workers are completely separated from all forms of property which makes them completely subservient to the means to which they can realise their labour. Capitalism thrives by actively reinforcing this distinction, and ‘… the so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as primitive, because it forms the prehistoric stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding with it’ (Godelier, 1967, p. 99). However, for the migrant platform-based gig workers, this process of separation works within both the material and within the digital ecosystem. Materially, they remain segregated from the products of their labour like all other workers, but they also get ideologically exploited because of the mental stigmatisation that they face. One worker from the north-east recounts:

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²² Names changed due to privacy concerns.

I have been here for around three years now, but in these three years, very few people have actually bothered to talk to me. I understand when people from local places do not talk. But a few days ago, I had been to an office to deliver food to a person with a Manipuri surname, I was so happy so I greeted him with a big smile, but the person just shrugged me off. It felt humiliating, he even did not speak in Manipuri.

A key role, as the worker above has highlighted, has been brought about by the behaviour that is meted out to them. Though, as the worker above highlights, they get exploited by almost everybody, getting exploited by somebody who share their social and geographical roots with them becomes more exploitative because that interferes with their notions of authenticity and belongingness. The treatment meted out to them negatively affects their self-esteem and self-worth that determines the extent to which they feel positively about the kind of work that they do and the circumstances under which they work (Stets & Burke, 2014). The algorithmic governmentality, however, that comes with the proliferation of platforms in any society and which emerges as an efficient device for the commodification of social relationships (Huws, 2014), contributes to the domination of money as a community-building element that Marx (1973/1993) had spoken about.

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The circumstances of crisis that exist within all capitalist economies play an important role in the creation of the platform amphibians, more so in the case of migrant workers because of them having to accommodate themselves with the effects of uneven development that produces a disproportionate web of power relations and wealth around them (Harvey, 2003). Migrant workers are more likely to work as platform amphibians because of the increasing need of money that characterises their lives. For these workers, innovations in the digital field characterised by platforms have exploited the conditions created out of the domination that commodities exercise over the material selves of human beings. They have hastened the promotion of money as a factor of community-building processes as Marx (1973/1993) had argued to be the case under capitalism, which is evident in the experiences that many migrant gig workers have had when they visit customers who are from their native places. The major transformation which has come is the intense amount of mechanisation of labour through automation that has come to dominate the labour process, which has created a social basis for the production of alienation at a mass scale (Fuchs, 2018). This is because, as Dunayevskaya (1958) argued, the more mechanised the labour process becomes, the less value an individual’s labour power generates which then results in an individual worker having to work longer hours to earn equivalent wages. This has great impacts on the workers themselves that interfere with not only their objective situation but also results in a deterioration of the subjective aspects of their identities. Arun, a migrant worker from Delhi coming from Bihar,²³ states:

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²³ Name changed due to privacy concerns.

I work for around 10–12 hours every day, during daytime as a security worker and then as a delivery person at night for Swiggy and then Dunzo. Swiggy gets more late night deliveries, that is why I selected it. Earlier I was like okay, the security work pays me enough, but then they started saying that some robots are coming up, so I started searching for an alternative job. With all these new machines in security, the need of security workers is also coming down. Someday, we will become obsolete.

Technology does not operate within a vacuum. The abundance and domination of technology signals the ushering in of an era of ‘extreme supply’ where machines become capable of undertaking both cognitive and manual responsibilities of the production process (Bastani, 2019). This gives rise to tendencies that celebrate the ushering in of algorithmic management-based techniques which demand that migrants and locales are treated akin to each other while leaving behind the internal contradictions existing between the people belonging to these categories. Getting a job becomes important for migrants because that creates the avenues for a better acquaintance with the space that they occupy (Abkhezr & McMahon, 2022). The contemporary society is a society where technological apparatuses and their associated networks dominate a significant part of human lives. Migrant gig workers in India continue to suffer from the effects of the dialectical relationship that exists between territorial logic and the logic of capitalist profit expansion (Harvey, 2003, 2014). Gig work does not emerge out of a vacuum but rather gains prominence because of the structural transformation that occurs within markets going through neoliberalisation which encourages individualisation, structural violence and a growing financialisation of human selves. The growth of neoliberalism has affected the very core of capitalism with a greater remodulation of productive and accumulation strategies emphasising market relations and mechanisation (Giroux, 2014; Leonardi & Pirina, 2020). Under such circumstances, the question of belongingness becomes an important part of the urban ontology that migrant workers.

