Gayatri Nair
In the winter of 2021, on the heels of lockdowns brought on by the pandemic, close to a hundred women platform workers from Delhi and its neighbouring cities of Noida and Gurugram (termed Delhi National Capital Region, or NCR) came together to protest their working conditions. This collectivization was significant – a large-scale protest indicative of worsening working conditions in the beauty and salon services of the platform economy, similar to the protests that had taken place in the food delivery and ridehailing sectors. This collective action challenged the discourse of women's empowerment and formalization of work promoted by platforms and state discourses that considered platform work as enabling more women to enter paid work. Technological mediation and the ‘app-ification’ of work are considered as ‘disruptive’ technologically but in India, the discourse has been about the social disruption introduced by platforms. For workers, however, the disruption has produced changes but has not fundamentally altered social conditions of work or life. As much recent scholarship on platform work in the Indian and Global South context has highlighted (Pollio, 2019; Surie, 2020; Rathi and Tandon, 2021; Dattani, 2021; Nair, 2022), platform work is informalized with the onus of investments and risks to health and safety placed on workers themselves. In India, it has always been the informal economy within which many women labour and live out their lives. What then has changed with the platform economy? Are women in platform work similar to other women in informal work?