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

For Marx, the industrial revolution provided the material context that the human society needed to strive towards the achievement of freedom (Dunayevskaya, 1958). This is because the industrial revolution produced the basic structure for the formation of class structures in the society by creating a massive wealth inequity and a destruction of pre-capitalist social structures (Marx, 1867/1976). With the industrial revolution, the working class had been exposed to a variety of different issues such as the housing crisis and the crisis of a dignified way of life, as Engels (1845, 1872) had elaborated upon. In India, the workforce—as has already been stated—comprises of more than 90 per cent of informal workers (Sengupta, 2008), who suffer from numerous issues concerning decent work and social security. In most cases, these workers live under conditions where they do not have adequate land space, dwelling area, and are constantly tormented by the structural violence that creates ‘the crisis of living’ (Desai, 1991, p. 175, own emphasis), which negatively affects the extent of urban belongingness that migrants possess. Urban belongingness is a critical part of the realisation of the full potential possessed by the inhabitants of an urban society. Migrants usually are characterised by a sense of alienness within the spaces that they come to inhabit, more so if they come from marginalised social backgrounds. People from marginalised social backgrounds are often looked down upon as being outsiders within the spaces that they come to serve. This is not only done by their employers—the platforms in this instance—or the customer, but also by other workers themselves, as two migrant workers explain in detail, one from Bengaluru and the other from Hyderabad, respectively. The first worker, Iqbal comes from Bihar and has been in Bengaluru for around a year while the second worker, Ashish²⁵ had come to Hyderabad to work as a security guard from West Bengal five years ago (in 2017) but has since Covid-19 unable to find a salary-paying job. They argue:

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The native workers rarely treat us as equal. Sometimes, they also threaten us that they will beat us. These are all very difficult circumstances under which we have to work in. In most cases, it is fine financially, there is no difference between payments and all. But when it comes to job satisfaction, the native local workers are more satisfied than us. We have to work long hours, pay rents and all, and it is very difficult with this income.

The team leader in the area speaks in the local language, now although he is also a gig worker like I am, there is an issue of linguistic efficiency. He sees me just as a migrant and says that I should go home and not come here to irritate them. They should inform the company if they do not want migrants, why harass us?

The migrant workers’ narration about a struggle between local and migrant workers leads one back to the critical role that Marx (1870) had designated to capitalism, which was to create a rift between local and migrants to suit its own benefits. Marx (1870) had argued that the differences between local and migrant workers are kept alive by capitalist forces to keep the workers segregated among themselves, which dampens their potential to rebel against the system. Migrant workers are often used by capitalism to create a deteriorated standard of living for local workers which enable them to keep the general level of wages low, increase competition and heighten dehumanisation.

Crisis in the lives of the workers has both objective and subjective aspects. The exploitation of migrant gig workers within urban spaces is a manifestation of the ways in which neoliberalism constrains the employment avenues available for the poorest of the poor and produces the requisite conditions of desperation that capital requires to bring in further control in the society. Their subjective experiences make them form their class identity mainly through a combination of their objective financial positioning and their subjective self-identification measures. Such a state of subsumption makes them unable to possess a right to the urban spaces that they occupy. David Harvey noted that the right to the city is a right that allows people to change the urban environment. The right to the city is about negating the process in which individuals lose the connection to the urban space which produces a notion of being lost without a community, which results in individuals ‘[recognising] their areas less clearly, evaluate them less highly, and become less attached to them’ (Hunter, 1974, p. 173).

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²⁵ Names changed due to privacy concerns.

A sense of ontological security can only be realised realistically if the immigrants are granted the right to the city which effectively means having the ability and potential to ‘change it after [one’s] heart’s desire’ and not merely a right to public services and access to resources (Harvey, 2008, p. 23). Cities are not created out of thin air but are rather manifestations of the social fabric including the ‘lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values’ which exists amidst the people who design and live in the city (Harvey, 2008, p. 23). A critical role in this regard in India is played by the middle classes who have been one of the most important actors in the construction of a favourable public perception surrounding the neoliberal restructuring of India (Fernandes, 2006). The growth of the middle class has coincided with the faster growth of inequality, and as such has made the positionality that the middle class enjoys in the society highly complicated. The idea of positionality has come to occupy an important position within contemporary social analysis, because it has enabled individuals to locate themselves in relation to others using ideas such as social location and the social identity that they possess (Washington, 2019). These factors play a critical role in the generation of a social consensus around exclusion, as Iqbal mentions:

First I am a Muslim. Sometimes, people will not let me enter their homes, or apartments. It is difficult to hide also because most of these spaces have open book name policy where all names of entrants are written, and they check your AADHAR card as well and your mobile phone with the code for delivery. There is a wide difference between me on the road and me delivering. While riding, I am a delivery person, while delivering, I am a Muslim worker.

