Abstract
This article examines capital–labour relations within location-based gig work in India, with a focus on the COVID-19 pandemic. The crisis of the pandemic exacerbated unemployment and created opportunities for platform services to expand, as consumers relied on digital platforms for their needs. This article assesses conditions across three gig services—food delivery, ride hailing and beauty work—based on interviews with 23 gig workers in the Delhi–National Capital Region in India and five organizers of gig worker collectives. The article discusses how workers’ incomes were cut even as they were exposed to higher risks to health and safety, and was accompanied by higher control exerted over their labour ostensibly for the safety of consumers. This control—both algorithmic and bodily—over workers derived its legitimacy from social hierarchies of caste and class between workers and consumers, and between workers and the platform. The article reveals a remarkable similarity in how workers fared across sectors, despite different classifications as essential or non-essential services. It establishes the significance of the pandemic to amplifying processes of labour commodification and labour control in gig work, ultimately contributing to antagonism between platforms and workers and to an emergent class politics of gig workers.
Introduction
This article examines the impact of the pandemic on gig workers with a focus on the relation between labour and capital in the platform model. Studies in political economy have often examined crises for their impact on social relations of production and reproduction, for instance, after the 2008 financial crisis (Narotzky & Besnier, 2014). This article similarly unpacks how the political economy of this crisis impacted gig work, in particular sharpening the capital–labour relation through the exercise of greater labour control of gig workers by platforms. The article considers how the legitimacy for such control intensified during the pandemic, in which the social hierarchies between workers, platforms and consumers enabled processes of labour commodification and exploitation.
The platform model of work characterized by short-term gigs contracted over digital platforms has expanded over the last few years globally. The relation between platforms and workers, however, remains contested over whether workers should be categorized as self-employed as platforms suggest, or as employees as many labour groups maintain (De Stefano, 2021, 2015; Gandini, 2019; Stylogiannis, 2021). In India, legal classifications of gig work were taken up by worker collectives during the peak of the pandemic in 2021, at a time when gig workers’ mobilizations grew as a result of poor working conditions, with demands made for better income and social security from platforms and the state. As this article demonstrates, during the pandemic, the platforms’ power considerably expanded while labour came to be constrained. The pandemic created fertile ground—economically and socially—for the introduction of policies that heightened existing asymmetries between platforms and workers; for instance, through new forms of labour control and disciplining of workers that were enforced in the guise of health and safety, rather than productivity.
Sudden and repeated lockdowns in India pushed a large amount of the workforce out of previous jobs (Abraham & Basole, 2022), and many took to gig work in food delivery. Food delivery came to be classified as essential work, and thus continued through the peak of the pandemic, while other gig workers in ride hailing, beauty and other services navigated the loss of income without state or platform support (see Medappa, this issue). Where and when work was available, it was accompanied by high levels of risk, such as delivering food to those who were sick without adequate protections for workers. Rising unemployment rates meant that workers on platforms continued despite the obvious risk to their health, while their dispensability to the platform was made evident.
In India, as well as globally, capital–labour relations in the gig economy are part of the informalization of labour, where the onus of risk and responsibility in work lies on workers themselves. Such informalization takes root within new forms of work, in jobs that are created by platforms that operate within the formal economy, suggesting the blurriness between categories of formal and informal (Agarwala, 2009; Breman, 2021; Harriss-White, 2010). Platform messaging and advertisements, however, emphasize that gig workers are being lifted out of informalization (see Figure 1), through distinct social relations of partnership established between platforms and workers which affords a new dignity to ‘partners’. 1 This discourse of development through entrepreneurship has been vital and influential to platform entry in the Global South (Pollio, 2019). The expanse of insecurity in contemporary work including gig work can, however, not be accounted for without noting the significance of digital technologies and catastrophic events such as the pandemic in shaping it. The case, however, for both—technology and global events—as being fundamentally transformative has been overstated. A more considered approach explores the role of technological interventions in legitimizing and reproducing structures of class, but also race and gender (Huws, 2012). It is in this context that the pandemic offers an important moment of evaluation to understand the nature of relations between platforms and workers and the impact of the crisis on capital–labour relations.
This article adds to such scholarship by examining the impact of the pandemic on the commodification and exploitation of labour in the platform economy. Platforms are considered here as capitalist enterprises in which their digital infrastructure determines how work and consumption are undertaken. While processes of commodification and exploitation have been part of the landscape of gig work even prior to the pandemic, this crisis offers an analytical vantage point, to understand them as they operate in an amplified manner. The capital–labour relation in the platform economy is shaped by forms of control exercised by platforms that rely on both technological and social hierarchies, both of which were exacerbated at the time of the pandemic. This resulted in antagonistic capital–labour relations and contributed to an emergent class consciousness among gig workers who mobilized in this period.
