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

Therefore, as politicized tech workers, they experimented with linking the struggles of tech workers and gig workers. However, while they were able to organize them, it did not result in successful, sustained labour agitation in most parts of the city. The tech workers like Palash reflexively recognized their limitations:

“The workers lose interest due to the lack of results from the movement. The lack of results is because the protests are localised. These big firms [DLPs] don’t actually care if 500 workers from a certain area stop working. Their scale is so large, and for the movement to succeed, mobilisation has to be on that scale. Sporadic movements here and there are not going to help the cause.”

While the lack of results from agitations in the initial stages partially explains the limited political success of gig workers’ struggles, it is crucial to recognize that the immediate livelihood challenges faced by migrant Bengali workers in the city are not solely in contradiction with the DLPs. They are also shaped by a multiplicity of actors—from intermediaries to the state—and by the struggle to navigate issues of illegality in citizenship, as well as the challenge of surviving within the ebb and flow of city life itself. The lower-class migrant working population is a fluid community that moves between cities, adding layers of complexity to the challenges of unionising these workers. Nonetheless, the spatial fixity and spatial organization of the bastis endure, preserving collective memories of past and present struggles. These anchored spaces offer entry points for organising, as they provide a sense of stability and solidarity amid the transitory nature of migration.

9 Discussion and Conclusion

Transversal Unionism: How Identity Intertwined with Class Position Creates a Rubric ofResistance

As our study indicates, responding to multiple axes of marginality— shaped by lower-class migrant workers’ spatial anchorage in unauthorized settlements, the politics of suspicion fuelled by anti-Muslim phobia and illegality of their citizenship, and the vulnerability and exploitation faced as labour—the social context of Bengali sub-national consciousness played a formative role in the mobilization of migrant social classes inhabiting the urban peripheries of Bengaluru. Notably, workers primarily inhabiting contradictory class locations, such as tech workers—many of them privilaged-caste Bengali Hindus—found converging points with lowerclass Bengali migrant workers in support of their livelihood causes. This led to a scenario what we identify as “transversal unionism,” where polyphonic practices of collective action and organising, mediated through Bengali sub-national consciousness and unfolding through the spatial anchorage of migrant labour bastis, paved the way for inter-class solidarity manifested through three distinct but fraternal unions: the AIITEU, the IMFK, and the AIGWU. While these unions are sites of class mobilization, not confined solely to sub-national politics, the lower-class Bengali migrants was drawn into unionization through the overlapping mobilizations of sub-nationalism and livelihood issues, accessed through the spatial fixity lower-class migrant labour bastis. This highlights how migrant workers’ agency apart from labour also carries both spatial and temporal implications (Rogaly, 2009).

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Organising Beyond Workplace: Imbedding Labour Power into the Spatial Dynamics

One of the significant challenges faced by traditional trade unions in contexts like India is the opaque relationship with employers, compounded by the erosion of the spatial fixity of the workplace, as seen in the case of DLPs. This shift creates challenges in (a) navigating collective bargaining through established contracts and institutionalized structures, and (b) reducing the access that external organizers from traditional trade unions have to workers, making it more difficult to engage and mobilize them, especially as they are dispersed across various locations. However, our study indicates that organising efforts, particularly reliant on external organizers, can explore and identify spatial fixity beyond traditional workplace scenarios, when they are absent. Similarly, focusing on demands beyond the workplace—such as social citizenship and right to city—can bring in cohesion amongst lower-class migrant workers engaging in heterogeneous work relations. Such entry points can be found in spaces such as unauthorized residential settlements where migrant labourers live, which, despite being outside formal work environments, serve as key sites for mobilization and solidarity. Particularly for migrant workers, their labour struggles are not necessarily disconnected from their struggles related to social citizenship.

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Moreover, with the decline of the factory-based industrial working class and the emergence of an economy where 90% of the total workforce is highly unorganized and informal, or even spatially dispersed, or if the choke points of production relations are opaque, the city itself could become the site of resistance. Migrant labour is critical infrastructure that sustains the city. They make the city productive, not only sustaining it but also reproducing its social and economic fabric. They help “position residents, territories, and resources in specific configurations, where the energies of individuals can be most efficiently deployed and accounted for, driving the city’s growth and functioning” (Simone, 2004). Any breakdown in this labour force is unaffordable to urban economies. Therefore, traditional unions should attend to the lower-class migrant labour force, by considering the city as the choke point, where production and consumption flows are structured.

Also, in the cityscape of Bengaluru, shaped by neoliberal imaginaries and the accommodation of labour from a diversity of cultural contexts to meet the needs of capital, these labour flows often intersect with cultural conflicts, such as “son of the soil” debates, over who gets to work or live in the city. Migrant workers, particularly Muslim minorities as in our case, are highly vulnerable targets, facing heightened oppression from far-right politics. Organizing lower-class migrant workers’ in such scenarios also opens up new frontiers of political resistance, demonstrating the interconnectedness of struggles against Hindutva in multiple provinces, as seen in our case. Therefore, organising efforts must address the subjective vulnerabilities and insecurities of migrant labour, considering cleavages such as ethnicity, caste and religion as well.

Bengali Tech workers’ supported organising efforts such as IMFK and AIGWU signify a creative exploration of engaging with migrant labourers’ social and cultural subject position alongside their objective condition of labour. Therefore, the composite nature of labour, which embodies a heterogeneity of social, political, cultural and economic contradictions, needs not be seen as something to be absolved into a singular class framing. Instead, organising efforts could engage with and navigate these contradictions, shaped by cleavages such as ethnicity, caste and religion, opening up lateral avenues of solidarity and action that reflect the complexity of workers’ lived experiences. Therefore, the engagement of

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Bengali tech workers with lower-class Bengali migrant workers,’ rather than being sectarian, is an exploration of informal spatial avenues for the mobilization of labour, by leveraging the cultural content of labour. This serves as an entry point to mobilize otherwise difficult and dispersed class constituencies, while also being integratable into the broader universe of class solidarity.

A_ppendix

See Fig. 1 and Table 1.

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