Abstract
The rise of the digital platform economy, driven by technological innovation, was expected to be more favourable for women workers due to increased flexibility and autonomy, but the nature of work on these platforms has been found to be often gendered and precarious. This chapter builds a case for examining platform work from a marginal worker’s viewpoint. It establishes a relationship between feminist approaches and informality and discusses how women have always been structurally and socially more vulnerable to external shock, making them doubly marginalised. The authors map the global understanding and literature on location-based platforms and review it within the Indian context while paying close attention to low-income women workers and the socio-cultural and political challenges surrounding them. The workers’ concerns, opportunities and recommendations in relation to the platform architecture and the accompanied algorithmic management are investigated and an argument is made for a feminist approach to the design and development of location-based digital labour platforms.
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Notes
- 1.
Schmidt (2017) has classified web-based digital labour platforms (or cloud work performed remotely via the internet) into freelance marketplaces, micro tasking crowd work and contest-based creative crowd work; and location-based digital labour platforms (or gig work bound to a specific location) into accommodation, transportation, and delivery services, and household and personal services.
- 2.
Gojek and ride-hailing platforms were perceived as disrupting the traditional modes of transportation
- 3.
Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the concept of ‘intersectionality’ to feminist theory by discussing multiple forms of exclusion faced by Black women due to their gender, race, and class. These concepts are seen as interlocking systems that are often experienced by an individual together (Crenshaw, 1989).
- 4.
Patricia Hill Collins expands the ideas of Crenshaw and links gender, race, and class to interlocking systems of oppression. This concept helps us to reimagine how power, oppression, resistance, privilege, penalties, benefits, and harms are distributed in a society (Collins, 2002).
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Bansal, P., Arora, P. (2023). Feminist Approaches to Location-Based Labour Platforms in India. In: Surie, A., Huws, U. (eds) Platformization and Informality . Dynamics of Virtual Work. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11462-5_7
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