Abstract
Extant research on the gendered dynamics on digital labor platforms and care work is divided in terms of focus: (migrant) men involved in supposedly “masculine” work such as driving and delivery, and home-based repair work, and the feminized invisible work performed by women in home-based care-work such as domestic work and beauty work. While such scholarship has merit, it completely dismisses the particularities of the South Asian context where beauty work, considered to be ritually impure work, has historically been performed by men from the marginalized Nai caste. Foregrounding the views of men in beauty work, particularly Nai-barbers (on and off platform), our findings reveal that Nai-barbers find the relocation of work from barbershop to customer’s home by platforms particularly humiliating. The transition from being entrepreneurs, in charge of their barbershops, to mere workers supervised by both platforms and customers, evokes memories of the servitude their ancestors endured. The humiliation and degradation of work they experience are rooted in caste and colonial histories. Our findings underscore the need to go beyond the immediate temporal context to identify the conditions of work that workers find degrading, and situate the feminization of platform economy within the context of coloniality and casticization of power, thus bringing a necessary intersectionality that recognizes but goes beyond gender.
Introduction
The Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, declared in 2020 that the time has come for an “Atmanirbhar Bharath,” loosely translated as “self-reliant India.” Self-reliance as a clarion call has a long history in Asian contexts, dating back to colonial times. In India, it stands not only for independence from the colonial master or “swaraj” (self-determination) but also for the responsibility that comes with self-rule and governance. The aspiration for self-reliance goes beyond the manufacturing sector to include creating self-employment opportunities by leveraging new digital technologies and moving away from the dependence on the formal sector for jobs. The Government of India’s flagship Digital India program is centered around technology-driven start-ups and encourages people to develop the necessary skills to become microentrepreneurs. The Government has been encouraging app-based on-demand platform aggregators like Urban Company (UC henceforth) and Uber to intervene in the informal services sector to improve the employment rate.
Of the different kinds of work in the informal sector now organized by platforms are those collectively referred to as care work. Within the slowly burgeoning literature on digital care platforms and the gendered dynamics in platforms and care work, media coverage and academic scholarship on the platform economy are divided in terms of focus: (migrant) men involved in supposedly “masculine” and visible work of driving, delivery, and home-based repair work, and the feminized invisible work performed by women workers in home-based care-work that involves bodywork such as domestic work, grooming, and beauty services, more commonly referred to as beauty gig work in platform literature or simply on-demand beauty work. 1 While such scholarship has merit, especially in the context of the ravages caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, it resurrects the much-critiqued dichotomy of public/masculine/visible work and private/feminine/invisible care (Komarraju et al., 2022).
In the South Asian context, beauty work, considered to be ritually impure, is largely performed by those from certain marginalized castes (such as the Nai caste who have traditionally performed men’s grooming 2 in India). This skill is not acquired through formal training but is passed down generationally, with young men serving as apprentices to family members (Ahmed, 2006). Since these types of work are identified more with certain castes rather than gender, the men performing them are also vulnerable to historically sanctioned stigma and discrimination. Despite the significant presence of men in what is considered to be “women’s work,” overrepresentation of women in care work (often described as the feminization of work and labor) has led to a lacuna in the scholarship on the experiences of men in such work. This article seeks to address this gap by foregrounding the views of men, particularly Nai Barbers in beauty work (on and off platform) in India to ask what new dynamics emerge from their presence/absence and (non)engagement with digital care platforms.
Our findings reveal that Nai-barbers find the relocation of work from the barbershop to customer’s home by platforms particularly humiliating. The transition from being entrepreneurs, in charge of their barbershops, to mere workers supervised by both platforms and customers, evokes memories of the servitude their ancestors endured before barbershops came into existence. The humiliation and degradation of (conditions of) work they experience are rooted in caste and colonial histories (as elaborated on in sections “Locating Men in Beauty Work” and “Findings and Discussion”). Therefore, we argue that conditions of work that workers find degrading must be understood in terms broader than the immediate temporal context, situating the feminization of platform economy within the context of coloniality and casticization of power, thus bringing a necessary intersectionality that recognizes but goes beyond gender.
The rest of the article is structured as follows: We begin with a brief review of literature on digital care platforms, and locate men in beauty work. We then outline our methodology followed by findings and discussion. Finally, conclusion and future directions of research are discussed.
Digital Care Platforms
App-based, on-demand digital care work platforms are intermediaries that connect care workers and customers. Care services, performed at the site of a customer’s home, include personal aides in elderly care, nannies in child care, domestic workers, and beauty workers. Scholarship in the area tends to focus on women workers in domestic and beauty work. By contextualizing platform care work in the larger body of scholarship on care work and local socio-cultural dynamics, scholars (Komarraju et al., 2022; Ticona & Mateescu, 2018) provide a nuanced understanding of the upsides of the platform economy, while also pointing to the challenges, as well as the agency of workers at the intersection of gender, class, race, and caste.