4 Migrant Belongingness and Deli_very Work in Urban India

The question of migration in India is intimately related to other aspects of social stratification such as caste and race (Gopalakrishnan et al., 2018). The growth of migrant workers in gig work despite the worsening conditions of work is because gig work provides these workers with an easier access to employment, something which many of them remain in desperate need of (Katta et al., 2024). Coupled with this, the focus on standardisation reinforces Marx’s (1867/1976) proposition that under capitalism, the relationship between human beings is degraded to a relationship between commodities completely dehumanising the worker in the process, as has been shown in the two preceding sections. The commodity form constitutes the basic fulcrum around which the capitalist society is constructed. Every major restructuring that capitalism has attempted to institutionalise in the society has revolved around the potential benefits that it can provide to the domination and circulation of the commodity form in the society. These modes of restructuring have benefitted from the growth of technological interventions because technological developments have come to replace the erstwhile dominance of service-based models and have become major drivers of economic growth (Zukin, 1987).

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Cities, as Van Doorn (2019) and then Marrone and Peterlongo (2020) have argued, are extremely important for platform capitalism because cities provide platforms with an ideal base for customers and remain in a mutually dependent symbiotic relationship with each other. Both platforms and cities get mutual benefits from each other in the form of increased customer base and more avenues for profit accumulation. Because of such interconnections between platforms and cities, urban spaces have begun to be characterised by a growing predominance of data-driven structures that have been shaping urban infrastructures (Barns, 2020). It is popularly assumed that gig workers have control over the conditions of their work, but it is rarely emphasised that the control that they have is only tokenistic in nature. They remain, as Wu et al. (2019) and Rachmawati et al. (2021) argue, far from independent and cannot determine the behaviour and work conditions as these are mostly controlled by the platforms.

The integration of the digital ecosystem with the physical ‘brick-andmortar’ framework of profit accumulation is essential because digital capitalism today, co-exists with ‘finance capitalism, hyper-industrial capitalism, crisis capitalism, authoritarian capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, mobility capitalism, global capitalism, etc.’ (Fuchs, 2019, p. 3). Markets have become, in the contemporary digital age, omnipresent in human lives. They have become deregulated and globalised (Castells, 1996; Sassen, 1999), often at the expense of public services (Harvey, 2014) which have caused the emergence of alienation on a mass scale (Fuchs,

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2018). The creation of such a mass-scale alienation has resulted in a change within the general consciousness of the society, which results in many migrant gig workers suffering from a lack of authenticity within their subjective selves in the urban spaces due to the lack of adequate positive social referencing points (Stets & Burke, 2014). Such feelings of alienated existence are bolstered by the fact that most contemporary social structures are characterised by a blatant rejection of equality and humane sentiments. Such rejection has been rendered mainstream by the way technology has been used under capitalism. Today, the threat comes from the widespread usage of technological innovations, such as artificial intelligence, neuroscience and information theory, which have reduced the social value attached to a human being (Mason, 2019).

