Tech Won't Save Us - What Gig Work Means for Women in India w/ Noopur Raval

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Noopur Raval to discuss India’s gig economy, the specific conditions of women who provide services through beauty and wellness apps, and how workers organize to improve their conditions.Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral research fellow at the AI Now Institute at New York University. Follow Noopur on Twitter at @tetisheri.🚨 T-shirts are now available!Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Noopur wrote about organizing in the gig economy and the conditions of workers in beauty and wellness.Julia Ticona and her colleagues wrote about tech’s impacts on domestic work.More than 100 women who worked through a beauty app recently went on strike outside the company’s office.Aditi Surie has written about platforms and informal work in India.Support the show

the head of the National Domestic Workers Association in the U.S. said that, you know, the domestic workers are the original gig workers. And I quite agree with that. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Nupur Raval. Nupur is a postdoctoral research fellow at the AI Now Institute at New York University who has done some great work looking at the gig economy in India, in particular around Bengaluru, and looks at parts of the gig economy that I think we don't talk about so much. You know, in this conversation, Nupur provides a really great outline of what the gig economy that I think we don't talk about so much. You know, in this conversation, Nupur provides a really great outline of what the gig economy in India actually looks like.

And we talk about the experience of workers in the beauty and wellness space of, you know, platform work that gets not nearly as much attention as, say, food delivery workers or ride-hailing workers. I think Nupur makes a really good point when she actually talks about how, you know, there is an overemphasis on Uber, whether it's in the research on the gig economy, but I would say just in general about, you know, our perspective on the gig economy more broadly. It can be really easy to reduce what is going on in the sector to, you know, what Uber is doing because it's one of the most powerful and visible companies in the sector that helped to kind of set the model that many companies later followed. But certainly there is a lot more that is going on there that, you know, we need to understand and think about. And I would say that Nupur also makes the point that it can be easy to, you know, draw a simple distinction

between global north and global south when we're talking about the gig economy and what happens in it. But she really emphasizes that, you know, it's probably more important that we look at the local context and how they impact how gig work actually takes place. And then maybe we can take some lessons by comparing, you know, different countries to one another instead of reducing it to just two parts of the world that operate in different ways. So that's just to say that I had a great conversation with Nupur. I feel like I learned a lot. And I think that she has a really important perspective to share and that I think you'll really enjoy. Before we get to the episode, I also just want to say, you know, this is the last episode in the gig economy series that we're doing for now. I'm sure that it's a topic that we'll

return to in the future, no doubt. But it was really great to talk to people across five countries and the European Union to get an idea of, you know, what the gig economy or platform work looks like in these different places, what it has meant for workers, and, you know, how they are trying to push back, trying to ensure that this is a good kind of work that provides good pay, that is safe, and, you know, that works for them. And, you know, I think that helps to make Newport's point, you know, when we look at what, say, an employment model might mean for migrant workers in Spain or in Australia, or when we see how in the United Kingdom,

you know, workers were fighting for this worker status instead of necessarily going straight to employee status. And we see in Canada that Foodora workers want a dependent contractor status that allowed them to organize a union at that company before it left the country, but how they are still fighting for employment rights and other protections in the meantime. come into play, the different regulatory structures, legal structures, you know, the power of workers in their organizing in order to be able to push back on the political system and on the app-based employers as well. So I guess that's just to say, you know, I hope that you enjoyed this series. I hope that you learned from it. I hope that you got a decent picture of what is going on in these different cases, you know, and hopefully that has also informed your understanding of gig work and what is going on in this sector as well. So that said tech won't save us is part of the

harbinger media network a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in canada and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com if you like the show make sure to leave a five-star review on apple podcasts and you can share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it and this episode episode of Tech Won't Save Us, like every episode, is free for everybody. And I would say in particular, you know, if you feel like you learned from this gig economy series, if you enjoy the podcast more generally, please consider becoming a monthly supporter to support the work that goes into making the show every single week. The show wouldn't be possible without that support. And I appreciate every single one of you

who decides to make a monthly contribution and help ensure that I can keep, you know, putting the podcast together, putting the newsletter together and holding the feet of these tech companies and these tech executives to the fire. So if you want to chip in, you can join patrons like Christian from The Hague and Brett from Denver by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Nupur, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to speak with you. You know, I've read some of your work on the gig economy in India, what is happening over there. And so I'm looking forward to discussing this with you