Women workers across contexts appreciate the professionalization of work–the standardization of work and the articulation of standard operating procedures, the flexibility of work and better pay (as compared with existing jobs and contingent on platform models), and the respectability that comes with technologically enabled microentrepreneurship (Komarraju et al., 2022). However, lack of work contracts, social security, invisibility, lack of dignity, and high surveillance that characterize paid informal care work continues into platform work. Further, digital platforms introduce new precarities that entangle the economic, psychological, and cultural. Women workers are aware of the limitations of platform work, flagging issues around the following: (1) Unpaid costs involving travel and mobile data and (2) Added labor that women workers must perform in planning their day—scheduling productive and reproductive tasks, making time for lunch and bathroom breaks, and calculating just how many tasks will lead to positive net earnings. There is a significant learning curve associated with such jobs. (3) “Taskification” or breaking down of work into different tasks to be finished within a set time limit leading to the deskilling of work. (4) Supervision by managers, customers, and algorithms (referred to as blended supervision, Komarraju et al., 2022) through ratings and review mechanisms that limit worker autonomy. These control mechanisms undermine the promises made by platforms to ensure the dignity and respectability of work. To avoid low ratings from customers, workers often put up with racism and casteism. For instance, in South Africa, workers have complained of being called “Kaffir,” an ethnic slur to refer to black people, being offered stale food, or not being allowed to use washrooms (Lesala Khethisa et al., 2020). Workers in India have similar complaints (Komarraju, 2023). In the United States, workers from marginalized races are held to higher standards than their white counterparts (Ticona & Mateescu, 2018).
Scholarship in the area also examines the expressions of worker agency (Komarraju, 2023), with Anwar (2022) calling for more attention to workers who are “embedded in specific geographical landscapes governed by sociopolitical and cultural norms.” (Anwar, 2022, p. 749).
Despite the tantalizing promise of respectability and professionalization by digital care platforms, care work continues to be undervalued, underpaid, and invisible because of its association with the feminine and the private, and continues to be overrepresented by women. This leads to what Kampouri (2022) describes as the feminization of the platform economy. This article argues that there is a need to acknowledge and engage with men in care work and deepen our understanding of feminization.
Locating Men in Beauty Work
To fully appreciate men as gendered beings, their experiences are important to understanding the gender dynamics of the platform economy at the intersections of class, caste, and gender. Within care work (considered to be women’s work), personal grooming/beauty work is uniquely positioned for several reasons. First, the long history of barbering predates industrial work. The body is the site of barbering and has been historically performed by men from marginalized communities globally (Booth, 2018). Across cultures, occupations that deal with bodily waste are “recurringly regarded as low in status,” and are relegated to the “least regarded workers” (Twigg, 2000, p. 391). Slave barbers from the African American community in the United States before the Civil War (Bristol, 2009), Chino (Chinese) barbers in Spain (Slack, 2010), and “oriental” barbers in Finland (Lefort, 2023) reveal these devaluations in the global care chains.
In India, as elsewhere, these services are inevitably offered by those belonging to the bottom of the caste system. Understood as a “system of birth-ascribed stratification, of socio-cultural pluralism, and of hierarchical interaction” (Berreman, 1960, p. 70), caste continues to exist in many parts of South Asia, barber work is done by a specific caste community called Nai-Barbers (Ahmed, 2006). One’s work identity is intertwined with and subsumed by one’s caste identity, which is why these professions are sustained across generations. Those on the lower rungs of the caste system take up various kinds of semi-skilled work that requires some degree of training (whether formal or informal) such as fishing, pottery, and barbering. In India, barber work is done by a specific caste community called Nai-barbers (Ahmed, 2006). Notions of purity, impurity, and pollution characterize the caste system. Since barber work involves contact with the human body, Nais are discriminated against as impure, polluting, and labeled as disease spreaders.
Second, in traditional societies, barbers performed a variety of work including shaving, cutting, circumcision, bloodletting, elementary surgeries, tooth extractions, and other kinds of healing actions. Under the influence of the Church, many parts of Europe disallowed healers from performing surgery. This job was delegated to barber-surgeons who carried out elementary surgical procedures. It is these multiple roles that led to barbers being referred to as barber-surgeons. In different parts of Europe, guilds comprising barbers and surgeons were formed to oversee the governance of surgical education. Thus, barbers were still able to garner higher social status because of their role as barber-surgeons. These guilds were subsequently replaced by Royal colleges and universities that offered medical education. Medical doctors however were still divorced from surgery. At different points in history (1749 in France and the mid-nineteenth century in Germany and the UK), surgery was reunited with medicine (Parker & Cantab, 1912) and barber-surgeons were banned from practising surgery altogether by Louis XV (Peschel & Peschel, 1986). This ban had an impact on British colonies and Nais were discouraged from performing healing activities.
Third, while barbershops are masculinized public spaces, the work is feminized because of spatial and bodily intimacy, leading to further marginalization of barbers. This is why barber work is associated with functional grooming rather than “feminine” beauty care, a distinction that even Urban Company (the platform to which workers in this study belong) makes—Urban beauty: Salon and makeup services for women at home; and Urban grooming: Haircut and grooming services for men and kids at home.
