India’s Gig Economy Workers at the Time of Covid-19: An Introduction

Platform Work in India: Disruption or More of the Same?

On 11 July 2022, The Guardian published the ‘Uber Files’, an international investigation into a collection of leaked documents covering five years of Uber’s global practices, between 2013 and 2017. This period marked Uber’s unrelenting, and often aggressive, expansion into transport sectors across the globe, during which a range of ethically questionable tactics were used to penetrate novel markets. Backed up by a spectacular level of venture capital funding, Uber lured customers and drivers with incentives that undercut established taxi markets. The files revealed above all Uber’s extensive lobbying of governments, media giants, presidents and prime ministers ‘to rewrite laws to help pave the way for an app-based, gig-economy model of work that has since proliferated across the world’ (Davies et al., 2022).

When Uber’s approach had mixed success, with local taxi industries blocking its operations across cities and politicians resisting its attempts to infiltrate existing markets, Uber used this resistance as evidence that digital labour platforms were disrupting outdated transport service models (Davies et al., 2022). Behind this narrative of ‘disruption’, however, lay the platform’s belligerent efforts to secure the regulatory reform it needed to legalize its operations across the globe. It was ultimately a senior Uber lobbyist who decided to speak out, as he believed that Uber executives ‘knowingly flouted laws in dozens of countries and “sold people a lie” about the economic benefits of the company’s gig economy model’ (Guardian Reporter, 2022).

It is the aim of this special issue to unpack some of this ‘lie’ through the experiences of men and women employed in India’s gig economy during the Covid-19 pandemic. During the 2010s, a range of platforms—such as Uber, Ola, Uber Eats, Swiggy and Zomato—introduced novel ways of organizing transport, food delivery and beauty services, making rapid inroads into India’s urban economies. These platforms depicted themselves as disruptors, creating employment and economic growth in a context in which the discourse of start-ups, unicorns and enterprise already dominated the neoliberal development imaginary (Cross, 2014; Gooptu, 2013). Some even referred to platforms as ‘incubators of entrepreneurialism’ (Vallas & Schor, 2020, p. 277). Within this discourse, digitization, disruption and economic growth are seen to go hand in hand, and the transformative economic potential of the platform economy is widely believed to rest on its capacity to simultaneously meet the interests of business, customers and workers through flexible employment arrangements and digital technologies. The papers in this special issue focus on workers labouring for platforms in India, and critically consider how they have fared under this novel economic model, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic. In India, the national lockdown was imposed very suddenly on 24 March 2020 and severely disrupted public life till June of that year, while in the spring of 2021 further, more localized lockdowns were enforced. ¹

In India, platforms’ narratives of growth and employment creation quickly received the state’s stamp of approval as the government’s own development agenda dovetailed with—and to a large extent relied on—the ‘disruptive’ transformations that digital technology was expected to unleash (Graham et al., 2017). In 2022, NITI Aayog, the Government of India’s leading public policy think tank that informs strategic government policy, published a report on the precipitous growth and potential of digital labour platforms. Drawing on enthusiastic consultancy papers (such as Augustinraj & Bajaj, 2021), the report described the platform model as a ‘new economic revolution’ and an ‘unfolding paradigm shift’ in India’s world of work (NITI Aayog, 2022, p. 5). It not only praised the job creation potential for workers but also its ability to ‘offer innovative solutions’ for businesses across sectors (NITI Aayog, 2022, p. 7).

While by and large considering platform work an unmitigated good for employment and economic growth, the NITI Aayog report also acknowledged some of the challenges this sector poses to its workers due to the nature of the contractual relationship, including the ‘lack of job security, irregularity of wages and uncertain employment status’, as well as the ‘pressures resulting from algorithmic management practices’, exclusion from workplace protections and entitlements, and weak worker collectivization (NITI Aayog, 2022, p. xix). It is precisely with these challenges and pressures that the papers of this issue engage.