Methods
To analyse this structuring of the capital–labour relation, I draw on qualitative interviews conducted with gig workers across three location-based forms of gig work: ride hailing, food delivery and beauty/spa work. Focusing on geographically bound/location-based forms of gig work enables a consideration of the impact of the pandemic on forms of work that demanded physical interaction during a time when this was restricted. The three sectors were chosen for the distinction between them in credentials required for work, costs of entry, prior experience needed to work and the gender representation within them. 2 Both food delivery and ride hailing are dominated by men, while beauty and spa work, within the larger home services offerings, see a higher representation of women workers. Despite these distinctions, including gender, as the article demonstrates, the impact of the pandemic on capital–labour relations across sectors was remarkably similar.
I use qualitative in-depth interviews with 23 gig workers across the three sectors, and with five organizers and union and worker collective representatives, as well as an analysis of social media posts of gig workers, and policy and discourse of platforms, to understand the pandemic and its impact on gig work. Interviews were conducted between May 2020 and October 2021. Workers were contacted both through interactions in locations where they were working/resting—typically outside malls or restaurants—as well as through snowball sampling techniques. Social media posts about the research were also used to contact workers across sectors. Lockdown restrictions and extended work hours of gig workers meant that most interviews were typically conducted over the phone, although some of the interviews, especially with organizers, took place in person. Interviews were largely conducted in Hindi, with the exception of two interviews—one conducted in English and one in Tamil, with translation services used for the latter. While the initial aim was to interview workers based in the Delhi–National Capital Region, four workers interviewed were based in the cities of Mumbai, Chennai and Bhagalpur. Respondents in food delivery and ride hailing were men, while all respondents from beauty and spa work were women. All but one of the union organizers interviewed were based in Delhi.
The average duration of work on platforms was 3.9 years, based on the responses of 18 respondents who were engaged in platform work prior to the pandemic. Four respondents had taken to gig work during the pandemic itself and one respondent could not indicate when she had begun gig work though she had worked in the beauty sector for over 10 years. The article uses workers’ experiences of changes in platform policy during the pandemic, and their relationship to consumers and platforms, to unpack the dynamic of the capital–labour relation experienced during the pandemic in the gig economy.
Platforms and Employment in India
Gig work, as a form of short-term work, is not an unfamiliar model of work in the Indian context. The duration and terms of work align it closely with informal work, a sector that is prominent in India with 93% of the working population engaged in informal work (Agarwala, 2009; Nagaraj & Kapoor, 2022). This includes a large number of workers engaged in forms of casualized work or self-employment with workers bearing the risks associated with work.
It is in this context that gig work contracted through digital platforms emerged in India. While the promise of the ‘sharing economy’ (Schor, 2014; Sundararajan, 2016) marked its arrival in the Global North, in the Global South the sharing ethic has been ‘fundamentally contingent and messy’ (Majumdar, 2021, p. 242). Even as gig work was similar to employment in the informal economy, digital platforms suggested they were different, providing flexibility and an opportunity for enterprise and enabling a transition for service workers from the informal economy into a new formalized space of digital platforms. In India, therefore, a discourse of empowerment and entrepreneurship has accompanied the entry of digital platforms. As Irani (2019) argues, shifts in the development discourse have recast development from the domain of planning expertise and the state to a project with the entrepreneurial citizen at its helm. This discourse underscores an important aspect of the platform model in the Global South, which has been to establish that the relation between platforms and workers is a partnership in which consumers, through their patronage of platforms, contribute to the economic empowerment of self-employed workers (Pollio, 2019).
However, as recent scholarship has highlighted, gig work remains far from a partnership or form of self-employment, falling more within the domain of non-standard employment (De Stefano, 2021; Stylogiannis, 2021). The contested term here is that of ‘employment’ itself, with platforms keen to highlight that their role is limited to aggregation and does not include direct oversight over conditions of work. As has been evident through gig workers’ struggles globally, this is a central issue on which much of the experience of gig work and the financial interests of platforms rest. Challenges to this arrangement threaten to upend the ‘lean’ model of platforms, which aims to minimize financial burdens by avoiding any responsibilities towards workers. In July 2020, Zomato, a leading food delivery platform in India, listed publicly and released a Red Herring Prospectus outlining the financial risks imminent if workers on the platform come to be recognized as employees under Indian law (Zomato, 2021, pp. 59–60). Even though platforms in India consider policy changes enhancing workers’ rights as a threat to their business model, there is no guarantee that even if recognized such rights would be enforced. For instance, in sectors such as manufacturing, enterprises merely hire more contract workers to replace regular workers as a means of circumventing labour laws and their enforcement (Sapkal, 2016).