Gig workers like Iqbal are frequently barred from using washrooms, lifts and public spaces within enclosed spaces (Kain, 2024).²⁶ Bhalerao and Kain have argued that a key reason behind such a treatment meted out to the delivery workers is the notion of purity that has continued to remain functional in the Indian society under neoliberal capitalism. Various factors—in addition to class positions—affect one’s positioning in the society while also affecting how one gets affected by the state of crisis under capitalism. Marx (1894/1981) had argued that a crisis under capitalism does not get constituted out of a lack of capital but rather often by the existence of too much capital produced by the overproduction of capital. Under capitalism, digital inequalities become explicitly manifested when larger capitalistically organised technological infrastructures come to shape the direction and ideological fabric of science and technology in the society (Risi & Pronzato, 2021). Under contemporary capitalism, technology has frequently been used to routinise certain experiences in such a way that those routines create avenues for profit maximisation and platform-based delivery work is a part of it.

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²⁶ Also see Bhalerao, M. (2021). The ‘Digesting’ Discrimination Within The Gig Economy. Feminism in India, October, 06, https://feminisminindia.com/2021/10/06/ the-digesting-discrimination-within-the-gig-economy/ [Accessing 04.07.2024].

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.

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5 Conclusion

Karl Marx (1852) had noted that with every epoch of historical progress there arises newer modes of oppression and exploitation. For the workers’ movement, it is of critical importance that it takes cognisance of these changes so as to be able to analyse the actual material contradictions that they face. The growth of cities and the rise of technology as a central element within the general social consciousness surrounding development have created a condition where the growth of platforms has come to mean a massive drive towards homogenisation. Urban marginality under contemporary capitalism creates the grounds for the domination of the market over all the different forces of social cohesion. It has become a space where the marginalised are constantly excluded from rights of equal accessibility. Lefebvre () had argued that industrialisation and urbanisation are two of the most important drivers of contemporary capitalist reality and the reproduction of the capitalist relations of production. Contemporary urban spaces, dominated by the growth of cities, have been a space where profits and growth have been privileged above everything else, which has created urban spaces that are highly segmentary and structurally violent in form. It is popularly believed that free trade benefits the regions with lower rates of development but in actuality, free trade mostly results in richer regions getting richer because of them being already well ahead of their less developed counterparts (Dutt, 1992; Harvey, 2006), resulting in a further concentration of capital.

The conditions faced by migrant gig workers prove that underdeveloped regions rarely have the autonomy required to make adequate usage of technological innovations and mostly depend upon highly developed regions to provide for them (D’Costa, 2003; Sagasti, 1973). In contexts such as these—which have remained unchanged for decades—the mere migration of labour does not mean an improvement in the standards of living for the underdeveloped region, but rather, as Ness (2023) argues, continues to use the underdeveloped regions as extractive sites for cheap labour or raw materials. Under capitalism, migration from underdeveloped regions to developed ones continues to be seen with appreciative eyes because they are seen to be a potential method of destruction of traditional economies, which is seen to be an essential part of capitalist expansion (Parasuraman, 2010). This is particularly evident in contemporary cities which are characterised by a lack of one’s right to the urban space and have been evolved as sites of consumption (Lefebvre, 1996).

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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.

Platforms in this context enable a distinction to arise between people working similar kinds of jobs.²⁷ 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.

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²⁷ 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

The problems faced by migrant gig workers rarely get represented adequately in mainstream media and academic discourse because most of these workers remain undocumented (Parasuraman, 2010; Parwez & Ranjan, 2021). The delivery workers need to be seen as subjects—and not mere objects—capable of effecting changes within their own working and personal lives. For Marx, the struggle against capitalism is not only restricted to the working class but also encompasses diverse sections of the non-capitalist classes because all of these classes struggle against the most critical relationship that exists within capitalism, the one between capital and labour (Anderson, 2020). This struggle needs to be treaded along dialectical lines of engagement where a dialectical analysis is to be recreated continuously in light of the ‘spontaneously [emerging and developing] Subject’, the Subject being a more radical and more socialised working class (Dunayevskaya, 1973, p. 73). The role of radical political movements and their relationship with mass movements constitutes a critical part of the ways in which such states of dissatisfaction be countered (Gonzalez, 2019). The demands placed by the gig workers in India are often restricted to mere superficial ones where they remain controlled by forms of labour aristocracy because most gig workers do not have any knowledge about the policy changes that are often brought in to make their lives easier because of their lack of education and social awareness.

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social status because of their salaried mode of payment, while simultaneously looked down upon as they are considered to be fast-food workers.

The struggle of the migrant gig workers cannot be comprehended unless one analyses the problem as being one where the worker, as Marx (1844) had argued, has oneself become the product and is being forced to sell one’s human essence for sustenance. Migrant gig workers represent the most destitute conditions imaginable for gig workers in India and as such demand a more introspective and detailed analysis than others. This means that one needs to move towards a reconfiguration of one’s ideas surrounding concepts such as class and exploitation and move towards more inclusive ones, that enable the analysis of issues concerning regional disparities, caste, race, gender and other such factors as parts of the totality created by capitalism. However, in doing so, it needs to be emphasised that the exploitation faced by migrant gig workers reflects not only a crisis of the working class, but rather a crisis of humanity itself within the consumerist urban spaces that capitalism has developed, in India and across the globe.

Acknowledgements The author thanks Marcelle Dawson, Simon Barber, Annabel Cooper, Kevin Anderson, Peter Hudis, Sandra Rein and Ursula Huws for their support. The author would also like to thank Dipsita Dhar and Rikta Krishnaswamy for their encouragement and inputs regarding the chapter.

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