Precarious Privilege: Globalism, Digital Biopolitics, and Tech-Workers’ Movements in India

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on Indian tech-workers’ views on labour and social movements in the context of precarity, digital globalism, and the neoliberal transformations of the culture and economy. Based on interviews of twenty information technology (IT) workers in India, conducted in 2018, I found that they inhabit the liminal spaces between precarity and privilege. I call it the precarity of liminality. This ambiguous status, combined with the assumption of white-collar prestige, prevents tech-workers from defending their labour rights. Indeed, even the trade unions formed exclusively for tech-workers are constrained by their members’ assumption of privilege. I hold that this is the case because the neoliberal market has transformed the local underpinnings of culture into a homogeneous simulacrum and codified performance, so that even the cultural diversity of these workers fails to resist their co-option into the global logic of labour and capital.

KEYWORDS:

• tech-workers
• information technology
• India
• precarity
• trade union
• culture

Notes

1. Nye, “Globalism versus Globalization,” 2–5.

2. Aneesh, “Global Labor,” 348–49; and Bhatt “From Students to Spouses,” 42.

3. Brady and Wallace, “Spatialization, Foreign Direct Investment,” 67–69.

4. Autor and Salomon, “Is Automation Labor Displacing?” 1–18.

5. Acemoglu and Restrepo, “Automation and New Tasks,” 3.

6. Stiglitz, “Artificial Intelligence,” 15.

7. Aneesh, “Global Labor,” 348–49.

8. McMillin, “Outsourcing Identities,” 236; and Chakravartty, “Symbolic Analysts,” 19.

9. PTI, “COVID 19: Silicon Valley,” 1–2

10. Poovanna, “Covid-19: Karnataka,” 2–3; and Sharma, “Labour Ministry,” 1–3.

11. Sangani and Chandrashekhar, “IT Campuses,” 3–5.

12. ITI, “Global Tech Trade Associations,”

13. Mukherjee, “Angry Twitter has Tips,” 1–3.

14. Ramesh, “Cyber Coolies,” 492.

15. Chakrabarti, “Indian Economy in Transition,” 71.

16. Foucault, “7 February 1979,” 105.

17. Marx, “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry,” in Capital, vol. 1, 557.

18. Hardt and Negri, “Postmodernization, or the Informatization,” 292.

19. Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.”

20. Chatterjee, “Classes, Capital and Indian Democracy,” 93.

21. Foucault, “11 January 1978,” 21, 11–13.

22. Lyon, “Liquid Surveillance,” 325.

23. Ibid, 73.

24. Benner, “Labor in the Network Society,” 192.

25. Ramesh, “Cyber Coolies,” 493.

26. Stevens and Mosco, “Prospects for Trade Unions,” 43.

27. Mirchandani, “Globality in Exceptional Spaces,” 21–23.

28. Badiou, “Our Wound Is Not So Recent,” 5; and Badiou, “Neolithic, Capitalism and Communism,” 3.

29. Schiller, Digital Capitalism, 3–5.

30. Purkayastha, “Migrations, Migrants and Human Security,” 168.

31. Marx, “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry,” in Capital, vol. 1, 557.

32. Greenwald, MacAskill, and Poitras, “Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower.”

33. Kirchgaessner et al., “Revealed: Leak Uncovers Global Abuse.”

34. Mendonca and Pramanik, “Ministry of External Affairs,” 1–2.

35. Mahajan, “India’s Biometric Aadhaar ID,” 4.

36. Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, “Special Economic Zones Scheme.”

37. Roy, “IT May Skip Bandh,” 1.

38. Bisht, “Trade Unions in Indian IT,” 222; and Chakraborty, “Small BPOs,” 1–3.

39. Ramesh, “Cyber Coolies,” 496.

40. Badiou, “Our Wound Is Not So Recent,” 12–13.

41. Žižek, “From Domination to Exploitation,” 11.

42. Agarwala, “From Work to Welfare,” 419–20.

43. Brady and Wallace, “Spatialization, Foreign Direct Investment,” 67–69.

44. Hensman, “Labour and Globalization,” 118.

45. Badiou, “Our Wound Is Not So Recent,” 17.

46. Upadhya, “Employment, Exclusion and Merit,” 1864.

47. Brady and Wallace, “Spatialization, Foreign Direct Investment,” 67–69.

48. Diptosh, “BPO Demand for Union,” 1–2.

49. McMillin, “Outsourced Identities,” 241.

50. Chakrabarti, “Indian Economy in Transition,” 73.

51. Gajjala, “Conclusion: Moving On,” 265–66.

52. Agarwal, “Comparison of Software Developers.”

53. Bhattacharya, “The Harrowing Reality,” 3–5; Hashmi, “Outsourcing the American Dream,” 242–45; and Banerjee, “Indian IT Workers in the US” 426–28.

54. Aneesh, “Neutral Accent,” 58–59.

55. McMillin, “Outsourced Identities,” 236, 238.

56. Chakrabarti, “Indian Economy in Transition,” 66.

57. Ramesh, “Cyber Coolies,” 495.

58. Foucault, “24 January 1979,” 65.

59. Gajjala, Tetteh, and Birzescu, “Staging the Subaltern Other,” 46.

60. Chatterjee, “Classes, Capital and Indian Democracy,” 92–93.

61. Ibid, 93.

62. Romm, “Facebook’s Zuckerberg Just Survived,” 1–4.

63. Burgess, “What is GDPR?” 15–16.

64. Rolf, “Toward a 21^st-Century Labor Movement,” 8.

65. Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 292.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rianka Roy

Rianka Roy, PhD, is Assistant Professor of English at Surendranath College for Women, Kolkata, India. Her research interests include digital labour, IT industry, political economy of digital networks, surveillance, privacy, migration, gender and social movements. Since 2019 she has been working towards her second PhD at the Department of Sociology, University of Connecticut, USA. Her publications include articles in peer-reviewed journals, books, blogs and newspapers.