The report’s overall recommendations, however, focused largely on accelerating platformization by removing entry barriers, widening inclusion (especially of women and people with disabilities) and upskilling the workforce (NITI Aayog, 2022, pp. xx–xxv). This is reflected in the wealth of numbers presented in the report to estimate the current size and future growth potential of this industry. While the NITI Aayog report did recognize the need to extend social security to platform workers, to date commitment to platform workers’ rights, livelihoods and well-being has hardly been a policy priority, let alone one that is protected by law.

First, it remains unclear how platform workers could be brought under the purview of formal legislation given their ambiguous employment status as independent ‘contractors’ or ‘partners’ (Medappa et al., 2020). High hopes are placed on their inclusion under India’s new Code on Social Security (Ministry of Law and Justice, 2020), which recognizes them as a separate category of workers, and on the e-SHRAM portal launched in 2021 under which such workers can access certain social security benefits. However, it remains to be seen how state and central governments will implement the report’s recommendations, what schemes will be developed under the new Code, and how platform labour will ultimately benefit from them (Deshingkar, 2022; Kuriakose & Kylasam Iyer, 2021; and below). Meanwhile, the state’s unmitigated belief in the platform model as an engine of development, and its sustained support for platform capital remain beyond doubt.

Second, while platform workers were classified as essential workers during the Covid-19 pandemic and praised as superheroes who transferred people to hospitals and workplaces and delivered food and other essentials to those who needed them, it also became clear that their own safety and well-being were rarely prioritized over that of the customers they served. ² Even the NITI Aayog report’s conclusion is telling: ‘the gig economy has proven its resilience and potential even in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, by continuing to unlock jobs in the millions and keeping communities connected’ (NITI Aayog, 2022, p. xvi). The platform sector is thus celebrated for its resilience and perseverance and for its services to the economy and society during challenging times but without any attention to what this period meant for the well-being, safety and livelihoods of its own millions-strong workforce. Scholarly studies and media reports, by contrast, have highlighted platforms’ almost total neglect of their workforce during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many workers, such as drivers and beauty service employees, lost their employment altogether, while others, such as delivery workers, had to handle enhanced workloads alongside more intensive digital surveillance without additional support or safety measures to protect them (Das & Srravya, 2021; Huang, 2022; Moulds, 2020; Parwez & Ranjan, 2021).

As far as worker social welfare is concerned, platforms appear to follow the informal economy in externalizing both responsibility for worker welfare and the costs of social reproduction. While these elements were already passed on to platform workers’ households, families and communities before the Covid-19 pandemic, this trend became particularly acute during the lockdown, when many gig workers had only each other, their kin and neighbours to rely on in the face of mass unemployment (Medappa, this issue; Ray and Sam, this issue). While such externalization of the costs of social reproduction and social security is a well-documented feature of India’s informal economy (Mezzadri, 2017, 2020; Stevano et al., 2021), it applies even more forcefully to the gig economy. In the informal economy, employers tend to remain at least present as a knowable person and often also as a patron to approach in times of adversity (Carswell et al., 2023). In the platform economy, by contrast, the employer becomes an invisible, distant and app-mediated entity who not only remains almost impossible to approach but also refuses to act as a patron. This has been identified as ‘platform disintermediation’, a process in which platforms retain power over labour by refusing to mediate in the latter’s work and life (Rosenblat & Stark, 2016). During the Covid-19 crisis, this disintermediation became even more extreme as the few remaining physical offices of platforms shut down and all interaction went fully online (see below). Hence, platforms’ claims to be disruptive have to be critically evaluated against the lived realities of their workers, who experience conditions of work, pay and job insecurity strikingly similar to those found in the informal economy—marked by high levels of uncertainty—from which many sought to escape in the first place. Seen from a worker’s perspective, therefore, and further unpacked in the papers of this issue, the digital revolution appears less as a disruption and more ‘as a continuation of structural trends that have long been underway’, pointing in particular to the extreme push towards full flexibilization of employment (Berg et al., 2018; Vallas & Schor, 2020, p. 280).