and learning a bit more about what this means for workers in India. And so I wanted to start with kind of a general question, because a lot of listeners won't be very familiar with the Indian context. So could you let us know a bit about what we should know about the Indian gig economy? What kind of platforms are operating there? What kind of work tends to be done through the gig economy most frequently? And is there an idea of, you know, the number of workers or the percentage of workers who do work through, you know, kind of gig worker informal work in India? In India, I mean, you have the usual platforms like Uber, but also its domestic homegrown rival, Ola, Ola cabs. And this number keeps on fluctuating. But I think Ola is usually

in lead. So Uber's the second bigger company and these ride-hailing companies were definitely the pioneers of the gig economy or at least the gig logic so to speak in India and I could be wrong but I think they've been functional since 2012 or 2013 so it's it's been a now. And once these companies kind of became more mainstream and started expanding, now I think Uber and Ola especially exist in more than 200 cities. So they've gone beyond the bigger centers to even cover what we call tier two and tier three cities, which are basically how we classify our smaller cities. And they have inspired in some ways a wave of companies that use the Uber or the gig logic to deliver other services and goods. So some of the more popular services are, of course, the food delivery platforms like Swiggy, Zomato,

again, which Zomato is a company that existed even before it became a gig company, but it was more of a food discovery portal. And then they kind of pivoted to food delivery. There's also beauty and wellness app based services. So they provide all sorts of salon services, but at home, including massage and therapy and stuff like that physical therapy and stuff like that and then there's also this fascinating and exploitative company called dunzo which sort of grew out on its own and i don't think that there exists you know the equivalent of dunzo in any other country that i know of but what they offer you is essentially a person who will do any chore that you like them to do. So the simple use cases are things like if you forgot your keys at a

friend's home, then you can book a person to go to your friend's home, collect the keys and bring them back to you. That's the kind of service they started out with. And then they got a lot of funding, I think, from Google and have since grown out to be a very big company. And they, I mean, this is kind of tangential, but it's quite interesting to see how they've become a very popular and cool service because they put out these annual reports about what it is that Danzo customers like to do through the platform. And that kind of gives us a glimpse into perhaps how some of these app-based platforms are figuring into the productive and reproductive rhythms of young, middle-class, upwardly mobile Indians who

can afford to book these services. So it could be something like getting hungry at midnight and wanting someone to go and bring you food from a restaurant that isn't on a food delivery platform, or wanting to get condoms or sanitary pads or tampons, and you don't want to make the run. So you get someone to donezo it to you, or you get a donezo person to go. So that's kind of the spread of the gig economy services available in India. And it's hard to again estimate how many people work in the gig economy because there's a lot of politics and weird things going on around labor statistics per se. And a lot of it is politically motivated because India is also undergoing an unemployment crisis for a while now, and especially a youth unemployment crisis, which is politically dangerous for the powers that be.

So there's been a lot of controversy and debate around why certain labor statistics have not been released in the recent past. But with all that said and done, it would not be an exaggeration to say that, you know, somewhere between a few hundred thousand and a million workers are employed in various gig economy services in India right now. I think that gives us a really great overview of, you know, what the gig economy looks like in India for, you know, people who are not so familiar with it, which I think will be most of our listeners, but they'll still be interested in learning more, right, which is the point of doing this interview with you. You know, I feel like when we look at India from a Western context, we can kind of see it as,

you know, just kind of one single entity and kind of assume that things are pretty similar across the whole subcontinent, basically, right. But I wonder, are there differences in different areas of India, when it comes to the gig economy and the penetration of the gig economy, because of, you know, the regional differences that exist in the country? Absolutely. Again, it's hard to say what the trends are, partly because platform companies don't release any data on how many people they quote unquote employ. But some of these trends do, again, map on to labor based migration, as well as what we call domestic migration, based on where people travel from and where people travel to in order to get education as well as employment. So some of the trends that I could helpfully point to includes things such as, right, historically, traditionally, the north of India and the states in northern India are where the population is higher and concentrated.

But at the same time, it's been traditionally an agrarian economy. are where the population is higher and concentrated. But at the same time, it's been traditionally an agrarian economy. Say, for instance, the states of Uttar Pradesh, which is perhaps the largest state in India and most populous as well. And typically, people have migrated from Uttar Pradesh to cities like Mumbai, which is in the western part of India, because people in Uttar Pradesh used to mostly engage in agriculture, which is a seasonal occupation. So whenever you don't have those jobs or that work available to you, they would migrate to places like Mumbai or Delhi in order to get seasonal work. And again, I guess a lot of listeners may not know is that until very recently,

