We are a group of scholars and researchers who work with gig and platform worker unions in India in various capacities. We form the India chapter of the Labor Tech Research Network collective, and have been meeting regularly from across the globe to share cross-sectoral organizing strategies, track the political landscape around gig & platform unions, and discuss research and reflections from our place-based engagements. Our work sits at the critical intersection of scholarship and activism. It involves amplifying workers’ voices, supporting unionisation efforts, and supporting workers in their struggles to lead more dignified and just working lives. Our discussions have inspired us to put together this blog series on the politics of writing about platform workers’ organizing.
The series is put together by us – Isha Bhallamudi and Anushree Gupta – and the posts have been co-authored with researchers Ambika Tandon, Debopriya Shome, Eesha Kunduri, Kaveri Medappa, and Malcolm Katrak, as well as worker-organizers Manju Goel, Abdul Nayeem, and Javed.
Digital labor platforms have evolved rapidly over the last two decades, fundamentally transforming work and labor relations within the global economy. On one hand, these platforms claim to link disparate geographies by opening up new markets and employment opportunities. But on the other hand, the underlying business models adopted by platform firms and their mode of operations have led to a sharp increase in inequalities and a multi-dimensional impoverishment of workers, leaving them trapped in low-skill, low-income jobs, with minimal social protection. As exploitative conditions of work within the platform economy become normalised across sectors (spanning ride-hailing, food delivery, home-services, to name a few), resistance to these norms has also emerged in the form of workers’ unions. As associational forms with a unique history and politics, unions serve as a counterweight against platforms, facilitating workers’ negotiations for better conditions and demanding accountability from platforms. Collective action and organising efforts by workers thus mark a turn in scholarly debates and research on platform work as well, with unions of gig and platform workers and their emergent modes of resistance being prominent themes in recent scholarship. This is an area that is nascent yet critical in the current socio-political moment, demanding urgent attention.
Platform researchers are increasingly seeking ways to contribute to organizing efforts, by assisting worker unions in their everyday functioning and having academic work concretely respond to platform-imposed inequalities and systematic violence. This often necessitates finding creative ways to be of use within a movement space, to develop a tacit sense of the politics of organizing, and finally, to create a place for oneself within a thickly-layered landscape that cuts across multiple domains of labor and social justice-oriented work. As researchers invested in the collaborative production of situated knowledges, we are trained to write from places and the pen is often our primary tool. As a result, our contributions to platform/gig workers’ organizing often take the form of multiple modes of writing: academic writing, public-facing writing, report writing, journalistic writing, legal writing, and writing for social media. While each of these modes of writing aims to produce outcomes that support unions’ public-facing campaigns, online and offline organizing, consumer awareness-building efforts, or legislative campaigns, each of them invokes a different set of challenges, too. Drawing on our positionalities as politically engaged researchers embedded in cross-sectoral organizing experiences, this series engages with the politics of writing about platform organizing and offers insights into the shifting terrains of platform work.
Our work in India is framed by the unique history and trajectory of gig & platform workers’ mobilisation in the country. These movements have emerged in a political-economic landscape that is often characterised as booming and prosperous, with the proponents of the digital economy only being concerned with profit-making endeavours that often succeed at the cost of workers’ lives and livelihoods. In this landscape, our work attempts to counter (both materially as well as discursively) the invisiblisation of the lived experiences of platform workers. India’s trade union landscape has for long been a fractured one, marked by competing agendas of various unions, driven by their affiliation with particular political parties. Notwithstanding this typical association of unions with party-based mobilization, and left politics in particular, unorganized workers in recent decades have been seen to depart from this lineage and include more broad-based appeals to welfare from the state through independent, non-party based unions. Such unionization efforts have also worked in tandem with other socio-political movements. In resonance with such histories, unions of gig and platform workers have been seen to deploy a variety of strategies including but not limited to rights-based campaigning, policy and legislative lobbying, as well as a social movement orientation, to address the multi-dimensional nature of issues that surround platform work.
Despite significant overlaps in the demands registered by unions across the spectrum (including party-based as well as independent unions), the landscape continues to be a highly competitive and fragmented one, posing constraints to cross-sectoral mobilization. Further, the exigencies and constraints of platform work make it hard for unions to sustain grounded organising work. Observing the evolution of the landscape from a handful of scattered protests to the establishment of trade unions and trade union federations,, we have tried to make sense of these developments as researchers in these spaces, alongside participating and contributing to work at the intersection of organizing, documentation and public outreach. Our grounded work from various locations forms the backdrop for these posts, enabling us to draw connections between our particular contexts and organising landscapes around the world.
Image by Ambika Tandon: The image depicts a protest by platform workers employed by a major food delivery platform in India, demanding better working conditions within the platform economy, including a decent living wage, more attention to their concerns and issues, and representing the new wave of platform workers’ mobilisations that have characterised the landscape of platform work in India in the recent years.
In this series, The Politics of Writing About Platform Workers’ Organizing, we ask and address questions like:
- How do we balance the researcher’s agenda and needs vs the union’s agenda and needs?
- How do we make decisions about what to write and not write about?
- How do we navigate the implications of making interventions by selectively visiblising certain dynamics or projects through writing?
- How do we navigate personal politics with union members?
- How do we deal with tensions between unions?
- How do we match the pace of change in the field?
- How do we negotiate time and institutional constraints that separate intellectual labor from the affective labor that working with unions entails, demanding that we choose between academic work and union-facing work?
- What are useful writing strategies for researchers working with unions?