In this special issue, we explore what actually happened to platform workers during the Covid-19 pandemic in India. The pandemic and series of lockdowns posed unprecedented challenges to platform workers, as normal work routines were severely disrupted by restrictions on movement, contact and trade. Through detailed ethnographic analyses of a range of platform workers across different sites in India, we engage with four key questions. First, how were gig workers affected by the Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns in India? Second, who did this workforce look to for support to sustain their livelihoods and meet the needs of social reproduction? Third, what forms of collective action emerged at this time and what do such workers’ struggles reveal about the potential for collectivizing within the platform economy? And, finally, how did platform capital use this specific moment to intensify its already highly extractive employment regime and to generate returns for its venture capital investors?

Digital Technology, Algorithmic Management and Labour Control at the Time of Covid-19

The presence of ‘gig’ work in India, in which workers receive piece rate remuneration, lack social security protections and scramble together a patchwork of jobs or work for multiple employers, long precedes the platform economy. These features that are associated with the recent growth of the ‘gig economy’ have been endured by informal workers in contexts such as India for decades. However, in the last decade or so, the rise of the global ‘gig economy’ model, enabled by the spread of ‘technology platforms’, has brought about some radical changes to gig working in India that have raised both excitement and concern. The former often fills the pages of industry outlooks, consultancy reports and policy documents, as discussed earlier, while the latter dominates critical social science scholarship. Whichever way we perceive the ongoing transformations of India’s gig economy, the platform management logic needs to be examined more closely and careful attention needs to be paid to the digital technologies that sustain platform mediation and functionality: the mobile phone, the app, the online payment facility and so on.

Platform-mediated services, ranging from transport services to dog-walking, have intensified the shift to ‘lean’ systems of production and distribution, and the ‘flexible’ organization of labour. Huws (2014) theorizes the growth of platform-mediated businesses and the labour underpinning this industry by referring to this labour regime as ‘logged labour’. She argues that workers are ‘logged’ in three particular ways—their work is chopped into smaller portions, amenable to measurement and quantification; they are closely and continuously monitored by platforms, clients and customers because of their ‘logged-in’ status; and, finally, these workers have to be constantly ‘logged-in’ to platform apps in order to receive work. Thus, the digital mediation of work—whose pace is intensified by modes of ‘algorithmic management’ (Duggan et al., 2020)—is key to understanding what sets platform labour apart from the more traditional forms of ‘gig’ work, which informal sector workers have long had to depend upon to sustain their lives.

Equally central to capitalist value extraction is the digital generation of data. In an illuminating article discussing the sources of value for ‘technology platforms’, van Doorn and Badger (2020) highlight how platform-based service providers extract value from the undervalued labour expended by workers as well as from the ‘data assets’ that are continually produced by workers. As they ‘accept’ tasks and log their ‘arrival’, ‘pickup’, ‘drop-off’ and so on, algorithmic metrics and ‘data assets’ are constantly produced. Platforms utilize these assets to optimize operations, maximize the value they extract from workers, and enhance their ‘valuations’ among investors, whose money fuels their start-up ventures. In addition to facilitating value extraction, digital management techniques also enable a tightening of platforms’ control over their workers. Indeed, algorithmic management produces forms of control rarely seen in face-to-face management. While the ‘disruptive’ platform discourse maintains that partners retain control over when and how much they work, it is now well established that algorithmic work allocations heavily restrict workers’ control over their own workloads and working times. They also enhance platforms’ ability to manage workers at arm’s length (Rosenblat & Stark, 2016; Wood et al., 2019; Woodcock, 2020).

When problems arise with customers or deliveries, workers often lack a human manager to turn to or a physical site to register a complaint or raise a question. As such, platform work—and the technology that underpins it—drastically challenges labour agency (Mendonça & Kougiannou, 2022). The absence of a direct employer, shared shop floor, or common work schedule and pay rate weakens day-to-day forms of resistance as well as attempts at longer-term collective organizing. Extreme forms of digitization, flexibilization and individualization (of remuneration rates, work times and workloads) are thus raising important concerns about the future of worker agency in the platform economy, as several papers of this special issue illustrate.