The growth of data-driven structures in the everyday urban lives changes the power relations existing in the society and works in favour of routinising and standardising labouring processes (Ettlinger, 2017) rather than making them more creative (Huws, 2006). This routinisation has a distinct effect on the identity that a worker embraces within oneself. Identity, as Stets and Burke (2014) argue, is a set of meanings that contribute to the definition that an individual possesses of oneself with regard to the social, cultural, political and economic contradictions that one faces in one’s everyday life. The identities of migrant workers become a part of the production and consumption networks that constitute, as Tabb (2010) argues, the totality of capital in the society creating the grounds for the expanded reproduction of capital. Social and biological attributes play an important role in ascertaining the role that a working individual can play in the process. Any kind of technology takes shape in the context in which it is developed, both socio-culturally and economically (Mackenzie & Wacjman, 1999). The kind of impact that technological innovations have over the overall shaping of an individual or a community can be immense. The middle-class consumption-based citizenship that has been critical to the growth of neoliberalism in the country, has benefited from the growth of platforms and digital infrastructure because they have brought forward a sense of heightened productivity where they are expected to be productive throughout the duration of their everyday lives (Gregg, 2011). The consumer establishes the basic fulcrum around which the new middle class is created as a universal entity. Neoliberalism attacks the fundamental principles and operating mechanisms in various social contexts attempting to implement its own homogenous value structure aimed at the creation of the perfect consumer-citizen who represents and practices market values more than traditional social or communitarian social values.

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Technological innovations have been instrumental in bringing in many changes within the everyday lives of the people. They have reduced the time that people usually used to spend outdoors, as well as have become instrumental forces in normalising ways of lives that counter the requirement of communitarian bonds and social solidarity. While a utopian view of technology ushers in a sense of gradual opening up of the society in a manner which gives rise to less gatekeeping and more democratic management, a dystopian view argues that technology causes the creation of a more social and cultural inequalities (Leonardi & Pirina, 2020). Technology acts in accordance with the dominant social ideology in place, as Marx (1867/1976) had argued, and does not act as an autonomous institution enabling historical transformation, but rather works in accordance with the broader issues surrounding labouring processes and work organisations. A simplistic understanding of technology can point one towards concluding that they help individuals in gaining a better control of their lives. Some technological innovations help in routinising and regularising certain aspects of individual human lives by interfering with the nature and content of human interactions. Within urban spaces, these processes undergo further modifications because of the existent capitalist valorisation processes, often at the disposal of the upper echelons of the society.

Cities, as Robert Park notes, are the human being’s most successful attempt at remaking the world in the image of the actually living individual’s thoughts and desires. However, ‘if the city is the world which [the individual] created, it is the world in which [the individual] is henceforth condemned to live’ (Park, 1967, p. 3). In other words, cities reflect the inhabitants and users therein as ‘what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from … what kind of people we want to be’ (Harvey, 2012, p. 4). Everyday life in any city is characterised by a certain mundanity, which often becomes the reason of being overlooked by academics interested only in the spectacular nature of an event or a process (Debord, 1961, 1968). This mundanity of everyday life retains itself—albeit often modifying itself—amidst the waves of migration. Most urban centres today realise that migration, both national and international, is a key aspect of their social fabric and developmental trajectory (Buhr, 2017). Belongingness is an important part of developing a sense of having a right to the city because it provides individuals with a consciousness that allows them to be active subjects within the processes that they are a part of (MacDonald, 2008). Thus, it also becomes critically important for capitalism to restrict the extent of belongingness that migrant workers possess because it caters to a state of psychological domination and subordination, which constitutes an important role in the process of establishing a state of subsumption in the society. In other words, economic exploitation fulfils only a part of the agenda that capitalism possesses, which only become complete with the complete domination over the human essence of the workers. It becomes easier for capitalism to do that in the case of migrant workers because migrant workers already remain under tremendous pressures of social stigmatisation and structural violence. This becomes an essential part of their everyday lives creating conditions of a ‘bad state of social being where they are seen akin to machines’ (Migrant Gig Worker from Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, June 2022).