To explore these questions, our collective work draws on labor as a critical theoretical lens and on mutual engagement and reciprocity as foundational principles. This allows us to engage with movement spaces and individual unions collaboratively and cultivate genuine solidarities. We also commit to a critical orientation in this series, by reflecting on the internal conflicts between our roles as researcher and union volunteer; how we face internal threats to the union in the form of contradictions between union members; and how our personal politics and those of our interlocutors affect larger union strategies and how they shape what we omit from our documentation and writing. We ask, how do we stay true to the larger politics and labour principles at stake in our writing? What are our stakes? How do we identify the guiding principles of this work? We also consider the difficulties of picking both what to write and the mediums through which to carry out this writing – whether academic, worker-facing, or public-oriented. How do we arrive at shared understandings with workers and unions? When we make these choices, what are we visibilising and what remains unsaid, hidden, tacit?
The first post in the series, “Writing About/With Platform Unions: the Role of Culture, Politics, and History,” by Ambika Tandon, Debopriya Shome, and Kaveri Medappa, discusses what it means to organise in different geographies and organisational forms, and how union and research praxis are both equally embroiled in social fabrics. It asks the questions: What are the tensions and contradictions that we confronted while doing research with ‘gig’ worker unions? How can we be less extractive and more useful to the workers we write about?
The second post in the series, “Transnational Audiences, Translation Work,” by Anushree Gupta, Debopriya Shome, and Malcolm Katrak, grapples with how our institutional, pedagogical, and disciplinary contexts shape our entries into union-engaged work and the nature of our collaborative and writing work. What does it take to carry out grounded, empirical research work that feeds back into movement spaces?
The third post in the series, “Gender Dimensions of Platform Work: What Does it Mean for Organizing?” by Anushree Gupta, Eesha Kunduri, and Isha Bhallamudi, reflects on the gendered nature of platform work and its implications for collectivization and unionization. Recognizing that organizing work is socially reproductive labour, we ask: what kinds of mobilizations does it produce and limit? How might unions respond to and challenge existing relational hierarchies and inequalities? What lessons can we draw from rich histories of women-led unorganized workers’ movements?
The fourth post in the series, “Organizing Diaries” by Abdul Nayeem, Javed, Manju Goel, Anushree Gupta, Ambika Tandon, and Isha Bhallamudi, discusses ways for researchers and gig worker organizers to work together. Through vignettes about the organizing process, we share our experiences across sectors and cities, and reflect on relational solidarities and challenges along the lines of gender, caste, and religion.
In the concluding post, we consolidate key takeaways and implications from the series, and reflect on the process of writing this series itself. All four posts are co-authored equally and authors are listed alphabetically.
Together, these posts also fundamentally engage with the relationship between theory and practice. Each post is inspired by and speaks from a collaborative ethos of knowledge-production, raising provocations for what it means and what it takes to center these methods within the academy. Doing this work means owning that we are engaged in projects that are intellectual inasmuch as they are political (though these may not be popular or convenient positions to take). Through these posts, we are also asking: how do we build theory from the ground up? What does it mean to generate theory that is embedded in local contexts yet responds to the need for academic legibility? What is said and unsaid is important for how we engage with questions of theorization – therefore, as critical labour scholars, we attend to the tacit and offer insights that arise from our engagements with organizing.
Finally, this series considers the implications of the gender dimensions of platform work for the labor of organizing, which we recognize is invisibilized, underpaid, and under attack. We also see how gender and caste affect and shape everyday interactions, relationships, and work in the platform economy, and mediate experiences of risk and violence in an increasingly polarized socio-political landscape. Going beyond theoretical critiques about how unions fail to incorporate ideals of gender equality, we consider instead points of entry and expansion that already exist in union spaces. In this particular relational landscape, how are unions, workers, and researchers pushing against gendered hierarchies and creating spaces for incremental change? Such a lens enables a more generative approach to organizing work and its transformative possibilities, highlighting ethics of care, mutual aid, and community.
Overall, we hope this series helps inform platform researchers and organizers, offering perspectives on what it means to grapple with the politics of organizing in the current moment, how we can respond to the need for ground mobilizing and cross-sectoral solidarities, how we might reimagine our roles as academics to meet these challenges, and how we might imagine more just and diverse socio-economic futures. Recent political developments raise new challenges for labour organizing. We have seen how ground mobilizing can be quickly co-opted by extremist forces, and it is increasingly difficult to organize effectively amid the broader landscape of diminishing spaces for leftist politics, increasing anti-labor policies, fascist governance, and union busting. Close-quarters engagement with unions offers sharp insights into the ground realities of organizing, and this is why we believe this series is of importance to researchers and organizers – to help us think and build on how we engage with unions, how unions engage in relational politics, and what are effective strategies and lessons to build power in the current landscape.
This post was curated by Contributing Editor Soojin Kim and reviewed by Iván Flores.
Acknowledgments
A big thank you to the Labor Tech Research Network for facilitating a crowdfunding project to compensate Manju, Nayeem, and Javed for their writing time, and Kaveri Medappa for putting together the funding call. We are deeply grateful to the individual funders who contributed to this project. Thank you to our discussion group for inspiring this series and Chiara Furtado and Nishant Kharkwal for participating in the discussion. A huge thank you to Platypus first reader Iván Flores, editors Soojin Kim, Sam DiBella, Hae-Seo Kim, Mine Egbatan, and Misria Ali, and Managing Editor Kim Fernandes, for generously welcoming these ideas and helping us put together this series with thoughtfulness and care.