It was during the Covid-19 pandemic that ‘algorithmic management’ truly came into its own. Workers were subjected to enhanced forms of surveillance as platforms desperately tried to convince customers of high levels of hygiene and safety standards in a bid to sell their services and remain attractive to investors (Nair, this issue). The temperatures of the delivery workers and of the chefs involved in preparing food promptly flashed on the screens of customers, together with updates about when the delivery worker had last sanitized their hands. Masks had to be compulsorily worn by delivery workers, while no such demand was made of customers. ‘Contactless’ deliveries could be requested by customers but not by workers. Moreover, the use of the controversial contact-tracing app, Aarogya Setu, was made mandatory for workers while the same was not asked of customers (Das, 2020). ³ All this exemplifies how customer convenience and safety were prioritized over that of workers, who were projected as potential vectors of infection (Ustek-Spilda et al., 2020). It leaves no doubt that digital modes of control and surveillance were significantly extended during the pandemic. Nair (this issue) analyses how this process, while reflecting long-standing inequities of caste, gender and class, largely served to further entrench existing hierarchies and discriminations.

The experiences of delivery workers during the pandemic also made evident the paradoxes of digital (dis)intermediation, introduced above. Such (dis)intermediation simultaneously rendered workers intimately ‘visible’ to platforms, while allowing platforms to further distance themselves from workers. Nair (this issue) aptly summarizes that algorithmic management tools enabled ‘labour control to take a disembodied but more acute form’. While app-based workers were required to log regular selfies with masks, details of sanitization and their body temperatures, their own grievances and demands for urgent help frequently went unanswered. During the pandemic, workers found platforms harder to reach than ever. Due to government rules on social distancing, several platform businesses, including Swiggy, Zomato, Uber and Ola, shut their offices, moved most support functions and training online, and laid off thousands of support staff (Majumdar, 2020). Call functions were replaced with Google forms or chat options, complaints remained unanswered for weeks on end and frustrated workers often wondered where to go as platform offices stayed closed throughout this time. The pandemic thus accelerated the speed with which platforms moved functions online and perhaps served as an opportunity to trim down on support staff.

On top of these enhanced levels of control and surveillance, platform businesses ruthlessly began slashing rates of remuneration and incentives during the pandemic, in some cases completely withdrawing certain bonuses that workers had heavily depended on until then (Nair, this issue). During the pandemic, delivery platforms formally introduced the option for customers to ‘tip’ workers, and used in-app nudges and platform social media accounts to encourage customers to give tips. While many platform workers’ livelihoods were seriously under threat due to job losses, rate cuts, withdrawal of bonuses, irregular work patterns and severe health worries, the praises for these ‘superheroes’ and ‘hunger warriors’ continued unabated on the platforms’ social media sites (Medappa & Taduri, 2020). The papers in this issue not only highlight the enhanced surveillance, exploitation and precarity that platform workers were subjected to at this time but also unpack the ways in which workers were activating diverse sources of social support and were organizing collectively through strikes and protests. Indeed, intensified levels of exploitation did not go uncontested—several cities in India witnessed protests by app-based delivery workers, beauty workers and cab drivers (Hussain; Medappa; Nair, this issue), reflecting the spike in protests by app-based workers globally and especially across Asia, Africa and Latin America (Bessa et al., 2022). Although the papers in this issue remain open to the hope and optimism inspired by such worker contestations, they also point to the structural factors inherent in the platform model that curb the potential for a more transformative labour politics (Hussain, this issue). The potential of such a politics is further constrained by the multiple factors that mark the contemporary political conjuncture: far-reaching state support for platform capital and state apathy towards labour, ongoing economic crises that deplete working-class livelihoods and the ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011) about gig economy futures that feeds on neoliberal discourses of individual drive and enterprise cultures (Gooptu, 2013; Hussain, this issue; Medappa, this issue).