Gig work shares many features with informal work, which transfers risks associated with safety and health and volatilities of income onto workers, and away from businesses and the state. In countries of the Global South where such informality has been the norm, digital informality both extends and contends with more traditional forms of informality (Endo, 2021; Nair & Divyadarshi, 2022; Soporanzetti, 2021). More recently, Indian state policy has moved towards formalizing enterprises while work remains informalized (Nagaraj & Kapoor, 2022), with policy contributing towards ‘disempowering labour’. This is seen for instance in the de-regulation of labour undertaken in the new Labour Codes introduced in September 2020 (Sood, 2020). Gig work—where regulatory interventions have been minimal—has continued to function without any changes in how risks and responsibility for the safety and health of workers are apportioned, despite the pandemic. However, recognizing the expansion of gig work, the state introduced (but has yet to implement) in 2020 a Social Security Code which recognizes gig workers under the law and obligates platforms to contribute to their social security costs, even as regulation of labour conditions itself remains unaddressed. 3 It is these labour conditions which became the grounds for worker mobilization during the pandemic, and for which workers have been making demands of both platforms and the state for intervention.
Capital Expansion and a Crowded Labour Market
A key feature of the platform model is to ensure a supply of labour on platforms to meet the rising demand for services. Though costs are undertaken by workers to enter the platform economy, in the early period of platform operations, workers were attracted by the high weekly payments they received and the low commission rates charged by platforms. With few costs incurred by platforms in signing on new workers, platforms have been steadily on-boarding workers. The availability of workers further increased with the pandemic because many turned to gig work after the loss of other jobs (Mukul, 2021).
The nature of the first lockdown introduced in India, announced by the government with only a four-hour notice, led to the severe loss of jobs and livelihoods in both the formal and informal economies. Typically, gig-based food delivery drew in workers from both the formal and informal sectors during the lockdown, because it was the only form of geographically bound work that remained steadily available. ‘@deliverybhoy’, 4 a food delivery worker in Mumbai, with a background in web design and marketing, lost his job during the first lockdown and found gig work by googling for jobs he could secure in a day. ‘Vinod’, a gig worker in Bhagalpur, a Tier III city in India, similarly found gig work to tide him over, after losing his job as a teacher in a private school during the pandemic. The costs of entry in food delivery were affordable for them, but since food delivery could now also be done using cycles and did not rely on skills and training like beauty or transport work, it also drew in other new entrants who were not as financially secure. Those with education credentials, such as Vinod and @deliverybhoy, saw their reliance on food delivery gig work as specific to the pandemic, with the hope to return to their previous jobs or sectors, as the situation improved.
Alongside widespread job losses which drove people to gig work, the pandemic also created additional opportunities for food delivery platforms to expand their workforce, through tie-ups with other platforms affected by the lockdowns. For instance, during the first nationwide lockdown in 2020, food delivery platforms came to be classified as ‘essential work’ and sub-contracted food delivery to logistics platforms that were otherwise unable to operate in the period. Platforms also relied on this new workforce to act as strike-breakers and to undercut the bargaining power of their own workers.
Ride-hailing platforms did not see a similar expansion in gig workers during the pandemic because the entry of workers into this sector is shaped by higher entry costs and previous work experience. Workers in the sector were left without platform support during the lockdown (see Figure 2), with most noting that they logged in and sought work for longer hours to compensate for their losses, once lockdowns were lifted.
Similarly, for beauty services platforms, high costs of entry and experience had limited the size of the workforce prior to the pandemic. While the platform Urban Company (henceforth UC) had previously recruited skilled beauty workers with work experience, in July 2019, the company signed a memorandum of understanding with the Indian government to partner on its Skill India programme (Dash, 2019). This initiative introduced the platform to a new set of gig workers accredited under the state’s skilling programmes. The impact of this was felt by beauty workers after the lockdowns were lifted. As ‘Rima’, a beauty worker, noted:
When I joined Urban Company in 2018 there was a lot of work. I had earned a lot back then. Then I think they have added a lot of people, they have many professionals and have less customers. Three years back we had a lot of work I remember, my income was a lot more back then.
With few other jobs available, the gig workforce expanded, enabling platforms to offer more services. For instance, Swiggy, a food delivery platform, introduced Swiggy Genie—a service for purchasing groceries, delivering home-cooked meals and transporting documents. Platforms were able to capitalize on the pandemic by creating new markets and recruiting new workers.
Workers perceived that some of the platforms’ innovations around pay and customer ratings made labour conditions worse. With platforms not compensating workers for the actual time spent on a task, many found working during the pandemic particularly difficult because the time spent on each gig had increased. ‘Tanwir’, a student who worked part-time on Swiggy, highlighted how the Genie feature was difficult to work on, because Covid-specific rules on the number of people permissible inside a shop at a given time, prolonged the time spent on such tasks. With the end of lockdowns, features such as Genie have continued and have spurred competing features on existing and new platforms. Time is now weaponized as platforms promise high-speed delivery (of under 10 minutes), requiring an increasing pace of work and further risk of accident and injury at low payment rates.