Fourth, liberalization and professionalization of such work with the introduction of licensing practices, and globalization of work through formal education in beauty work led to dominant populations establishing salon chains and franchises, and allowing men from other castes to take up this work. Parlors and chains/franchises in India are intermediaries that replace the traditional dyadic relationship between barbers and customers. The participation of those higher up in the social hierarchy is limited to owning parlor chains/franchises while those who do the actual work are drawn from vulnerable populations. Unlike barbershops, salons also have the option of offering unisex services. On-demand beauty platforms are new players in grooming/beauty work. It must be noted that the target clientele for all three categories—shops, salon chains, and franchises are different. It is in this context that we ask, how do men in grooming work, on and off the platform, perceive platform work? Since “men” is not a homogeneous category, we take an intersectional approach to understand the impact of platformization of these services on historically marginalized men groups, and Nais, in particular.
Methodology
The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns imposed across the world propelled social scientists, especially those employing ethnographic methods, to reimagine what fieldwork might look like and entail. The forced seclusion and uneven distribution of labor in the home that became glaringly obvious during the pandemic, the neoliberal academia and its insistence on productivity, and the masculinist assumptions underpinning anthropology, prompted Günel et al. (2020) to propose patchwork ethnography as an alternative to classic ethnography. They contend that novel ethnographic practices such as online ethnography, multi-sited ethnography, and auto-ethnography emerge from the needs of the research subjects. They propose patchwork ethnography to acknowledge how researchers’ lives and multiple identities could (re)shape what is understood as valid ethnographic work. Noting how “family obligations, precarity, other hidden, stigmatized, or unspoken factors—and now COVID-19—have made long-term, in-person fieldwork difficult” Günel et.al., propose “a new way to acknowledge and accommodate how researchers’ lives in their full complexity shape knowledge” (Günel et al., 2020, np).
Given the inter-subjective relationship between the researcher and the researched and the interdependencies thereof, we extend the scope of patchwork ethnography to acknowledge the identities and commitments of both. The short, fragmented but intensive engagement with participants endorsed by the authors to account for the researcher’s personal and professional commitments, reflects the nature of jobs the workers are involved in–piecemeal work or gigs that are short but involve intensive labor in India (as elsewhere). The method is best suited since it closely reflects workers’ lives.
Part of a larger project on men in platformized domestic work and beauty work, and their positioning toward platform work, this article examines the experiences of men in platformized beauty work. The first author conducted the fieldwork in the metropolitan city of Hyderabad, South India (popularly known as the second “Silicon Valley” of India). As a “local,” she is proficient in Hindi and Telugu, the most spoken languages in Hyderabad. Patchwork ethnography complemented by life history-based semi-structured interviews and participant observation (wherever possible) across the following categories yielded rich insights:
Leaders, NBYS
As Randeria (2010) notes, low castes have historically been self-governing groups/communities. In contrast to the colonizers’ conception of modern law and constitutional justice, law and justice in India have always been caste/community-driven. These caste-community associations that predate colonization continue to have authority and jurisdiction over their members. Nais in Telangana are governed by their caste associations, such as Telangana Nayee Brahmin, Telangana State Nayee Brahmins Co-operative Societies Federation or Nai Brahmin Rashtra Sangham (NBRS) that specify the ground rules of the profession to safeguard the interests and livelihoods of Nai in Telangana. NBRS promotes learning and entrepreneurship among Nais. The interviews with leaders of NBRS’s youth wing—the NBYS were conducted in a training center set up by the organization that also includes a “saloon.” The first author visited this center multiple times to observe the rhythms of their work. One of the leaders of NBYS, Naresh, had also worked with UC as a trainer for a short while.
Salon Owners
To get a broad understanding of the industry, the first author tapped into her network(s) and spoke with two salon owners.
Salon Workers
The first author made multiple visits to two local unisex shops and one high-end salon. Frequenting an all-Muslim local salon (owned by a Muslim who only hires Muslim migrant men as workers) gave us access to Muslim migrant workers. These workers also gave us insights into the caste system among Muslims.
This study draws on three complementary theoretical frameworks—decolonial theory, entangled modernities (Randeria, 2010), and platform mobilities (Gibbings et al., 2022). A decolonial approach does away with easy dichotomies such as masculine, feminine, Western, non-Western/de-Western. We consciously move away from the term “dewesternising” since it has the effect of setting up “West” versus Non-West or as the “Non-West” following the development path set by the “West” or treating the entire Non-West/Global South as homogeneous.
In line with this mode of thinking, we draw on an entangled modernities approach that rejects the idea that modernity originated in Europe, only for it to have spread to the Global South, albeit slightly differently owing to the variations in national/ cultural context. Randeria (2010) proposes multiple modernities to flag how law and constitutional justice did not “spread” to non-Western contexts. In India, different caste-communities have always had their self-governing associations that predate colonization to dispense justice. Furthermore, as we elaborate in section “Home as a Symbol of Servitude: Historical Trauma of Nai-Barbers,” the entanglement of colonization and caste politics continues to have implications for the Nai community.