Legislation, Social Security and Labour Resistance: Towards a ‘Double Movement’?

As the articles in this special issue show, despite the extreme circumstances of the pandemic, platform-based workers experienced these not as a unique rupture in social and labour conditions, but rather as a continuation and deepening of existing relations of exploitation and extraction. These continuities have two aspects. First, the lack of labour protections that predated the pandemic (such as a lack of wage guarantees or social security benefits) became even more extreme and obvious during the pandemic. Second, the infrastructures of coping—institutional (trade unions, lenders) as well as informal (kin, neighbourhood and peer networks)—that workers relied on to manage the everyday challenges of platform work before the pandemic were once again mobilized to cope with the pandemic.

Essentially, the rights of gig economy workers are limited by their legal categorization as ‘independent contractors’ or ‘partners’, rather than as employees of the mediating platforms. Their labour is therefore highly commodified as workers only receive payment for tasks performed without being entitled to the labour rights and social security benefits that formal-sector workers are typically entitled to (Lin & Nguyen, 2021). However, as the platform economy started expanding, legislators across the globe sought to curb the most excessive forms of exploitation by defining these workers’ rights more explicitly.

A move towards social protection, however patchy and halting, could be interpreted within Karl Polanyi’s (2001) theory of ‘double movement’. Basing his analysis on England’s sixteenth-century ‘poor laws’, Polanyi argued that when a production regime is unsustainably extractive, workers’ outcry demands a response from the state in terms of social protection. When capitalist wage relations squeeze workers irredeemably, the state has to combat the ensuing crisis with social protection measures. Historically, these measures have included new workplace-based labour standards and regulations, and social welfare benefits pertaining to unemployment, work-injury compensation and old-age pensions. Such measures seek to de-commodify labour by providing it with substantive social rights (de Haan, 2014; Lin & Nguyen, 2021). Following this line of enquiry, Agarwala (2006) identified a recent shift in the demand-making strategies of informal workers in India, who now increasingly seek ‘welfare’ from the state rather than better wages and treatment from employers. Agarwala has documented how workers’ demands are ever more being articulated around welfare and reproductive needs (housing, education, health), and argued that the setting up of welfare boards for various occupations is an indication of this evolving labour-state relationship and, thus, a reason for optimism.

But what does the welfare landscape look like for India’s rapidly expanding platform labour force? At one level, attempts are made as part of the new Code on Social Security (Ministry of Law and Justice, 2020) to recognize ‘platform’ and ‘gig’ workers as a separate category of workers and to bring them under the remit of at least some social security provisions. Towards this end, it is the intention of the Code that social security schemes—around life/disability cover, accident insurance, health and maternity benefits, old age protection and creche facilities—are formulated and that a National Social Security Board is established to oversee the implementation of such schemes for gig and platform workers (Ministry of Law and Justice, 2020, pp. 67–71). Close to three years after this Code was passed in the Indian parliament, there are still no signs of its implementation. However, in a first of its kind in India, the Rajasthan state government recently passed the ‘The Rajasthan Platform-Based Gig Workers (Registration and Welfare) Bill, 2023’ (Khan, 2023). As an outcome of persistent lobbying efforts by informal and platform-based workers’ unions with the Congress-led government in the state, this bill borrows from the long history of establishing welfare boards for informal occupations in India, but also includes certain progressive clauses such as workers’ right to registration with the Board irrespective of how long the worker has been engaged in working for one or more platforms. However, given that existing welfare boards leave much to be desired in terms of worker registration, scheme implementation and money expended (Jha, 2021; RoyChowdhury, 2017), it remains an open question whether platform and gig workers' welfare boards are likely to be established more widely across states, whether they will steer a different course from their predecessors in other sectors, and whether they will deliver meaningful social protection for its registered members.