Automated Management
At a time when workers experienced more risk at work during the pandemic, their ability to contest or negotiate the risk was reduced with the introduction of more automated or algorithmic forms of management. While such management is part of the platform model, it was during the pandemic that algorithmic management of the workday came to be expanded. Team Leader and Fleet Manager positions were reduced and replaced by management through the app. Workers found little room to raise or negotiate problems with managers, and they reported spending more time navigating the automated management on platform apps. Instead of being able to call a manager, workers now typically had to report problems through automated forms such as Google Forms or by raising tickets through call centres. ‘Pushpa’, a beauty worker, explained the hassle of this process:
…once we tried to call, they simply made us wait for a really long time, and we are left in bad shape with the wait (halat kharab kardi humari wait kartey kartey). If the ticket is raised, then we need to ask for the code. The support guy says give us the code, then they keep shifting our calls to the profile team, the product team and where all.
She also noted that dependence on the app had risen during the pandemic: ‘Earlier they would manage the app, they would modify things, now what happens is that if somebody has a penalty then they are just done, they don’t listen to you.’ R, an organizer of beauty workers, believed app redesigning was a feature of the lockdown, granting platforms the time to design and implement the remodelled app that was based on more interface engagement. Protocols pertaining to ‘safety’ were also added to the app during this period, requiring workers to provide selfies to show compliance with uniforms and branding, as well as temperature checks and other mandates. These new requirements were in addition to the nudges and alerts workers already received regularly through the apps. However, workers across platforms resented these changes and the automated management system, which they believed did not enhance their safety and also stripped decision-making of any nuance. The distrust of such automated management was also seen in one of the demands raised by striking UC workers in October 2020: to have a human managerial position created around safety (as opposed to a reliance on an SOS button on the app). Automated/algorithmic management had also enabled platforms to control labour through a disembodied but more acute form where movements, comportment and physical health of workers can be monitored.
Labour Control and Devaluation
In addition to increasing their market share through new features and reliance on high-risk labour, platforms used the pandemic to cut workers’ incomes. While such pay cuts were initiated in food delivery services prior to the pandemic, many additional pay cuts took place during the lockdown, with reductions in base rate pay and the removal of incentives resulting in lower incomes for workers. Pandemic rate cuts played a significant role in sharpening relations between capital and labour and indicated to workers that neither were they accorded the social or economic value of ‘partners’ nor could they consider the platform as their partner given that such policies were implemented during a crisis. Food delivery platforms also used the time to push advertisements that called for workers to be recognized as ‘hunger warriors’ (Nair et al., 2020), celebrating them as martyrs. In this complex framing, similar to other care work, food delivery workers were marked as socially integral but reducible to an economic value, which was actively being devalued at the time.
In Delhi, Swiggy introduced a rate cut first in February 2020 and subsequently added a second drastic cut across four cities (Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Hyderabad) where the base rate pay of ₹35 (approximately 43 cents in USD) was reduced to ₹15 (approximately 18 cents). In the NCR, Swiggy compounded this by ending its Smile programme during the lockdown, which gave a ten-rupee coupon daily to workers to redeem through Amazon. Cuts in base rates, surge rates and rising fuel costs severely depressed incomes for workers. This led to protests breaking out in all four cities; a video that went viral of one such protest in Chennai showed a worker lamenting:
Our bodies feel like we were beat up. During the lockdown, we delivered food to Corona patients. We’ve risked our lives doing that. We thought Swiggy would take care of us. If they do this, how will we live? We trusted them. (Kauntia, 2020)
Platforms’ disciplining of protesting workers was swift and severe. Workers in Delhi NCR who had participated in a strike found their IDs blocked; so hurried and arbitrary was the process, that cases of mistaken identity and blocks were common. Despite this, workers attempted to keep the strike going, but for many whose daily earnings through gigs were the main source of family income, especially during the lockdown, continuing to strike was unsustainable. Striking workers also noted the lack of acknowledgement or support from the state during this time. ‘Dharmender’, a worker in Delhi NCR and a strike participant, remarked, ‘Government is not doing anything, government should think about us, that Swiggy is a company of 23 thousand crores only because of us workers, we work under any circumstance…’.
Although conditions of work and incomes were contested in food delivery, workers believed that it was during the pandemic that they felt most exploited. ‘Pasha’, a strike participant noted:
I had a loss of 50 percent … I feel that before the lockdown if I had invested a lot of time in it, like I am doing now, I would have saved up a lot and could have bought some property. Right now, I give so much time, I give 18 hours, back then in 12 hours I would get all the leads and then I would rush home. I would want to do no more because I made up to 1000 rupees every day; we got an incentive and also got monthly [incentives], so we had no tension. We could leave home on time and return home on time. But it needs a lot of time now, one has to set targets, a lot of time is getting expended and I have a loss of 50 percent.