We also draw on the platform mobilities approach that explicates how people’s mobilities (whether spatial or economic) are entangled with the historical and cultural. Technologically-enabled platforms do not suddenly “open up” unrestricted movement and access to opportunities. As stated above, identity vectors such as gender, caste, and race among others mediate people’s experiences of platform work.
The history of barberwork (section “Locating Men in Beauty Work”) and its feminization provide compelling evidence of the entangled global and regional linkages, justifying our choice of theories and further attended to in the relevant sections. We situate this “local” paper not as an exception to the dominant theorizing about the platform economy but as an unpacking of how the study of men in beauty work in India contributes to an intersectional understanding of the global transformation of work and feminization of platform work. Global here, is understood not as a contrast to other contexts but as comparative, plural, overlapping, and entangled. Given the global formation and functioning of care chains, such an approach is befitting.
Data Collection
The method of oral and process consent (Ellis, 2007) was adopted, with participants being informed that they had every right to decline to answer any questions at any point, retract statements, or rephrase what they may have said if needed. Workers were offered a compensation/mobile recharge of Rs. 500 for their time. Anonymity was offered to all the participants in the study. Please refer to Table 1 for further details.
Details of the Service Providers Interviewed.
The first author ensured that the translations from the transcription agency were accurate. Although the quotes are grammatically incorrect, literal, and colloquial, we made minimal effort to correct them since they reflect the context of the participants and the transcriber(s).
To capture the everydayness of such articulations that are otherwise not paid attention to due to the workers’ location, we relied on the small story approach to analysis, apart from the usual note-taking and memo-writing approach. Small stories are an umbrella-term that covers a gamut of under-represented narrative activities, such as tellings of ongoing events, future or hypothetical events, shared (known) events, but also allusions to tellings, deferrals of tellings, and refusals to tell. These tellings are typically small when compared to the pages and pages of transcript of interview narratives. (Georgakopoulou, 2006, p. 123)
Our initial codes were caste, dignity, humiliation, entrepreneurship, challenges in platform work, and the history of Nais. The interviewees would start to circle back to issues already discussed, for instance, caste, within and across interviews, not because ideas had been exhausted but because of their centrality to the issues at hand. Owen’s (1984) recurrence (making note of similar ideas), redundancy (same words and phrases), and forcefulness (vocal emphasis) proved to be useful in analyzing the rich data, structuring the paper in terms of workers positioning toward platform work along the spectrum of co-optation, resistance, and rejection, and organizing it around the central analytical theme—work location (private home and public barbershop).
Findings and Discussion
Unlike food delivery, a service created by digital intermediation, beauty work has a long and checkered past marked by caste and colonization. It should come as no surprise that when “modern” technologies collide with caste, old histories and new dynamics emerge that beg to be studied. Therefore, we begin with the specific histories and experiences of Nais, their entry into platform work and experiences, before moving on to the experiences of men in brick-and-mortar salons and their positioning toward platformized beauty work.
Home as a Symbol of Servitude: Historical Trauma of Nai-Barbers
Nais were once minor surgeons, ritual specialists, and barbers. Although Nais were (and a few continue to) be matchmakers, musicians, and assistants to Brahmins (therefore called Nai-brahmins) in a variety of ceremonial events and rituals, their main occupation remains barberwork. It is no wonder, then, that they keenly feel the loss of a more complex and socially connected role that is now reduced to that of a barber—this has an impact on how they perceive platform work.
The thriving oral cultures among Nais remind them of their glory days when they were surgeons and healers. Yugandhar, leader, NBYS, says that their rich history and lost glory are passed down from one generation to another in the form of songs and stories: We have a rich history in almost all arts and science. Sushrutha, a Nai Brahmin was the first surgeon doctor. He designed equipment for doing surgeries which helps to cut skin and hairs. Until then no one used to cut hairs. Patients feel relaxed if they listen to music during surgery, hence Nais invented music equipment also and started playing music. They are good at surgeries, introduced haircuts, and have talent in music, and taught the same to their people and the next generations . . . We lost everything except the hair-cutting business, which is considered galeeju [dirty]. (Yugandhar)
The diminishing role of barbers has its roots in two parallel movements—the colonizers’ changing views on the role of barbers (please see section “Locating Men in Beauty Work”) and the Indian elites’ (upper caste/upper class) efforts to standardize Ayurveda (Rai, 2019). Unlike barber-surgeons in Europe who could choose between barber work and medicine/surgery, barber-surgeons in India could not do so on account of their caste and financial conditions. Concomitantly, upper caste elites favored the standardization and institutionalization of medicine and Ayurveda to keep lower castes from practising them. Colleges were set up to teach Ayurveda in languages not accessible to low-caste communities including Nais who, up until then, practiced many kinds of indigenous medical treatments.