estimates suggested that about 90% of the economic activity in India happened in the informal sector. And while this may have reduced a little bit, but it would not be an exaggeration to say somewhere between 75 and 90% of India's economic activity still happens in the informal sector. And informal sector, roughly, or the unorganized sector, roughly, refers to jobs that are off the books, right? So people who are not employed through contracted labor or who are not given contracts, who, of course, do not get any sort of benefits or promises of benefits and at the same time are often paid in cash as well. So it's not necessarily illegal, it's kind of a grey economy. Informal work is recognized as legal and there's legislation that governs how informal work should

happen but it is also understood that there's a lot of scope for exploitation, just simply not paying wages. A lot of sexual harassment also happens and goes unchecked because people work in the informal economy. So anyway, the gig economy flourishes both in the north and the south of India, for sure. Also in the western parts of India. Some of these things also map on to digital connectivity or internet network. So typically, or historically, the northeast of India, due to a variety of reasons, including intense militarization, as well as a mix of difficult terrain and geography, but also certain reasons why the larger focus of what counts as India and its economic and social policies have tended to exclude the northeast parts of India that are essentially closer to China.

So I'm not 100% sure how much the gig economy has flourished in those parts. But it's also known that a lot of people from the northeastern states of India usually have to economically prosperous compared to the northern states. And they also have a healthy mix of industry as well as agriculture. And specifically, my field site, which was Bangalore, has kind of seen this IT boom and is known as the Silicon Valley of India. But in the more recent times, it has also become the startup hub, and has for a while now been the tech and engineering education hub as well. So people come there looking for education, and then they get some sort of quality education. And then it also happens that the job creation helps them to settle down and stay in Bengaluru. And that has then led to some sort of friction between migrant workers or incoming migrants

and the local populations, obviously, because, you know, there's this whole narrative around taking jobs away from local people. Absolutely. That just gives us an even better insight into, you know, the regional variety, I guess, of what's going on there and how things differ in different areas. And, you know, the stat that you said about around 90% of the workforce in urban India being in informal labor, like that was fascinating to me when I read it in one of your pieces. And I wonder, you know, I was speaking earlier in this series to Rafael Groman in Brazil, who was talking about how, you know, the term gig economy

doesn't fit so well, at least in Brazil. And he said in many parts of the global south, because so much work happens in the informal sector and is kind of based around kind of gig work that, you know, wouldn't traditionally happen on a platform, but is still kind of piecework in a sense. Do you think that fits in India as well? Or does the term gig economy still kind of indicate platform work or something like that in the Indian context? That's interesting. And again, because India has so many languages, and while English is quite prevalent, but the gig or gig work has not necessarily been the popular way to refer to all kinds of app based work. And in most cases, or if you want to talk

about it to people who live in India, I think the more popular way of talking about it is to actually refer to brands who become sort of nouns or, you know, commonplace names. So you'd say, are you Ubering? Or are you working for Swiggy? Or are you a Zomato partner? And some of those terms that they have invented on their own, which I guess refers to also the fact that gig has very specific connotations, depending on the country that one is talking about, right? And having said that, also, you know, I would agree with Raphael in the sense that since casual employment or casual labor is the dominant reality of the majority of global south

countries, it's not in any sense a novel form of work because of the piecework nature of it. What the novelty lies in the fact that people are doing this work through an app-based platform or through a technology. So I guess, yeah, one would refer to is, and more recently, the Indian government also released a new social security wage code, which has then for the first time included gig workers, or, you know, a variety of platform workers, as they call it. And they, in fact, instead of going the other way and sort of paying attention to the ongoing debates in the global north, namely UK and US, the Indian wage code has sort of jumped and skipped and gone directly to classify platform workers as informal workers and as

contract workers. So that then puts them in a different kind of category. The employment debate hasn't even happened in that sense over here. Yeah, that's really fascinating. And, you know, there's another kind of piece of this that I think came up in both of the pieces of yours that I read. And that's this kind of difference between this kind of platform work in the sense of some work that is more male dominated in other work that is more female dominated, and how they probably have a different experience of this kind of app based work. Can you talk a little bit about that division, I guess, or that difference, and how this kind of work would be experienced differently by men and

women in India? Absolutely. Referring to my paper that I co wrote with Dr. Joyjeet Pal on app based beauty and wellness workers. Majority of that work is done by women. I'll just give you a little bit of background on how I got interested in that question. So in fact, the idea sort of came while reading more US-based scholarship. And I remember, I think it was the head of the National Domestic Workers Association in the US who had said somewhere, this is a very popular quote, who said that, you know, the domestic workers are the original gig workers. And I quite agree with that, right, in the sense of how the work is structured and how all the

other conditions of work. So I started thinking about this. And I also read Julia Tekona's work, where she has co-authored a paper at Data & Society, I think, where again, they had come up with this observation that within gig work scholarship, there seems to be an Uber bias. And the Uber bias refers not only to the fact that a lot of people are taking Ubering as the benchmark for evaluating a lot of gig work conditions, but also that we seem to be collapsing and forgetting the fact that, you know, the majority of workers employed on platforms like Uber are male workers. And it's not just the fact that they are coincidentally male, right? Driving in itself across the world is mostly a masculine occupation or profession.

