Platform work in Bengaluru: worker articulations and platform design in India's informal economy

Surie, Aditi

Platform work in Bengaluru: worker articulations and platform design in India's informal economy

Thesis / Dissertation

2025

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Environmental Humanities

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

The global North has a discursive hold telling us how digital labour platforms impact workers. The fear inherent in this discourse comes from the fact that many global North workers are faced with only ‘casualized' platform work rather than job opportunities that come with career progression, steady increments to their incomes, and welfare entitlements. These stories travel placelessly like theories of technology do, hiding how workers especially in the global South experience risk, vulnerability, social structures, and state-citizen relations. This study seeks to undo such erasure, bringing to the front what happens when a universalist rhetoric is rooted in place: in the Global South. Workers in the global South work without contracts, with little career progression and do not receive the bulk of state welfare from their work identity. What is the experience of platform work for these workers? This study situates this question in India, specifically Bengaluru, a metropolitan city in southern India. Indian workers operate in markets that are deeply moulded by regional economic histories, social conventions like caste and filial kinship. Labour platforms too encounter informality in the process of creating platform services that stand apart from informal services and jobs. The design and governance choices on workers can reveal if there is a change – reinstituonalization or alteration – of informality by platforms. I use a dual focus on worker and firm to understand platform work from India. I ask the worker how they perceive elements of platform work from their inherent ability to compare informal work and platform work. Then I ask the firm how they design work for workers – as they design and govern interfaces, protocols, systems all from scratch. Bengaluru – know both for a vibrant informal economy for its workers and migrant workers from surrounding regions – and for being a startup capital for India – is the site for this study. I use ethnographic methods with workers and firms. For workers: in-depth and life history interviews and worker's survey offer data to understand how platform workers navigate Bengaluru's labour market and the platform. I speak to drivers and tradespeople namely electricians, plumbers, and carpenters, on mobility and home services platforms respectively to situate questions of the future of work in Bengaluru, India and as a signpost of the majority world in the global South. Platform work as defined by workers from the global South or majority world is contradictory because it holds opportunities for educated workers for whom education has not created social mobility, access to good quality jobs, or a sense of fulfillment from using their skills. As a category of work, it exposes the volatility that workers are forced to manage because of dynamic incomes and changes to the rules of work despite the promise of continuous work from the platform, the investments they make, and constantly learning the changing algorithmic structure of gamified work. Platform work holds a fundamental tension in the majority world described through the three characteristic contradictions presented in this study. This study uses these characteristic contraindications to offer future research a way to better situate questions of the future of work in the Global South.