Forced out of their other roles, they were forced to go from home to home offering services to upper caste and class populations: We lived a life of servitude. We had to go to Patel, Reddy, Saukari’s (upper caste masters and leaders) homes when they called on us. They would say “Go call that Mangalodu
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.” The tone was disrespectful . . . They would kick us out as soon as the service was rendered because we are dirty . . . We were humiliated . . . treated with no dignity . . . Eventually, we thought, why must we go to someone’s home and suffer? Our elders decided we would hang a mirror near rachabanda
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and do our work. Anyone in need of our services would have to come to that place. From there we moved on to madigelu—shops without shutters. As we progressed, we started having shutter shops. (Yugandhar)
For Nais, customers’ homes are a symbol of servitude. It is where their ancestors suffered humiliation and indignity. Barbershop, on the hand, is associated with freedom, dignity, self-esteem and reliance. As Dalit scholars remind us, humiliation can only be felt by those who enjoy a valued identity (Jogdand, 2015). The full import of platformization that relocates work from barbershop to home and why Nais find it humiliating can be traced back to the multiple entanglements of colonization and caste politics that have led to the diminishing role of the once highly-skilled Nais in Hindu society.
Private Home to Public “Saloon” and Back: From Entrepreneurship to Platform Mediated Servitude
Women workers in beauty gig work have been able to leverage technology-based digital platform work to expand their client networks, gain respect at familial and societal levels, and find dignity in work (Komarraju et al., 2022; Raval & Pal, 2019). Nais and NBYS leaders, however, do not associate tech-based platform work with progress but see it as a reversal of hard-earned freedom from servitude: We have worked hard to get out of the servitude that we did twenty, thirty years ago. Now you use the latest technology, give us a bag, before we used to carry a pette or kalapa,
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now you give us a bag and ask us to do the same, go from home to home. Aren’t they obstructing our progress? You are reminding us of our past and sending us from door to door . . . We have faced these situations and came out of it . . . just when we are slowly progressing in our lives . . . UC has come to destroy our efforts and the progress of the community. (Yugandhar)
The loss of multiple social roles, lack of education and upward mobility, and now platformization have led to several “dignity injuries” (borrowed from Mahalingam et al., 2019) and humiliation, which informs the positioning of NBYS leaders and Nai workers toward platforms that are forcing Nais back into customers’ homes and servitude. Naresh (leader, NBYS) asks, You think about it, in barber shops or salons, customers wait for their turn. Platform work, customers summon us. How is this progress?
Urging people to appreciate the remarkable progress and dignity the community has been able to achieve in a staggered manner, Yugandhar asserts, From those days we progressed and we have started to set up our shops . . . to live a life of dignity . . . all the customers come to shops. Now you want us to go back to customers’ home? All this platform entrepreneur is a gimmick. (Yugandhar)
The location of work distinguishes entrepreneurship from servitude, as the NBYS leaders emphasize: We run our shops. We create employment for ourselves and if everything goes well, for others . . . Look at this [training centre], I spend Rs. 230 daily to travel to and fro but I do it because we are empowering the next generation with the skills—craft and entrepreneurship. What Urban Company is doing is not self-employment or entrepreneurship . . . It is fancy servitude. From entrepreneurs, we have become banisalu [slaves]
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again . . . (Naresh)
Unfortunately for the Nai community, liberalization opened the possibility of other castes setting up their salons and working in them. Increasing competition, rise of the new middle classes, increasing disposable incomes, and new ideals of beauty and luxury drew upwardly mobile populations away from barbershops. Barbers were left to cater to a niche segment of the lower-middle classes. Now, platforms are beginning to “snatch” whatever little business they are left with.
Platformization threatens the survival of existing barbershops—a symbol of their freedom and entrepreneurial spirit. “Those who survive on shops must pay rent. We don’t want companies like these to destroy them,” Yugandhar states, while emphatically rejecting platform work on behalf of the NBYS and NBRS. It is exactly this tension between staying afloat, earning a livelihood and preserving their (caste) dignity that has led to cognitive dissonance among Nai workers associated with UC.
Only a Stop-Gap Arrangement: Nais Co-Opt Platform Work
Hyderabad is the second “Silicon Valley” of India. With investments pouring in from IT companies, and Non-Resident Indians in the IT sector returning to India, the real estate prices have seen a huge upside. This is accompanied by steadily rising rents, inflation, and electricity charges for both domestic and commercial categories which have made life difficult for small business owners such as barbers. The COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated these issues and workers from across occupations migrated back to their villages. Small and mid-sized salons shut shop during the second-wave of the pandemic. International salon chains implemented salary cuts. By the end of the second-wave, even luxury salons saw the footfall fall by half (Tewari, 2021). In the case of platforms, the easing of lockdowns unlocked a huge demand for home-based grooming services. Workers in the study chose to register with Urban Company as a stop-gap arrangement before better things fell into place but never left due to different pressures of real estate price escalation and the pandemic. It is in this context that these interviews were conducted.
Bangaru (31) joined UC in January 2020. A school dropout, he started working as an apprentice at his grandfather’s shop at 14 for 2 years. Later, he worked at several Nai shops to learn different techniques and meet new people before finally joining his older brothers in Hyderabad who had already set up a “saloon.”