So then the things that we ended up learning about gig workers per se are also informed by the realities of male workers going outside and doing relatively masculine professions. Although sometimes there are papers, including my work, that has captured the experiences of some female workers, you know, doing this kind of work, there's still some pressure for them to perform masculinity while they're at work, simply because they want to be safe and secure and don't want to be taken as a sort of vulnerable woman who's out on the streets doing this kind of risky work, you know, in the middle of the night or on the weekends or with drunk passengers and so on and so forth. So those kinds of questions inspired this question of like, what would it mean to study almost the opposite of this? A profession that is gendered and feminized, and a profession where a lot of

women seem to be doing app based gig work. And that's kind of why I started studying the beauty and wellness platform. Absolutely. But you know, I think the point that you make there is an important one that I want to emphasize, you know, and it's certainly one that I'm guilty of as well, you know, the overemphasis on Uber as kind of the representation of this whole form of work, right? And kind of focusing on it instead of so many of the other platforms and, you know, forms of work that happen on these platforms. And so I think that's a really good point. And so yeah, I do want to know a bit more about, you know, what it's like on these beauty work apps and what it's like for these workers who engage in that kind of work. So I guess give us a bit more information on

what it's like for workers who, you know, go onto these apps. Would they usually have been working in the beauty sector before this, or are they usually new to this type of work? And then what is the difference, I guess, going onto the app versus doing it, I guess, more traditionally in a store or something like that? So in India specifically, again, like I said earlier, a lot of people from northeastern states of India tend to migrate to Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi. So that kind of does form the background for beauty work as well. Because when men and women from these states end up in these bigger cities in other parts of India, it's not so easy for them, partly because they are already racialized in a particular way. Because, you know, India being this culturally diverse place, all people also don't look alike. And

specifically people from the northeastern states tend to look more like East Asian countries or people from East Asian countries, compared to people in other parts of India, that I guess, you know, look like your typical South Asian faces that you might be used to seeing in the media. So when they do land up in a city like Bangalore, for instance, it's kind of hard for them to hide or do away with the fact that they are already seen as different people in certain ways. And this has been a longer problem. At the same time, there's also these kinds of cultural and racialized patterns that have informed the kinds of education that they can take up, the kinds of jobs that they can take up, as well as the fact that if someone comes from outside and wants to look for quick work that

can pay and can help them stabilize themselves in the city while they look for better opportunities. Due to a mix of all of these factors, beauty and wellness as an occupation has been one of those easier places to enter. It's also interesting that if one is talking about typical mainland Indian masculinity and Indian men who might migrate from rural areas to urban areas looking for work, the easy option or that low threshold option that might be available to them would be driving. And this is very gendered as well as racialized. And I feel like I need to foreground that right from the start is because a rural Indian male migrant might also not be able to easily enter or take up, say, beauty and wellness jobs is not just because he wouldn't be allowed into them,

it's also because he has to maintain a certain cultural identity as the breadwinner of his family. And if he goes and tells the family who's still living in rural India somewhere that, you know, I've taken up a job at a salon, it would obviously be very emasculating just because of the construct of the Indian male that he has to sort of play into, which is, you know, fortunately not the barriers that Northeastern migrant workers, male and female, as well as women from across India kind of face. So it's easier or almost considered and expected that they would join more soft skill jobs like this one. So that's how a lot of both Northeastern men and women enter this profession, as well as women from

urban centers, as well as rural India kind of enters this profession. So that's the people I started observing and studying as they entered the platform. What is interesting about this particular paper and why I'm especially happy the way it turned out is because until this paper, you know, most of us platform researchers never really get access to the back ends of platform offices and companies. So the only things we can sort of find out are either through computational methods by querying some of these platforms or interviewing workers and observing them at their places of work. Observing workers at their places of work was also going to be hard in this particular case, because the work happens in a domestic space or within extremely private spaces. And so due to a mix of all of this, and the fact that, you know, the platform company actually allowed us to hang out at the spaces where they were recruiting workers, they were interviewing workers, etc, that methodologically,