Critics of India’s recent labour reforms accuse recent policies of being more protective of capital rather than of workers (Das, 2022; EPW, 2020; Venkatesan, 2020). RoyChowdhury (2021), for example, questions a sole focus on ‘welfare’ that does not consider issues of low wages and the redistribution of surpluses. Medappa et al. (2020) similarly highlight that while the Code on Social Security seeks to provide some basic provisions to platform workers, it fails to address any of the long-standing demands relating to decreasing pay, workload intensification and the dangers to health and well-being associated with gig work. In a recent interview, Babu Mathew, an eminent legal scholar and trade unionist in India, referred to the Code’s provisions for platform workers’ social security as ‘marginal’ at best, for these measures are ‘schemes’ formulated by governments in power and do not guarantee ‘statutory’ social security protections that formal workers are entitled to and can claim as rights (see also Bhatia, 2021; Saraogi & Parthasarathy, 2022). Crucially, the national Code on Social Security, by continuing to see platforms as mere ‘aggregators’ or ‘digital intermediaries’ rather than employers, and defining ‘gig workers’ as those in work arrangements ‘outside a traditional employee–employer relationship’, Indian lawmakers are simply endorsing a convenient claim and discourse pushed forward by platform businesses, even as courts and state authorities in many parts of the world are challenging such claims (De Stefano et al., 2021).

Indeed, the measures outlined in India’s new Code on Social Security have an uncanny resemblance to the ‘third-way’ solution that Uber campaigned for, which promises some social security measures while refusing to guarantee substantive labour rights to workers. In California, for example, Uber and other digital labour platforms successfully campaigned in November 2020 for a statewide referendum on Proposition 22, which stripped platform workers of employee status and its associated protections, such as a minimum wage guarantee, work-injury compensation and paid sick leave (Dubal, 2021, p. 56). By emphasizing paltry new benefits, such as a health insurance stipend, Proposition 22 was successfully presented to voters as a pro-worker referendum that regulated digital labour platforms, all the while failing to safeguard basic rights and protections (Midgley, 2021, p. 9).

Meanwhile, in the absence of more substantive labour rights, the universal experience of India’s platform workers was that they only had informal sources of support to turn to during the pandemic. While app-based drivers and providers of personalized services such as beauty workers saw their work disappear during the lockdown, food delivery workers—suddenly classified as ‘essential workers’—had to cope with the risks of exposure amidst rising demand for their services. As Ray and Sam (this issue) describe, even before the pandemic workers relied upon various ‘off-platform’ informal networks to enable their work. These included kin, neighbours, fellow workmates and moneylenders. Their monetary and non-monetary support helped to smooth over uneven earning patterns or to service debts incurred to take up the job in the first place. Loans were routinely taken out to acquire vehicles in the case of cab drivers and delivery workers, or to purchase personal care products in the case of platform-based beauty and spa workers.

During the pandemic, these informal networks of support proved vital to the social reproduction of platform workers’ households and were extended to include the home villages to which many migrants returned. There, they could reside with kin, find alternative sources of income, and even take up agricultural work, if only on a temporary basis. However, as Ray and Sam (this issue) discuss in some detail, workers’ access to kin-based forms of support was uneven and relied upon numerous factors, such as the quality of relationships they had maintained with extended family and community members, and the sorts of resources they themselves had access to. Medappa (this issue) further highlights how, in addition to turning to kin and family networks, platform workers also benefited from mutual support among co-workers and from the welfare assistance provided by local trade unions. Taken together, such forms of aid enabled them to sustain their households through the crisis, while simultaneously propping up the reproduction of the platforms themselves.