Early in the trade, Bangaru realized that he would have to set up a shop by himself to make ends meet: It has been 10 years since we started the shop. All these years I worked in the shop and now I have come to Urban Clap.
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Rents and bills are increasing, we have families to take care of, one shop is not sufficient for all three. I have been trying to open one more shop for one year. Some shops are worth one lakh, but they will say three lakhs or four lakhs including mirrors and furniture . . . but the shop will run only when the old furniture is replaced to give it a new look. How else will the customer know that a new person has purchased it? But giving such a high rate is a waste . . . If I get a good one, I will buy it.
Kesar (36) has a similar story. Born and brought up in rural Telangana, Kesar eloped with his childhood sweetheart and settled in Hyderabad in 2005. He says it is Nai work that came to his rescue: I learnt this in my native place itself. Relatives are also in this trade . . . I learnt how to handle business in a city saloon. I opened a saloon in 2006 but after nine years I had to close it. After that I worked with somebody else, then after the lockdown, there were a lot of problems with parlours . . . I got an offer from Urban Company, and I joined.
Familial responsibilities and the added expenses of “customers wanting fancy stuff and environment” led to the closure of his shop. Even with the most necessities, Bangaru estimates a shop’s monthly expenses are anywhere between 30,000 and 40,000. With the increasing demand for home services, this is not the right time to attempt a new venture, say both.
Shyam (33) and his brother-in-law moved to Hyderabad in 2010. They set up a barbershop “better than many.” Like Kesar, added expenses following the birth of his child, and the expectations of customers meant that he needed to get better at what he was doing. He pursued an expensive certificate course in hairdressing, using up his savings in the process. Having lost his job during the pandemic, he joined UC. Like the others, he dreams of setting up his shop but to make ends meet, he needs to stay on the platform. He also admits, There is no cross-gender service in UC. I appreciate that. That is why I was willing. They also said we won’t be working for anyone, that we are partners. That was also attractive. We Nais are meant to run our own shops. That is our duty, not working under someone.
Workers have different motivations to join platform work: Lack of employment opportunities elsewhere, job loss due to the pandemic, better income, and dignity of work. Urban Company is only a stop-gap arrangement and they remain hopeful that they will be able to run their shops one day. This is comparable to young on-demand domestic workers in South Africa who also consider platform work to be a temporary arrangement till better things fall into place (Kalla, 2022). It is important to note the caste dynamics that make the status of being a “self-employed” gig worker or “microentrepreneur” less entrepreneurial and a stop-gap arrangement.
Navigating On-Demand Work: Platforms, Customers, and Caste
Platforms like Urban Company have positioned themselves as an elegant solution to unemployment. By leveraging digital technology, platforms facilitate microentrepreneurship, professionalization, and dignity of work. The discursive construction of such claims happens through terminology like “independent contractors,” “service partners’’ or “self-employed service professionals.’’ Working for one’s self is indeed attractive but workers are quickly disabused of that notion as soon they start work: When I owned my shop, it was different. We decided the timings of the shop; we would leave in case of emergencies. It is different, working for yourself. They [UC] described it like this when I joined but no, we must be at their beck and call. When we indicate our unavailability, there are calls from the company asking why are you not working. If we are late, customers call and the company questions. They banned me once but then there was so much demand that they lifted the ban. It is all their wish . . . With Company [UC], rules change. Sometimes, you can do this, other times you can’t. All of us are left scratching our heads . . . You must be on your feet constantly. (Shyam)
Three issues are being flagged here: limited personal autonomy, surveillance and constantly changing terms and conditions that have been a thorny issue for workers across contexts. Surveillance in platform work extends to all aspects of work—frequency of (non)availability, their dressing (uniform), time allocated and charges for services, and even the relationship between customer and service provider. Scholarship in the area already speaks to the blended supervision by three key players—platform managers, customers, and algorithms (Komarraju et al., 2022). In contrast, Nais are not just “service providers” but owners and decision-makers in their shops. If the shop is big enough, Nais are also employers and mediators between their employees and customers. Once Nais enter platform work, the dynamics and relationship between customers and Nais change due to three reasons: (1) Relocating service from the barbershop to the customer’s home, (2) the design of the platform calling for ratings and reviews from customers which in turn determine whether the service provider can continue working on the platform and the leads (gigs) he gets, resulting in (3) Platform work reconstituting a culture of servitude marked by a master-slave relationship that has long pervaded home-based work in India (Komarraju et al., 2022): Customers have an undue advantage on platforms . . . They give reviews. They rate us. If we are late by a minute, if we ask many questions. if we dilly-dally post-service
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. . . if we take too much time setting up our table or search for products, we get low ratings . . . best to follow the cue of the customers but even that doesn’t ensure good ratings. (Shyam)
While the workers were initially hesitant to talk about customers (given how they were recruited for the study), they delved into this aspect once trust was established. For instance, workers make it a point to carry their water bottles. On occasion when they request customers to replenish their bottles, they pass off tap water as filter water rather than enter the kitchen where water purifiers are generally installed. While workers did not make the connection to caste, it isn’t much of a stretch to imagine that some customers may think it is polluting to carry water bottles used by Nais into their kitchen.