this became an interesting thing to study most of the people we interviewed and observed at work had been beauty workers for a long time traditionally even before joining these apps so in that sense the problem in the space for the companies to solve is not in fact to train people into how to do this work. They were really, really good at providing the core beauty services, you know, say waxing or threading or providing massages or facials and stuff like that. But they still had to give them somewhere between one to 10 days of training, all at the company's cost, in order to turn them into a platform worker, in order to, you know, tell them how metrics work, how the app works in itself, what to do if the app fails,

and, you know, what the codes of providing service through the app, you know, or representing the app company, what all of that means for this particular worker. So that was the interesting part here. I think I want to kind of double down on what you are talking about there, because I found that part of the paper really interesting as well, where you discussed how, you know, the company wanted to have this particular idea of like entrepreneurialism and how these workers would act in relation to this kind of work. So can you discuss a bit more, I guess, kind of the expectations of the company and the ideas that it was trying to, I guess,

communicate to these workers about what kind of work this was and I guess what the expectations were for them to, I guess, think about how they were undertaking this work. I'll give you an example, which is in the paper as well. So I went in with a simple question that I wanted

to know how the mid-level managers at the platform company make a decision as to who they want to hire or invest their resources in versus who they think is not ready yet or they don't want to invest in. Because you have workers, women, who've heard about this company through billboards or, you know, through their other friends who are already on the app. And then they basically walk into the platform company office. And then they're called for an interview and then they're assessed for the kind of things that they can bring to the platform. And that's where the assessment of this ideal worker happens. So it's a fine balance because as I saw in some of the interviews, the manager wanted to know and find a hook or a kind of vulnerability that would assure the manager and the company that this worker is not going to run away or not going to

quit or not going to not show up. And so it might sound counterintuitive or even weird and cruel that they actually in the interview wanted to find a kind of weakness or, you know, a strong motivation that could be, you know, something like the woman is a single mother or she desperately needs the money or something like that, you know, or she has someone to care for at home who is sick and needs the money. And that meant that, okay, this person's going to stay. But at the same time, if this vulnerability became too much, right, if the woman is saying, I not only am a single mother, but look, I can't work between so and so time during the day because I need to care for my child who's going to come back from school. So afternoons is when I can absolutely not work.

So I'm not going to pick up the jobs that are listed in the afternoon slots, then the woman becomes a liability. Because, you know, then she has all these non negotiable, social, cultural obligations. Similarly, like again, there were women who said, you know, I actually like doing this work because most of my family doesn't need to know about it. It's not a very visible form of work. I can just slip away during the times of the day when nobody needs me at home and then I can come back whenever they need me. So my family is still sort of the priority for me. Then the company would again say, well, that's not going to work for us. So naturally, the question that arises

from that is what does that mean for, you know, the promise or the idea of flexibility, right? That is so core to so many of these platforms, because I'm sure, you know, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm sure that these platforms promote themselves as flexible as well. But as you're talking about there, that flexibility in the same way that we talk about with Uber and whatnot in North America, it seems like the flexibility promise maybe isn't as easy as it seems. This is a tricky one because I feel like most of the curiosity in academia, at least around whether there is flexibility or not, is mostly driven through investigations of the platform itself or platform design, right, to determine what flexibility means, whether there's actually flexibility or not. But I like to look at it

from the perspective of workers themselves. So I did ask them this question when they were taking up the jobs or, you know, after they had completed a job. And I said, you know, how how flexible would you say this platform is? It's crucial because when you ask a how question, it also allows them to articulate what they mean or what they understand by flexibility at their end. And they articulated flexibility in some of these ways. So like, I think it's in the paper as well. But one woman said that the reason why I kind of like this platform is because, you know, I joined the platform, I work for a few months, and they know I'm a good worker, I have good ratings, etc, etc. And then whenever my family needs me, or you know, like there was a wedding at home,

and I had to go back to my village or whatever, something else turns up. She's like, I just switch off the app and vanish. And I know that they're going to keep calling me for a few days to know, you know, to see where I've gone. Because they invested money, time, resources, like they gave me a kit, which you need to work. They gave me a a uniform they might have given her a small loan etc etc so they have some incentive to follow up and say where are you why are you not working and especially when this particular company was trying to expand to newer markets is typically also when workers have more say than customers do because they want to build a steady supply and the platform needs to come across as a reliable

platform as well right so flexibility kind of is also waxing and waning if you will because it is available to you but depending on how much bargaining power the workers may have at that time I would also say that you know the beauty and wellness space, I think, again, because it is so strictly centered around dealing with women workers can just not force them to work in some of the more stricter or inhumane ways that they absolutely do in the case of Ola Uber, or the food delivery space, which is dominated by young men. So in this case, and you know, a very recent incident, in fact, attests to this reality, which is that the wellness platform has been getting more and more popular in the pandemic, right? So they've taken this as their