Tied to the loss of incentives and reduction in pay cards was also a ratings system, which according to workers operated arbitrarily. Ratings were not new on platforms, but in the context of the pandemic, they were perceived as a form of labour control that contributed to worsening conditions. Protests by food delivery workers broke out through August and September 2020, with workers suggesting that deteriorating conditions had brought together those desperate for a change. In response, platforms continued to block IDs of protestors and used affiliations with other platforms (in logistics and transport) to continue operations and break the strike. Such measures undercut the bargaining power of workers, and as many struggled financially, the protests faltered. Lower payments are now the norm in food delivery.
Similar problems of changes in pay rates, commissions and ratings were experienced in ride hailing and beauty work. Even as both these forms of work remained suspended during the lockdown, upon reopening workers faced higher commission rates in both as well as lower base payment rates in ride hailing. ‘Rameez’, a driver in Delhi who worked with both Uber and Ola, noted that previous commission rates of 15% had increased steadily to 25% but added—‘they say it is 25% but when we sit to calculate the commission comes up to 30% easily’ 5 . Particularly difficult for workers in both ride hailing and food delivery were the high fuel costs that had been steadily rising since April 2020, throughout the period of the pandemic. As most workers in both sectors drive more than 100 kilometres a day, these prices ate into their already low incomes. For many, the only alternative was to stay on the road longer in search of work, adding to the risk—financial and otherwise—that they undertook.
Beauty workers too by the end of the lockdown encountered substantial changes that contributed to lower incomes and heightened control. Beauty workers were classified into three categories based on their skills and ratings. The categorization of workers accompanied a new standardization in work, with different pay introduced for similar services across categories and changes in commission rates for workers, which at their highest was 30%. Prior to the lockdown, there were only two categories, and workers reported that a steady line of jobs was available. However, with the increase in the number of workers and new categorizations introduced after the lockdown, workers felt pressured to work continuously to be able make the same income they did prior to the lockdowns. ‘Ritu’, a beauty worker, explained the change:
…after the lockdown happened, they started to do gadbad [created a mess] … the commission was 20% before, now it has become 30%, then the credit
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is too much, we also have to spend something on our own travel. Now they block us if we are at 4.7 rating…So, before Covid I could save up significantly, but now it is tough. They have changed categories, I am in Prime, but now there is Lux(ury), Classic—earlier we didn’t have this…They take higher commission from Prime. We have asked the company to have a single category, because we don’t get enough bookings.
The categorization also introduced new standards for workers, expanding the affective labour to be performed. ‘Kamla’ who was placed in the Luxury category elaborated on these changes:
…because I am in Lux (luxury category), that is why we have to take care of everything, our behaviour, our hygiene, our body language, we have to take care of everything. They tell us we have to get ready just like air hostesses, and work like them. Then they need to understand that air hostesses are in an air-conditioned (AC) environment, their make-up doesn’t come off. But we don’t have full time AC. When we work with customers we will definitely sweat. So, we don’t remain in full time make-up, but they have told us that they will keep a check on our profile and see how we look.
Many of these ‘suggestions’ in training operate as a form of labour disciplining and remain common to other forms of service work (Gooptu, 2013; Islam, 2022) where appearances must be brought in alignment with standards tied to middle-class consumption and to enforce class hierarchies. In the period after lockdown, such disciplining was further entrenched and enforced through the classification system that was introduced.
‘Saloni’, also a Luxury category worker, explained how each category had varied rules regarding the amount of time to spend on a service. At the highest end of such categorization, Luxury category workers were expected to spend much longer now for each service and with stringent ratings enforced by customers, the work was more arduous: ‘We have to work hard, tooth and nail…To give our 100 percent we have to try to give 200 percent instead.’ In each of the categories, workers were also required to use products bought from UC itself. Orders for products were placed automatically by the platform, adding significantly to the costs that workers incurred. The high cost of the products (workers noted being charged up to 10,000₹, or approximately USD 121) combined with increasing commissions and rising fuel costs (many workers drove scooters to each job) had led to a steady decline in their incomes.
In addition, in the post-lockdown phase, UC also introduced a response rating which was based on the number of leads or gigs workers accepted. While prior to the pandemic workers had a fair amount of flexibility in determining their choice of leads 7 (a minimum of two being acceptable), workers now had to accept more leads, with a downgrade in their overall rating if they fell short. Low ratings led to mandatory retraining time, leading to a loss of working days. However, beauty workers, unlike workers in food delivery and ride hailing, did not suggest ratings were algorithmically managed.