Bangaru says that even in shops one would have to handle difficult customers but they wouldn’t be humiliated in other ways such as customers keeping an eye on every movement of theirs. “It is
Lee (2017) notes in the context of Dalit histories that caste functions as a spatial-sensory order. While entry into a customer’s home could be read as a loosening of the spatial order of caste, workers mention how customers have a designated room with an attached bathroom to minimize workers’ access to the rest of their home as much as possible. It is crucial to acknowledge here that the discrimination faced by Dalits is not comparable to that of Nais who are placed above Dalits in caste hierarchy. However, Nais are stigmatized as “disease spreaders” and “dirty” because of the nature of their work.
Platforms may afford economic and social mobility; however, the experiences of Nais offer us insights into how these mobilities are not completely unrestricted. As Gibbings et al. (2022) observe, although platform mobilities often employ a rhetoric of unrestricted flow across time and space, the movements of people and technologies associated with them are in fact entangled in the social, political, economic, and ethical relationships that characterise the places in which they operate, and in unexpected ways. (Gibbings et al., 2022, p. 637)
Thus, despite ostensibly enabling entrepreneurship and economic and social mobility, platforms reproduce, reify, and reconfigure local social inequities and precarities. Platform mobilities are structured by (pre)existing hierarchies and relationships.
Limits to the Glass Escalator Effect: Income Disparities Between Women and Men in On-Demand Beauty Work
Early scholarship on work and/in organizations notes that men who enter feminized occupations (jobs categorized as feminine and overrepresented by women) find it easier to ascend in their careers and are also paid more. This is referred to as the glass escalator effect (Snyder & Green, 2008). However, men’s experiences in on-demand beauty work point to the limitations of this effect: Ladies’ service has a very good income. They can earn up to 80000 or 1 lakh or 1,20,000. . . They have a wide variety of services . . . Most men only opt for shaving and cutting, which is 250 and 150. Rs. 400, on this a commission of 50. Before corona, there was some demand for clean-up, facial, pedicure, manicure. If it is those services, it will be almost 800, 1200, 1500 and above. Usually, 80% Cutting shaving requests, 20% facials, cleanups, de-tans. (Bangaru)
Kesar adds, The [women’s services] demand is very high . . . if they do service for 30 to 40 people . . . because the charges are high . . . It is not so with men . . . We might get several leads but they are for smaller services.
The volume of leads, then, does not guarantee income. It is the total value of services that determines how much money one makes. Apart from income disparity because of (1) differently priced men’s and women’s services, and (2) greater demand for women’s services, there is also the issue with what professionalization of work means. Platforms do not offer the possibility of deepening skills or upskilling: They hire workers with experience. Their training is more about how we are when we join duty and go to the customer place, how we must be, how we must behave, they will teach all that. We must speak well in front of the customer; we must speak with respect. We should not speak in an arrogant way. They will teach all that. (Kesar)
Shyam argues, In this business, we must keep ourselves updated about the latest styles, especially now with TikTok generation. Company does not concern itself so much with craft.
Evidently, the glass escalator effect is not uniformly available to all men in feminized work and needs to be contextualized. Despite regular demand, the ritual and functional nature of men’s grooming (such as cutting and shaving) severely limits workers’ earning capacity. Further, unlike in brick-and-mortar salons where workers can progress from being regular hairstylists to expert hairstylists, and earn more by moving from single-sex services to unisex services, there are few opportunities for “promotion” or “upskilling” in platform work. The scope for career progression or escalation is limited in platformized beauty work.
Brick-and-Mortar Salon Workers Reject Platform Work
The quality of other jobs available (pay, work conditions, and the level of regulation) determines how workers perceive platform work. Men working in mid-sized and high-end brick-and-mortar salons find that their “employee” status has several benefits: We are guaranteed a monthly income plus commission on services we offer. The higher the value of services, the higher the commission. It’s a win-win. We don’t buy or procure products . . . we are paid for overtime. Our salaries were affected during the pandemic. But our owner [not employer] assured us she would not lay us off. We are seeing a slow uptick in customers. It is not up to the pre-pandemic but we will get there. (Avee)
There is also the element of convenience. Workers point to how platform workers travel from one customer location to another, regardless of the heat, cold, and rain, all the while lugging around heavy equipment, only to be judged by the customers and penalized by platforms for what the customers rate as poor service.
It is not all about finances either. Workers in brick-and-mortar salons/shops clarify that only those men who are “desperate because of financial burdens or constraints” (Jacob) take up platform work. Passionate workers would not because the scope to learn and grow is limited. Avee (a Nai himself who learnt the craft from his brother) says that even those who have not or could not afford to learn beauty work could join a barbershop or salon and learn on the job. Santosh concurs, If we don’t know any work, we start as helpers . . . Cleaning and stocking trolleys, rolling the towels . . . Then slowly hair washing is taught—how to hold hair, massage, dry hair, then colouring, then basic cutting, and styling. Over time it is taught.
