‘New’ terrains of precarity – gig work in India

ABSTRACT

Gig work has been considered ‘disruptive’ by platforms for its market efficiency, but concerns around precarity of work in the Global North have been raised since the early 2000s. In India, the dominance of informal work makes precarious work the norm, thus begging the question, does gig work disrupt or extend this precarity in new directions? Based on in-depth interviews with gig workers in India, this paper explores the relations between the informal economy and platform-based gig work in India with a focus on the experiences of workers. The paper argues that, much like informal work, gig workers bear a disproportionate risk, with their work regulated by social identities of caste and gender that determine entry and exit from work. The digital mediation of work in the gig economy extends such existing social relations of informal work into gig work, especially as labour remains deregulated by the Indian state. Through this, India points us in the direction of what the future of work may be for workers in a global digitised gig economy where such precarious and insecure work is now increasingly entrenched.

KEYWORDS:

• Gig work
• platforms
• informality
• informal economy
• algorithmic insecurity
• precarious

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Institutional IRB approval was received for this study and consent of respondents taken prior to conducting and recording interviews.

2 The sample included one respondent each from the city of Chennai in Tamil Nadu and one from Bhagalpur, Bihar, and two are from Mumbai. The remaining six respondents are from Delhi.

3 * Indicates pseudonyms which have been used for all gig workers to protect their identity.

4 This is anonymous Twitter handle used by the worker where he highlights working conditions in the gig economy.

5 Data from Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2018–19 for individuals aged above 15.

6 PLFS data 2018–19.

7 A later strike held in December 2021 by Urban Company’s women gig workers ended with the platform serving a legal notice to some of the workers on strike.

Additional information

Funding

This was part of the 'Technology and the Future of Work: Implications for Inequality in the Global South' project by the Southern Center for Inequality Studies, University of Witwatersrand and IDRC.

Notes on contributors

Gayatri Nair

Gayatri Nair teaches Sociology at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi. Her research interests are in urban informal labour and livelihood patterns with an emphasis on the questions of caste and gender.