Paper Short Abstract:

From a study of food delivery workers, we examine the precarity and consolidation of working conditions driven by the platform economy in the context of Urban India. We consider ‘gigging’, the informalization of labor, and the need to reconceptualize worker well-being.

Paper Abstract:

From a study of food delivery workers and the informalisation of labor ( Shaikh et al 2023)we attempt to reconceptualize worker well-being in the context of Urban India. We point to the contradictions in conceptualizing platform work in India as marginalization and consolidating employability. In the absence of a formal employment sector, platform work, however precarious, offers a sense of regularity and persistence of work. The study is an ethnography of everyday work practices, contexts, and conditions of food delivery workers in three metropolitan cities in India. Through characterizing delivery work, we bring to fore uncertainty amidst the employability of delivery persons and narratives of food delivery journeys.

If traffic conditions, wait times, and unsafe neighborhoods become everyday threats to life, the digital platform endangers the delivery worker towards completing demand-driven daily targets. At the end of a workday, “... what one earns is how much one has broken ground, sped in dangerous traffic, and delivered food at doorsteps without hoping for a tip…”. Despite the ‘illusion of choice’ and ‘algorithmic despotism’ (Griesbach et al. 2019) of food delivery platforms, workers are mindful of the opportunities that come by: as a delivery worker spoke ”... there is a variety of platforms, getting banned from one leads us to another platform.. this work can reward and punish us…” Borrowing the idea and spirit of Scott’s ‘Weapons of the Weak’ (Scott 1985) our study highlights the vexed duality of ‘gig’ labor in the context of India and by extension in developing countries.