Jacob only likes working for high-end salons because they facilitate the upskilling of workers: We go to conferences. Travel and accommodation are paid for. Sometimes, top beauty technicians and aestheticians hold classes in our salons.
Nawaz says that a distinct advantage of non-platform work is the bond they create with one another and how he considers everyone working in the salon his bhais (brothers), so much so that the only competition that exists is in terms of learning the skill. It is not uncommon for the workers to cooperate to meet their monthly targets, say Azeez and Avee. The structured individualism and isolated nature of platform work do not allow for such peer bonding, despite efforts by platform workers to connect and mobilize informally on other social platforms. Nais are an exception to the rule because they already have a caste association to depend on to mobilize themselves.
Concluding Thoughts: Feminization of Platform Work
At the heart of this article and Nai workers’ lamentation, is the site of work—“home.” Historically, home-based care services have been undervalued because of their association with the feminine and owing to their “private” nature, they have escaped regulation. Questions about class, caste, and gender are still unresolved within these private spaces. “Home” (of the customer) remains a conduit of oppression and humiliation for marginalized populations who supply a ready army of labor to manage the boundary work that the middle classes find so distasteful to perform themselves.
For Nais too, home remains a symbol of servitude despite the economic mobility afforded by platform work. UC and any other platform like it are regarded as
While a few works broaden the scope of feminization as “declining terms and conditions of employment” (Phizacklea & Wolkowitz, 1995, p. 3), these theorizations fail to capture why Nais find platform work as a reversal of their progress. The rejection of platform work by Nai leaders and the cognitive dissonance Nais in platform work experience is rooted in caste histories and colonization. There is a need to go beyond this specific temporal context to understand what specificities of platform work Nais find humiliating. It is crucial to situate feminization within the context of coloniality (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2014) and the casticization of power to understand the lived experiences of Nais in platform work today. Further, caste-based humiliation must be accounted for in conversations about platformization and conditions of work that lead to feminization of certain sectors. For about a fifth of the world’s population, caste identity is a major determining factor in what life opportunities are made available to them (Sanil, 2024). Yet, it has not received significant attention in scholarship.
We locate the process of ritualized “feminization” of the platform economy governing care/beauty platforms to its colonial legacy and caste politics that marginalize Indian males who are employed generationally and otherwise, in this line of work.
Global supply chains and circuits of labor cannot be investigated without recognizing and understanding entangled histories. A critical translation (recalling Chakrabarty, 2000) of what platforms offer to diverse populations is necessary to overcome the multiple binaries that theorizations are often caught between—(1) Western epistemologies and epistemologies of the South; (2) parochial claims of Asian theories or Southern theories. Such an approach also serves to build global solidarities of workers across borders. As Randeria (2010) reminds us, and hopefully we have demonstrated through the shared histories of barbers across the world, one must acknowledge the global (inter)dependencies and entanglements of social and colonial histories. The experiences of workers scattered across the globe must be grounded in these entangled modernities. Our aim is not to reconcile and balance transnational and regional linkages but to map out co-existing tensions. The messy realities of Nais who may not like platform work and yet are embedded within it, the discomfort of co-existence and potentially contesting narratives serve as points of analyses. These messy realities are not meant to be reconciled with or resolved because people have always lived with contradictions.
Technological affordances are context-specific, as we see in the case of Nais, shaping and being shaped by the local socio-cultural particularities. To understand the motivations and drivers behind user practices with platforms, any discussion on affordances and technological properties must also center the social [infra]structures that condition user behaviors, including caste or community-driven logics. Much of why people do what they do is driven by historical and legacy practices, identity politics, group belonging, and relational dynamics. By examining the enduring impact of colonization and caste on work and workers, we hope this study will catalyze explorations/work with thick descriptions of the specificities of the geographical, historical, and cultural contexts in which communities of workers are situated to understand their choices and decision-making on an everyday level through platforms and how this might complicate or deepen our understanding of theories such as feminization, regardless of where they emerge from (Global North/Global South). The social is key to understanding the technological.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We are indebted to co-editors Elaine Jingyan Yuan and Lin Zhang, and the two engaged reviewers for their detailed and thoughtful suggestions throughout the review process. Collectively, they pushed us to clarify our ideas and think deeper about their implications. Earlier versions of this manuscript were presented at Southern Center for Inequality Studies, Academy of Management conference 2023, and National Communication Association 2024. A special note of thanks and appreciation to CDMC-MICA for housing this project.
Data availability
The data supporting this study are not publicly available due to ethical and confidentiality constraints. Anonymized participant quotes are included in the article in accordance with the informed consent provided. No further data can be shared.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The first author gratefully acknowledges research support from the Southern Center for Inequality Studies, University of Witwatersrand.
Ethical Approval
The research has received ethical clearance from the Human Research Ethics Committee Non-medical at the University of the Witwatersrand (H21/07/07).
Consent to Participate
Verbal, processual consent from all participants was taken.
Consent for Publication
Informed consent for publication was provided by all the participants on the condition of anonymity. The quotes included in the paper are therefore appropriately anonymized.