opportunity to finally increase the amount of commissions they deduct from workers' jobs. And things got too much, they got intolerable. And so I think about 100 women workers struck outside one of the platform company offices in Delhi, on the outskirts of Delhi. And I think it was about three or four days of the strike. And the company had to agree to their demands. It also helped that there was a lot of news reporting that probably wasn't available in the earlier times. But it was a very well covered strike and the company had to come out with a 12 point agenda addressing all the demands of the women workers. So yeah, returning to the question of flexibility, I think it's, if you look at it from the worker's perspective, I think it's a negotiation. They have to negotiate on a daily basis. They negotiate often by building personal relationships with the mid-level managers or interns and hence, you know, appealing to their humanity sometimes saying, look, you know, I'm such a great worker, you know, you know, you need me. So I'm just not going to do so and so things. And the manager will say, okay, fine, I'll take care of you. But make sure that you don't tell the other workers that I've given you

this extra flexibility. It's really interesting. You know, and I appreciate you outlining how the flexibility, you know, it's not so simple in that it can be understood in different ways by different workers in terms of what it means to actually be flexible. And I want to come back to the point that you made about the strike in just a minute. But I feel like another important piece of the article that you wrote was around professionalism, right? And how there's kind of an expectation of professionalism when it comes to these workers, how they present themselves, but also how they use that professionalism as the way to kind of protect themselves from offers and comments in the street and things like that, that they don't want anything to do with. So can you talk about the role that professionalism plays in this as well and how they understand it?

Sure. So the professionalism piece, in fact, relates directly to, you know, what does it mean to work in a largely informal economy? Because even if you are employed in a so-called formal job, like researcher Aditi Suri, who also works on gig work in India, has kind of made this point over and over, which is that formalization or informalization, for instance, is again, not a very easy question to answer. So platform company jobs have led to certain degrees of formalization, in the sense that they offer you an interface, right, they actually do offer you a contract. So they offer you some kinds of security as well, which you would typically not find for someone who's working at a small restaurant in

India, or a stall or something like that, or even a smaller salon, right, which may or may not be registered, and may not be operating as a registered small business. But coming back to the project of professionalism, and I'm going in a bit of a circular manner because I feel like again one of the questions that Global North Scholarship compels you to ask and which we went in asking was you know we're asking workers how do you feel about this job right do you like this job do you not like this job how do you feel about wearing uniforms and I feel like the Global North answer in many ways is like of course this is oppressive. You know, companies that are not employing these workers are forcing them to do certain things to represent the brand of the company.

So this has to be exploitative or oppressive or unpleasant. And that's where the rift happened, because the wellness company workers, they did not love the company. They don't hate the company, but it's a different kind of relationship. And so when we were talking about uniforms specifically, and again, going back to how these workers' bodies are gendered and racialized in particular ways, they wanted me to first understand what it takes for them to do their daily work. And that's where they started explaining the project of professionalism. They said, you know, I am a Northeastern woman. And so when I navigate my way in Bangalore, I am very aware of the fact that a lot of people, a lot of men who may consider that I'm a class subject equivalent to theirs, right? I'm a low income or a lower middle class person. They think they can take liberties with me. So even if I'm simply taking an auto

rickshaw to be able to go to my next job, I have to constantly encounter, you know, either some man staring at me constantly, or this auto worker trying to make conversation with me saying, where are you going what what work are you doing these wellness companies offer massages at home so the woman often has to actually carry a quite heavy massage bed everywhere so there's no way she can walk to work or take it in the bus or something she has to take a cab or an auto so again these men would have questions for her you know know, what is this? What is this object? And if she says it's a massage bed, it's over for her. She can already sense

in their faces and in their tone that they've basically classified her as some sort of a quote-unquote loose woman that they can further take liberties with. So she's like, I often tell them that it's a keyboard, it's a casio, you know, a keyboard player. Yeah, or something like that. And then when she lands up in this particular apartment complex to do her job, the platform company has told her that customers don't like being called. Don't call them in advance. Just wait until, you know, the job time is started.