In beauty work, two important modes of control emerged after the pandemic: the first through the ratings system and the second through the increased supply of skilled workers entering the sector. The post-lockdown period enabled the increased classification and fragmentation of workers as well as stronger labour disciplining through ratings and the fear of job loss. ‘Pooja’, a beauty worker in Delhi, attributed this to the fact that the platform now hires workers without prior experience. ‘Priti’, a worker from Delhi, reiterated this:
I feel there are too many beauticians, nearly 1600–1700 girls in Delhi NCR, so nobody really hears our problems while earlier they did. In future I feel that as the company prospers, they will forget all their employees….
The loss of income, and control over work, led to the outbreak of a significant protest in October 2021, with approximately 100 women participating in the strike call given soon after in Delhi NCR. The timing of the strike, set around a popular Hindu festival of North India—Karva Chauth—which typically sees high demand for beauty services, was strategic and led to a quick retreat by the platform. But it was soon followed by platforms enforcing higher investments of time and money by workers, through a ‘pay to work’ programme,
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and the introduction of further classifications based on skills and ratings. Additionally, to boost demand workers were compelled to pay for discounts for consumers. As ‘Ritu’ noted, this was a way of paying twice:
They [the platform] give discounts to clients, but they take all the commission from us. The company gives discounts and makes it up from our earnings. Then the company even tells us to give customers discounts from our end.
These measures led to a protest on 20th December 2021 with workers calling for an end to these new policies. However, the protests ended after the third day, when the platform sued four women workers. The protests indicate that workers saw their interests as distinct from the platform; with an emergent gig worker identity uniting workers across categories and regions. Such solidarity was built despite the changed nature of work, including the division of workers through the classification system that created hierarchies of income. Much like their fellow workers in ride hailing and food delivery, workers in UC too mobilized during and after the pandemic, driven by poor working conditions and what they perceived as the domination of platforms.
Social Hierarchies and Labour Control
In addition to the commodification of labour and its brutal impact on incomes throughout the pandemic, gig workers were also subject to heightened discipline and control that relied on existing social hierarchies to be enforced. Work arrangements, through the periods of the lockdowns and after allayed consumers’ fears about the spread of the virus by managing the bodies of workers. This hierarchical arrangement between the interests of workers and those of the consumers and platforms provided the legitimacy to enforce strict forms of bodily labour control, purportedly in service of consumer safety. Food delivery and home services platforms collected and displayed workers’ body temperatures on the app (see Figure 3). Other mandatory policies required workers to submit selfies for checks on the wearing of masks and uniforms and the display of platform branding on clothes and bags. Not meeting these requirements could lead to IDs being blocked.
Temperature of a Gig Worker Visible on the App Interface for Consumers.
Even as the justification for these practices was safety, platforms did not mandate consumers to similarly share body temperatures or even wear masks. Workers had to manage their own risk of being infected by buying safety equipment, and many food delivery workers attempted alternate living arrangements at home to avoid transmission to their family members during the peak of the pandemic. In cases where safety equipment was provided by the platform, such as by UC to beauty workers, there was little attention paid to how the work itself—so reliant on proximity and touch—would be altered.
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‘Richa’ pointed especially to the skewed nature of safety measures:
The minute I ring the bell I wear my plastic gloves immediately, I wear my rubber gloves and mask…then I sanitize my bags right in front of the customer. After that I put my things on their floor, then I ask the customer if they want me to sanitize or to wash my hands. It is not as if customers will only get it from us, the reverse is also true. …Last year, it was cold, this is about Diwali time, there was a woman who sanitized me—I don’t know what she did, she drenched my jacket. I had to get back in the night from there and I got drenched completely, then I began to sneeze, I didn’t like it at all.
In setting such protocols around safety, platforms suggest that the threat of spreading the disease only comes from workers. This was echoed in the pandemic measures introduced by several Resident Welfare Associations 10 in large cities, which prohibited the use of elevators by delivery workers or earmarked separate elevators for them (see Figure 4). Such measures that were extensively deployed during the pandemic, targeting the management of the body of the worker and limiting their movements, emerge from prejudices and norms on cleanliness embedded in caste practices. The fear of the disease provided both the guise and legitimacy for the exploitation of gig workers. Managerial control over workers—which in the platform economy has always required consumer participation—was now further extended. Workers were not only judged for their skills at work but also on their compliance with practices and norms arbitrarily demanded by both platforms and consumers. The threat of poor ratings, which can lead to de-boarding from platforms, made it difficult to contest discriminatory behaviour from consumers.
Even as gig work may have been considered indispensable during the pandemic, workers perceived that they were considered expendable both by platforms and consumers. ‘Ramesh’, an organizer of commercial drivers in Delhi and a taxi driver himself, pointed out that both consumers and platform policies proved injurious to workers:
During Covid it was a horrible time, we had no money to eat. The cheapest life is that of taxi drivers; so patients would book taxis and while getting down they would tell us ‘Brother, get yourself tested, my test is positive’. There were three major spots that were set up as quarantine centres, and we have no rights to know about drop points [on the app]. So we would ask customers, they would tell us we are going to guruji’s ashram; they weren’t going to any guruji’s ashram, they were going to a big quarantine centre that had been constructed. They all have cars, family members, but their life is most precious to them.