Indeed, a more general paradox that the pandemic exposed was the devaluation of socially valuable and reproductive labour performed by ‘key workers’ or ‘essential workers’—nurses, cleaners, transport and logistics workers, supermarket staff—who enabled life and social reproduction for others who could afford to shield at home. Platform workers in many parts of the world became the providers of ‘essential services’, ensuring that people continued to be able to access food, groceries, medicines and other basic needs to sustain life. While continuing to disregard the health risks and associated fatalities of workers during the pandemic (Kaushik & Gurmat, 2021), platform businesses expanded into new service delivery areas, grew their business activities and, crucially, partnered with governments to posture themselves as ‘do-gooders’ and providers of critical ‘infrastructure’ during the pandemic (Surie, 2021; van Doorn & Badger, 2020).

Meanwhile, the real ‘infrastructural labour’ remained hidden from view as the workers providing these essential services were neglected by both the platforms, which often increased the rate of exploitation at this time, and by the state, which did little more than promote hand-clapping and vessel-banging to praise essential workers (Scroll Staff, 2020). This special issue, therefore, contributes to feminist analyses of social reproductive labour in a number of ways. First, it analyses the infrastructures of support that workers relied on to enable their own social reproduction (Ray and Sam; Medappa; this issue); second, it examines how social reproductive imperatives both shaped and limited worker resistance (Nair; Hussain, this issue); and, third, it demonstrates how capital reproduced itself throughout the pandemic by extracting value from the underpaid and unpaid labour that workers engaged in to survive (Medappa; Nair, this issue).

Finally, in addition to providing each other with informal support, platform-based workers also turned to a variety of trade unions and grassroots labour organizations to mobilize collectively in the face of mounting pressures (Parwez & Ranjan, 2021). IFAT, KCTU and other organizations at local and state levels marshalled workers for protests and strikes in the face of declining pay rates and incentives and functioned as sources of mutual support and solidarity. However, while the platform economy saw more spontaneous outbreaks of protests during the pandemic than ever before, sustained forms of collective workers' action and labour resistance remained challenging to achieve in this sector. Why this is the case is precisely the question that Hussain addresses head-on in his contribution to this issue. Zooming in on two expressions of collective action among Swiggy delivery workers in Hyderabad—one a spontaneous walkout and the other a collectively planned strike—Hussain explores the different barriers to more successful, long-term labour mobilization. He concludes that a variety of factors obstruct the development of trade unionization among platform labour, some of which relate to the nature of the platform workforce while others regard the structural features of the platform model itself. All that can be concluded from the empirical evidence available to date is that sustained collective action in the platform economy faces serious obstacles, yet workers continue to pursue whatever route available to them to mobilize and make their voices heard.

The Contributions to This Issue

In ‘Infrastructure of the last resort: networks sustaining platform-based gig-work in the COVID-19 pandemic in India’, Rajorshi Ray and Jillet Sarah Sam draw on fieldwork with app-based taxi drivers and food delivery workers in Kanpur and Kolkata to explain how ‘off-platform’ networks of support enabled platform work during the pandemic. They identify four social relationships that were important to platform workers’ coping strategies: household members, dispersed kin, neighbourhood networks and work-related ties. Reminding us that scholars tend to think of workers under neoliberalism as embodying an enterprising self, enacting ‘individualized coping strategies’, Ray and Sam show instead that many such strategies involve activating social networks and relying upon other people for financial support, care and other forms of help. They dub these networks of kin, neighbours and co-workers who provided monetary and non-monetary support during the pandemic the ‘infrastructure of last resort’. Like Medappa (see below), Ray and Sam argue that these informal social networks help maintain and generate value for the digital labour platforms. The question then is to what extent this infrastructure is not just a ‘last resort’ during Covid times but also part of the routine functioning and labour process of gig economy work in ‘normal’ times.