And then just go to the apartment, find it and then ring the bell, which is which I guess is it's an interesting insight as well for me, because, you know, I think I'm definitely more on the customer side, in the sense that I'm definitely the kind of millennial person who would say, I hate being called, right. And we would all agree to it. But one never thinks how this could translate into platform design and platform policies that force workers to kind of play this constant guessing game and be like, oh my god, I can't call this person. I just have to land up at their house and maybe text them. Like, how is this going to work? So anyway, when the woman is waiting down in the apartment complex, most of the upwardly mobile upper middle class apartment complexes in India or major Indian cities

are also heavily securitized. So she has to encounter the security guard, who then has to, you know, size her up and allow her inside or not. And that is again, another risky place where they try to ask her, you know, what do you do? What is your job? And this one woman said, you know, I said, I'm here to provide this massage service to a client. And the guard took this as an opportunity to say, oh, can you also give me a massage? You know, my back is hurting a lot, which was kind of an innuendo or, you know, some sort of a weird conversation. And so she could point to her uniform and she could basically just point to her app and say, here's the company I work for. See, here's the logo on my uniform.

If you need a massage, I encourage you to sign up on this app and book yourself a massage. So she didn't have to say, you know, why are you talking to me like this? It didn't get unpleasant, basically. And I value these things because I think that there is older literature in sociology where people have sort of seriously tried to understand what it means to construct a professional identity in forms of work that are not socially considered as dignified, you know, or forms of work, you know, including nurses, or all kinds of caregivers, who paradoxically end up making our bodies healthier and better looking. But in themselves, the workers get stigmatized as dirty workers, or, you know, workers who are

not respected. Yeah, no, I really appreciate you outlining that, because it shows how, you know, okay, yeah, they are wearing, you know, a uniform of a company or something like that. But in this context, it really helps them to navigate the spaces that they are encountering as a worker, and to provide some degree of protection for themselves by being able to point to it and say, Look, I'm a professional, I'm doing my work, you know, leave me alone, essentially, right? So yeah, I think that's, I think that's great to know. Now, I want to go back to the point that you made about the strike, because this also kind of gets to the logic piece that you co wrote with Ritha Kadri, who was on the show in the past as well, talking about gig workers in Indonesia. And so I think this is really interesting, because, you know, you talked about the strike of the, you know, beauty workers for one of these platforms, and how they kind of push back on the company to make some demands as they were increasing the commissions and, you know, I'm sure doing other things as

well. But in the piece, you also talked about how there is also organizing and work that is done to try to create organizations that engage with the political system. And I'm wondering if this is a difference again, between the kind of more female gig work in India versus the kind of male work, like the driving and things like that. Or if you see that in the beauty work as well, where they're still trying to engage with, you know, political parties and things. I think I'm only realizing this in conversation with you right now, that actually, all of this has, again, even the political participation has so much to do with public and private performances of masculinity and femininity, especially in India, since we're talking about that context, but also possibly

elsewhere. The different or the unique bit about the Indian political environment might be the fact that how typically state and private relationships have worked out. So the piece that I talked about in the logic essay was that when workers think about the strategies and tactics available to them in order to build a certain form of worker power against the company, it's not obviously only the method of striking or collectivizing in more formal ways. And the reason for it, for instance, in Bangalore is because, again, the composition of the workforce itself is so checkered and so divided and heterogeneous, where migrant workers and local workers, not just that, so North Indian migrant workers and local

Kannadiga workers, that's one kind of friction. But also, say, for instance, Karnataka as the state where Bangalore is. Karnataka and the other state, Tamil Nadu, which is its neighboring state, have also been historically locked in a lot of friction over linguistic identity, regional clashes, clashes over water distribution that have all kind of played into, you know, if you think in the US context, for instance, think about state rivalries, right? So California versus Texas or something like that. So it's a similar kind of thing. But these rivalries play into what one considers as belonging to a place or not belonging to a place. And that definitely informs also the ways you can build formal or informal collective power, right? And hence,

what I saw in some of the early years of platform companies arriving was that the app workers were in some sort of tension and friction with existing auto-rickshaw drivers and cab drivers, because that divide became again about younger migrant workers taking on the app-based jobs versus the locally embedded, local language speaking traditional workers who had anyway controlled the market for a while, right? Because labor markets locally are controlled through these mechanisms of, do you speak the same language? Do you look like us? Do you understand what we're talking about? What are our stakes, essentially? So that, fortunately, has loosened up a little bit, both as platform work has become the dominant reality. So there just simply isn't the scope for traditional workers to deny or ignore it anymore. And I say fortunately, because that

has also forced some of the mainstream political outfits, collective outfits or worker outfits or trade associations to finally, you know, let go of the question as to whether app-based workers should be included in the fold of traditional worker collectivization. And that's a separate question too, which I've written about elsewhere, is that some of these tensions have been historic, right? So worker outfits and collectivization outfits that have come out of industrial worker movements do not naturally have the incentive to include domestic workers, for instance, because domestic workers have to go into apartment complexes or homes and etc, etc. And hence this question of what counts as a workplace