Platform practices, such as informing consumers about the vaccination status of workers but not offering the same information to workers, continue to sustain informational asymmetries in gig work, and also sustain both caste prejudices and relations guiding consumer–worker interactions. The perceived distinction in the caste and class location between the consumers of gig work and its providers—with the assumption of consumers being higher placed—led to gig workers encountering forms of ‘social’ distancing that inscribed clear caste and class boundaries between consumers and themselves. The hierarchy between the consumer and workers came to be sharply inscribed in interactions during this period, where both informal and coercive measures of labour control could be pushed in the name of safety. As a beauty worker noted:
We don’t feel comfortable with such behaviour but we have to work in these situations if we have to keep earning … the client is comfortable, but we are not. After working for six years, I have back ailments. I have cervical and backbone pain; some levels are higher and some are lower so that affects our back. Some clients don’t even like it if we are sitting on a stool and working, they say ‘khade ho kar kaam karo’ (stand and do your work).
Analysis
As the findings demonstrate, a number of new practices were introduced across platforms during and after the period of the Covid lockdowns in India, through which labour commodification and exploitation expanded. Already existing skewed relations between platforms and workers (highlighted in labour process theory scholarship: Gandini, 2019; Griesbach et al., 2019; Kellogg et al., 2020) were now exacerbated through platforms adding new services, demanding new skills and deploying new forms of control over workers. Such practices produce what Gandini terms the repurposing by platforms of ‘skills, autonomy, consent and resistance’ (Gandini, 2019, p. 13), and this played a vital role in determining how work was conducted during the pandemic. Even as there was significant variation between platforms in the context of work itself, platforms in food delivery and beauty work required workers to draw on new skills, and across all platforms worker autonomy was reduced. Even classifications as ‘essential’ or non-essential work did not produce a significant distinction in how workers were impacted through the introduction of such practices. Thus, despite being classified as ‘essential’ workers, food delivery workers, suffered similar forms of control and cuts to their income, as workers in ride hailing and beauty work.
The expansion of labour on platforms, despite poor working conditions, was driven by the fear of job loss—this was not active consent but a form of hegemonic despotism at work (Purcell & Brook, 2020). The exploitation workers were subject to was made possible through the legitimacy created for the control of labour marked by caste and class. Social reproduction theory analyses this link between exploitation often understood economically and oppression which is cast in social terms (Bhattacharya, 2017), to draw attention to the role of gender in the production of value under capitalism (De’Ath, 2018; Doyle Griffiths, 2020). Extending this analysis between the social value or legitimacy of work and workers and its relation to the economic valuation of the work to gig work, the role of caste in the devaluation of both—work and worker—becomes relevant.
Though informalized, gig work in India is not work typically undertaken by those lowest in the caste and class hierarchy, in large part because of its high entry costs. But neither are these workers the social and economic elite. Workers typically come from middle-order castes and ‘lower’ castes and classes, who have some access to education and small capital but are unable to transition to more formal work. In part, this changed with the pandemic, as many who lost more secure forms of work also entered gig work. Yet service work such as that undertaken in location-bound gig work is largely organized around ‘higher’ caste recipients of service and ‘lower’ caste providers. 11 These structural hierarchies of caste inform class relations, in which the services provided are carried out by workers who are considered ‘disposable’, even after the recognition of some services as ‘essential’ or important to the management of life during the pandemic. As the findings indicate, during the peak periods of the pandemic workers experienced threats to their own health and safety and income cuts were most drastic across sectors of work. Writing on the ‘disposability’ of women workers in the Global South, Melissa Wright suggests that the myth of disposability explains both the state of worthlessness embodied by women factory workers as well as how they produce valuable things with their labour (Wright, 2006, p. 2). Extending this argument, Mezzadri (2016) suggests that as processes of informalization expand, men too begin to experience such precariousness; evident here too in the case of both male and female gig workers who are rendered similarly ‘disposable’.
Structures of caste also inform class relations, visible through the forms of control and management exercised through apps or consumers on behalf of platforms. During the pandemic, platforms could introduce new surveillance measures and subject workers to bodily control in addition to control over their labour, through the social legitimacy of caste relations within which consumer–worker interactions existed. This social hierarchy legitimizes the low pay including for ‘essential work’ and labour control as it is undertaken to ‘protect the consumer’. That is, the precaritization of workers is informed through classed, gendered and caste-based structures that were entrenched further through this crisis. Significantly, despite key differences in terms of gender composition and credentials for entry between ride hailing, beauty work and food delivery work, the control over the work process and workers and the shift towards algorithmic control introduced during the pandemic was similar across sectors. That is, neither gender nor skill classifications played a role in determining if a worker would be subject to greater or less control by platforms. 12 Capital–labour relations were thus similar across these sectors of gig work.
