Academic Wits Research Outputs (All submissions)
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10539/36827
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Item With and against Platformisation: Men in care professions and the gendered dynamics of the future of work(ers).(Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS), 2022-11-15) Komarraju, Sai AmulyaWhile several studies examine platformisation and the future of work from a gendered perspective, much of the media coverage and academic scholarship on the platform economy is divided in terms of their focus – (migrant) men involved in the supposedly “masculine” and visible work of construction, driving, and delivery, and the invisible care work performed by women workers and the challenges involved in both. Undoubtedly, the over-representation of women in different kinds of care work prompts such research. However, in India, both men and women from marginalised castes and classes have historically performed care work, such as domestic work and salon work. Based on patchwork ethnography and interviews with male workers in two feminised care professions (cleaning and salon work), this working paper first makes a case for feminisation of platform work beyond the mere presence of women, and then proceeds to explore the material contexts within which male workers enter (platformised and not-platformised) feminised care work, their views on platformisation, their resistance to and co-optation of platform work, and, related to these, the strategies they use to affirm their masculinity.Item Unexceptional neoliberalism: enterprise and informality in the gig economy of India(Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS), 2022-11-15) Nair, Gayatri; Divyadarshi, JenniferThis paper examines the conditions of work in the platform economy across India, which has witnessed a significant expansion in the number of gig workers joining platform enterprises. The precarity underscoring work in the gig economy is now widely acknowledged, but what does this entail for workers in India and the global South who have typically been a part of the informal economy? The paper explores whether the absence of labour regulation and social security in gig work marks it as an extension of informal work. Based on interviews with gig workers and rooted in their experiences of work that remains unregulated, we consider whether gig work is an instance of “unexceptional neoliberalism” as it extends informality to new sectors. The paper unpacks the impact of the neoliberal state’s agenda of promoting enterprise on gig workers who are now subject to algorithmic controls of platforms, alongside “traditional” constraints of caste, class and gender, even as they are considered by the State and digital platforms to be autonomous entrepreneurial subjects.