and what kind of protections should be afforded to those workers require a more expansive definition. So yeah, I would say that a lot of these tensions or divisions over who collectivizes and in what forms is definitely sort of pegged around identity positions that workers belong to, not necessarily maybe men and women. The big difference between men and women would be that even today, right, women are not expected or seen as natural stakeholders of public political movements and spaces. So it would be quite surprising or exceptional for a woman leader to emerge in, say, the ride-hailing space and say, I'm going to fight for these rights, because we don't even see enough women workers participating in that area. But you might have finally a woman representative coming out of, you know, the recent strikes in the wellness company case, who then becomes the de facto representative of women's voice and may be invited to the table for larger discussions on the gig economy.

I think you've outlined that really well. And I just think it's really interesting to understand, you know, how those divisions then impact the way that organizing works, you know, and the way that workers kind of come together. And, you know, as you say, as platform work has become more commonplace, I guess people have come together a bit more than they had in the past, which I think we talk about in the logic essay and has actually piqued a lot of people's curiosity is because I think this is not really to do with the reality of gig work or work per se but more about the gaps or the kinds of orthodoxy that is set into some of the platform scholarship like for instance why are we not assuming or asking how platform power interacts with local or state or national political power? Right. Why do we sort of keep talking about platforms as if they're inward looking ecosystems and any sort of power that is built or conversations that happen only happen there. And somehow when people switch off their apps, we don't know what

happens in their worlds outside. And so one of those things that I had seen in Bangalore was that in the early days, there was also a lot of hesitation to draw some of these clear cut boundaries around, you know, us against platform company, because platform companies are very well loved by local authorities in Bangalore, right? Because Bangalore projects itself as this innovation hub, the local government wants to be the facilitator of innovation and sort of techno capital and venture capital rather than being seen as the enemy of that. And there's some baggage to it because India had been and still is to some extent a welfare economy.

And so when economic liberalization happened in the early 90s, the world kind of saw or the business world kind of saw it as India's promise to say that the state is no longer going to interfere with business and with innovation and enterprise to the extent that it used to. So that legacy kind of echoes even in conversations today, where in Bangalore, you literally have this elite layer of citizens, you know, who run successful companies, and are invited to all kinds of civic decisions, they're invited to all kinds of civic meetings, where they are somehow treated as experts on matters of transportation, on urban planning, all kinds of things. So against this context, workers are very well aware that they need to maintain social relations. They need to somehow at least be in the good books or maintain a working relationship with the city elite, with the local authorities, with a number of stakeholders. And hence, again, the first response to a lot of platform company policies is not to go and strike against them or call for a

ban, etc, etc. They really tried to appeal to local political leaders who are up for election. You know, they tried these other means to exert power over the platform companies. That demonstrates the importance of the political engagement to then push back against the power and the access. And that platforms, no matter where in the world, are always embedded in material social political realities, right? So I really don't find some of these big theories of what platforms do useful to understand what happens at the local level. Yeah, I appreciate that. We are running short on our time. So I want to end with just a final question. You know, we've discussed many aspects of your work and, you know, this kind of platform

work in India. Is there anything else that we didn't touch on that you think it's important for the listeners to know about what's going on in India? It really depends. I mean, the thing that I've been pushing for is just for a normalization and people acquainting themselves with the laboring realities of the majority of the world. And I feel like calling it just global south or calling it exceptional in some ways, or just calling it invisibilized work doesn't quite do justice to this conversation. And we need to urgently sort of start having this comparative conversation rather than make it a global North versus South thing. Because that I genuinely believe will offer us creative and powerful tactics to build international solidarity,

right. So I think the first step for any of us to is to educate ourselves as to what is the normative reality of Brazil, Indonesia, India, anywhere in the world, to be able to say, Oh, yeah, I recognize, I recognize how caste, for instance, right, which we didn't get to talk about, is such a major social force, and figures into gig economy work work that in order to understand issues of dignity of labor or you know what kind of demands gig workers are making in India or elsewhere I think it would be really crucial to understand some of those social realities. Yeah I think that's a great point to make to end this conversation to get that in people's minds so they're thinking about that as we end. I really appreciate you taking the time today to chat with me to discuss what's going on in India and your work. Thank you so much.

Thank you for calling me. Thank you. Nupur Raval is a postdoctoral research fellow at the AI Now Institute at New York University, and you can follow her on Twitter at at Tethysherry. You can follow me at at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.