External factors have typically played an important role in labour control (Burawoy & Wright, 1990), and in the crisis of the pandemic these external conditions came to be rapidly transformed. Structural conditions, such as a neoliberal state keen to deregulate labour, gained impetus during the pandemic crisis, as seen in the dilution of labour laws. The unfolding job crisis enabled platforms to extend measures such as increasing commission rates and reduced incentive pay. The pandemic, with the exaggerated conditions of a crisis, therefore, made available a gig workforce ripe for more acute control and for work at lower rates. Despite the entry of a new class of workers, and the possibility of ‘factional politics’ (Edwards, 1979) through classifications introduced between workers, a new form of class consciousness among workers has emerged. This is largely due to the conditions of work, lowered incomes and the acute control to which they were subjected in this period. That is, in addition to capital–labour relations determined through the external conditions (Krzywdzinski & Gerber, 2021), it has also been shaped through labour commodification and labour control practices undertaken by platforms during the pandemic. That the pandemic also came to be the period when collective action of gig workers swelled is thus no coincidence. Their dispensability and value to platforms becoming evident, many workers, especially in food delivery, perceived their conditions to be at par with daily wage workers. Workers repeatedly mobilized and demonstrated their unwillingness to accept low incomes and poor work conditions as the norm, with solidarities extended for the protests of different sectors of gig workers. But as with other forms of informal work and worker action, the structural constraints for labour are severe (Harriss-White & Gooptu, 2001, p. 93). Platforms rely on the state’s deregulatory impulse, refuse recognition of worker collectives (Fairwork, 2021, p. 16), and resort to threats and violence to thwart worker collective action. 13
The crisis of the pandemic has not been a threat to neoliberal capitalism, but in many ways has entrenched it further (Mezzadri, 2022). The overarching similarities in conditions across the sectors of gig work examined here—ride hailing, food delivery and beauty work—suggest that classifications of work as essential or non-essential during the lockdowns did not translate into a substantial difference for the informalization of work. This is not to suggest that all workers were affected similarly in the pandemic; those who came to gig work to tide over their brief unemployment versus those engaged in it on a long-term basis have fared differently. But the growing mobilization of gig workers demonstrates that the pandemic has been a critical period in which the skewed relation between capital and labour in gig work has become apparent to workers.
Conclusion
The author Arundhati Roy (2020), writing on the pandemic, suggested that it was a portal offering an opportunity to create a transformative moment. From the perspective of gig workers, however, the pandemic has not been a portal to a transformed future but rather an entrenchment of the past. It enabled a reiteration of traditional capital–labour relations, where even as work became increasingly risky, workers bore its burden alone. Platforms’ messaging suggested otherwise, marking gig workers as ‘warriors’ and ‘saviours’ and branding their risk as a form of choice and entrepreneurial agency. In contrast, through the pandemic gig workers used social media and collective action to draw attention to their difficult working conditions, and through this have challenged the idea of the gig worker as either entrepreneurial or self-sacrificing.
Changes in platform policies, especially relating to commissions, ratings and compulsion to purchase work inputs from platforms, were introduced at a time when labour’s bargaining power was weakened as a result of an unemployment crisis and state regulation in favour of capital. The pandemic, and the classification of some forms of gig work as essential work, enhanced labour’s exploitability through lockdowns for some sectors while delaying this in others. Work relations in the platform economy have also been shaped by social identities of caste and gender, which workers find difficult to combat given that their ability to work is affected by the consumer ratings that platforms privilege. Through the pandemic, such social hierarchies were vital in establishing legitimacy for platform practices such as mapping the body temperatures of workers and submitting them to algorithmic control as well as to forms of social control that consumers insisted on. The social devaluation of the gig worker coalesced with the structural conditions within which their work came to be marked by worse pay and conditions, indicating the complex nature of labour commodification and exploitation.
Even as the relations between platforms and workers, and workers and consumers, are not specific to the pandemic, the pandemic sharpened these relations. It has become evident to gig workers that their interests do not align with those of the platform, contrary to what platforms say about the mutual benefits of their ‘partnership’. Consequently, worker resistance and collective action have also seen a new lease on life through the pandemic, visible not only through strikes and protests but also in the everyday relations of solidarity forged between workers. This has contributed to a rise in unions and associations which has given an organized and collective expression to their interests. Workers have also relied on social media to document their exploitation articulating it as a social phenomenon rather than an individual experience. A lasting legacy of the pandemic for gig work is the fillip it has given to such worker consciousness and action.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study emerged in part from the funding received from the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies, University of Witwatersrand for the project Future of Work(ers).