Kaveri Medappa’s ‘Rethinking Mutual Aid Through the Lens of Social Reproduction: How Platform Drivers Ride Out Work and Life in Bengaluru, India’ focuses on the social networks and mutual aid that app-based cab drivers provided for each other in Karnataka during the Covid crisis. Faced with a loss of income during the lockdown and growing indebtedness because of the vehicle and other loans, Uber and Ola drivers turned to their social networks, both locally and back in their home villages, for support. Shifting the focus onto institutional players such as trade unions, Medappa shows how both informal and formal networks aided cab drivers, individually and collectively, through a period of economic hardship. Building upon social reproduction literature that demonstrates the ‘mutual dependence’ of productive and reproductive labour within capitalist production regimes, Medappa demonstrates how various networks of support were vital to cab drivers and their households not only during the pandemic but also before the pandemic, in ‘normal’ times, to absorb the many costs, dangers and risks of app-based driving. Medappa highlights how the gamut of unpaid and invisible labours that platform workers deliver enabled their own production (being able to sell their labour power to platform capital) and social reproduction (rest, leisure, affective ties) as well as platform businesses’ ability to sustain and reproduce themselves. Medappa’s article, therefore, makes at least two novel contributions. First, it enhances our understanding of how everyday forms of mutual aid—both formal and informal—become a source of value extraction by platforms, and, second, it extends the remit of social reproduction debates by highlighting that non-domestic spaces and institutions also perform socially reproductive labour from which platforms benefit.

Gayatri Nair’s article, ‘The Political Economy of Gig Work in the Pandemic: Social Hierarchies and Labour Control of Indian Platform Workers’, zooms in on the relationship between labour and capital in her account of platform-based taxi, food delivery, and beauty and spa workers mostly in the National Capital Region. Noting the contested nature of the employment categorization and platforms’ refusal to recognize the capital–labour relationship, Nair’s contribution powerfully asserts that the platform labour regime is effectively shaped by the inherently antagonistic relationship between capital and labour. In so doing, Nair explains why, regardless of whether work was perceived to be ‘essential’ during the pandemic, workers could still be treated as expendable. In order to unpack these capital–labour relations, Nair describes how workers experienced platform policy changes during the pandemic, how they related to clients and how they responded both individually and collectively to the challenges they faced. In doing so, she shows how the pandemic did not rupture existing relations but rather offered capital the opportunity to expand its power while limiting that of labour. Moreover, Nair’s contribution shows how the gig economy reflects many of the conditions and problems of labour informality more generally. Like informal sector workers, platform workers may see an occasional expansion of social protection measures, but not a formalization of labour rights. Nair’s research puts into question analyses that consider social protection a ‘double movement’ that protects labour in the face of crises. Instead, she shows that limited state social welfare responses fail to address adverse labour conditions and perpetuate the entrenched lack of labour rights.

Nair also demonstrates, especially in the example of beauty work, how the power disparities between platforms and workers are mediated by caste, gender and class. These relations play out in the in-person encounters between workers and consumers, for example in the intimate sessions of beauty workers in their homes. Beauty workers contend with the demand to keep consumers safe and comfortable while their own comfort and safety is violated or ignored. The use of consumer ratings in workers’ pay and work allocations is imbricated within these hierarchical relations between workers and platforms, and between workers and clients.

In ‘Learning to Strike in the Gig Economy: Mobilization Efforts by Food Delivery Workers in Hyderabad, India;, M. Sajjad Hussain tells the story of two strikes by platform-based food delivery workers in Hyderabad. Platform-based workers have long been assumed to be adverse to labour organizing and collective protests because they often are atomized, spatially dispersed and in competition with each other for work. While Hussain’s article too demonstrates how the digital infrastructure of app-based work creates barriers to collective mobilization, he also shows how digital technologies, like social media, can be used to create networks of support and as a means to rally workers for strikes and public protests. Though the Hyderabad strikes failed to prevent cuts to pay and incentive structures, they did bring visibility to working conditions and proved to workers that they can put pressure on platforms in small, subtle ways (by logging off during strike periods) or in noisy, visible ways (such as by demonstrating in front of popular restaurants and physically occupying key spaces). Hussain’s contribution, therefore, reminds us that even the most extractive labour regimes can never completely silence workers’ voices or prevent labour mobilization—even though in the case of India’s platform economy the potential for concerted collective action in making platform capital cede to workers demands for better working conditions remains uncertain.