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Gig workers are neglected in terms of their job stability and security and are vulnerable to lower customer ratings. Migrant gig workers become a part of neoliberal governmentality whereby they are inculcated within a neoliberal career developmental framework which prefers flexible work rather than secured jobs as they promote leaner systems of production and circulation (Abkhezr & McMahon, 2022; De Neve et al., 2023). The entrenchment of migrant workers within such modes affects their everyday life which becomes constituted by a growing precarity and social insecurity. Everyday life, as Lefebvre (2002, p. 41) had defined is the omnipotent reality within human existence such that ‘we are inside it and outside it. No so-called elevated activity can be reduced to it, nor can it be separated from it’. Under capitalism, the everyday life comes to be defined by the production and consumption of commodities that create a consumer-oriented citizenship in the society, whereby the ability to consume becomes the basis of manifesting one’s belongingness, both legally and socio-culturally. Any capitalist socio-economic structure is based on the production of commodities through structures and ideologies which convert everything, including emotions, into tradeable commodities (Marx, 1867/1976; Illouz, 2007). The algorithmic management which is used to control the delivery workers, works through surveillance and monitoring and often attempts to dehumanise these decisions concerning their lives and working conditions that workers have to take (Huws et al., 2019).

The satisfaction that is generated with a quick and efficient delivery becomes an important dimension of the middle-class consciousness surrounding the urban spaces that they come to inhabit. The growth of capitalism has resulted in a general commodification of the society, where entities which had been previously categorised as essential entities have begun to be exploited as profitable entities, like all other commodities. During Covid-19, the profits of these platforms exceeded all limits with many of these platforms deemed essential services and earning huge profits while leaving the workers completely bereft of social and job security.²⁴ Under these circumstances, the belongingness to the urban spaces for migrant gig workers has suffered tremendously because the boundaries between their working day and workplaces have eroded significantly (Risi & Pronzato, 2021) constituting a fractured everyday experience for most of these workers (Huws, 2006). The social existence of these workers gets reduced to the experiences that they bring to the middle class, as one delivery worker from Assam who has been working as a delivery worker for more than five years in Bengaluru explains:

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I have got tons of Assamese people while doing this work, but they never speak to me properly. They only see me as a delivery person, nothing more. They see me as a commodity, something which they have ordered on their phones.

One of the main reasons for this transformation of human beings into dehumanised commodities is the constant fetishisation of interactions that a human being has with technology which results in many customers of platform-based services seeing the workers as nothing different from the platforms’ user interface (Deb Roy, 2019). This results in a massive dehumanisation of the workers whereby the system completely strips them off their labour and their humanity (Anderson, 2017). This results in the creation of a massively heightened form of hyper-dehumanisation and primitive accumulation (Marx, 1844, 1867/1976).

Primitive accumulation in India has produced the basis for the transition of the agrarian economy to a neoliberal one, and as such has decimated the agrarian relations of production resulting in a growing reserve army of labour for capital in the urban spaces to exploit (Gopalakrishnan, 2009). The creation of such a workforce makes it possible for capitalism to keep the general wages depressed that contribute a growing social poverty in the society. Migrant workers help capitalists in keeping the wages low and gaining a competitive edge over their competitors (Marx, 1894/1981). This helps them in extracting a greater amount of surplus labour and surplus value from the workers, which in turn, plays a critical role in the generation of profits for platforms. Platform-based capitalist processes in the contemporary society thus, behave akin to most components of global finance capital where migrant workers are treated as being disposable parts of the workforce (Ness, 2023).

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²⁴ See Nandi, S. (2020). Covid-19: Uber to offer cabs for essential services. Mint, April 05, https://www.livemint.com/news/india/covid-19-uber-to-offer-cabs-foressential-services-11586077100965.html. Also see Mawii, Z., Rathi, A., & Tandon, A. (2020). From Health and Harassment to Income Security and Loans, India’s Gig Workers Need Support. The Wire, April 29, https://thewire.in/business/covid-19-lockdown-del ivery-gig-workers [Accessed 04.07.2024].