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Zothan Mawii - COVID-19 and Relief Measures for Gig Workers in India
https://cis-india.org/raw/zothan-mawii-covid-19-and-relief-measures-for-gig-workers-in-india
<b>CIS is cohosted a webinar with Tandem Research on the impact of the COVID-19 response on the gig economy on 9 April 2020. It was a closed door discussion between representatives of workers' unions, labour activists, and researchers working on gig economy and workers' rights to highlight the demands of workers' groups in the transport, food delivery and care work sectors. We saw this as an urgent intervention in light of the disruption to the gig economy caused by the nationwide lockdown to limit proliferation of COVID-19. This is a summary of the discussions that took place in the webinar authored by Zothan Mawii, a Research Fellow at Tandem Research.</b>
<p> </p>
<em>Re-posted from <a href="https://tandemresearch.org/blog/covid19-and-relief-measures-for-gig-workers-in-india" target="_blank">Tandem Research</a> (April 14, 2020)</em>
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<h3><strong>List of Participants</strong></h3>
<ul>
<li>Aayush Rathi, Ambika Tandon and Tasneem Mewa, The Centre for Internet and Society, India (Co-organisers)</li>
<li>Zothan Mawii, Iona Eckstein and Urvashi Aneja, Tandem Research (Co-organisers)</li>
<li>Aditi Surie, Indian Institute for Human Settlements</li>
<li>Astha Kapoor, Aapti Institute</li>
<li>Dharmendra Vaishnav, Indian Delivery Lions (IDL)</li>
<li>Janaki Srinivasan, International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore</li>
<li>Kaveri Kaliyanda, The University of Sussex</li>
<li>Pradyumna Taduri, Fairwork Foundation</li>
<li>Rakhi Sehgal, Independent researcher</li>
<li>Shaik Salauddin, Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT)</li>
<li>Simiran Lalvani, Independent researcher</li>
<li>Tanveer Pasha, Ola, Taxi 4 Sure and Uber Drivers and Owners’ Association (OTU)</li>
<li>Vinay Sarathy, United Food Delivery Partners’ Union (UFDPU)</li></ul>
<h3><strong>What relief measures do gig workers need during this pandemic?</strong></h3>
<p>The coronavirus pandemic has the world in its grips, and exposed the fragility of our economic systems and societal structures. The ensuing lockdown and physical distancing measures put in place by states to control the spread of the virus has impacted citizens differently and largely along class lines. While white collar workers remain relatively insulated as they work from home and have their essentials delivered, it has laid bare the vulnerabilities faced by India’s largely informal workforce. Since announcing the lockdown and the exodus of migrant workers from cities, the central and state governments in India have announced a number of relief measures for workers. However, those working on on-demand platforms have been excluded, while relief measures announced by a few platforms are inadequate to provide meaningful protection, leaving workers to fall at the cracks. Tandem Research and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) hosted a webinar on 9th April with a group of union leaders and researchers to draft a charter of demands for platforms and government to ensure better protection for gig workers.</p>
<p>We heard from 4 union leaders about the situation facing workers on the ground and the shortcomings of the measures platforms claim to be taking to ensure their workers' safety and protection. This piece recaps some of the issues that were uncovered during the meeting.</p>
<p>Tanveer Pasha, President of Ola, Taxi 4 Sure and Uber Drivers and Owners’ Association (OTU) and Shaik Salauddin, President of the Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT) pointed out that while Ola Cabs and Uber claim to have instructed drivers on safety and hygiene measures and provided personal protective equipment (PPE), in reality their efforts have been wanting. The unions themselves have been conducting these awareness drives while IFAT purchased masks for drivers in Telangana. On-demand food delivery services have also not provided workers with any PPE, although they have been deemed essential workers and must continue to interact with customers and restaurants as they go about their tasks.</p>
<p><strong>High on the list of concerns facing gig workers was income security and the security of their jobs once the lockdown is lifted</strong>. Transportation companies Uber and Ola cab have suspended services although some drivers in Bengaluru, working with OTU have pivoted to delivering essential goods or transporting healthcare workers. The number of orders on on-demand food delivery services has dropped drastically too. Gig workers are earning little to no money during this time and have little recourse to savings or other safety nets.</p>
<p><strong>Unions are demanding that workers are paid a sum of money to tide them over during this time, which can be paid back to the platforms without interest</strong>. Unions argue that the commissions charged by platform companies can be used to cover these costs and even call for a reduction in the commission after the lockdown is lifted so that workers can recover financially.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.carandbike.com/news/ola-introduces-drive-the-driver-fund-initiative-to-fund-relief-for-driver-community-2201886" target="_blank">Ola Cabs</a> and <a href="https://yourstory.com/2020/03/coronavirus-zomato-feed-daily-wager" target="_blank">Zomato</a> have started funds to support their workers, taking donations from the public and from management, <strong>but workers are yet to see the benefits of the funds</strong>. With little transparency or clarity as to how these funds will operate, unions and workers are left wondering if this is solely a publicity move on the part of platforms. No announcements have been made regarding these funds - who is eligible for the fund? What are the criteria workers will have to meet to receive funds? Will workers have to pay the amount back to the platforms? If yes, will it carry interest? Will workers’ ratings or the hours they’ve logged on the app be used to determine their eligibility?</p>
<p>The government announced a moratorium on EMI and loan repayments, and has directed the RBI to set guidelines. Some state governments have also announced waivers on house rent payments. While these measures should have eased the pressure on gig workers, that hasn’t been the case - <strong>informal lenders and non banking financial companies (NBFC) have continued to ask workers for payments, flouting the RBI guidelines</strong>. In the absence of enforcement from the government, gig workers are unable to reap the benefits of directives designed to relieve the financial pressure they are currently under.</p>
<p><strong>Delivery workers find themselves in a double bind</strong> - they have been deemed essential workers by the government and on-demand services remain up and running. However, with few restaurants remaining open and few orders coming in, they are forced to work long hours for little money, and in risky conditions as roads remain deserted because of the lockdown. Dharmender Vaishnav (Indian Delivery Lions) and Kaveri Kaliyanda (PhD scholar, University of Sussex) raised pertinent questions over the classification of delivery workers as essential workers - <strong>Who are the workers essential for? At what personal cost to their health and safety must delivery workers continue to serve the interests of platforms and their middle class customer base?</strong> This categorisation also allows on-demand food delivery companies to absolve themselves of the responsibility for ensuring workers receive wages - they can claim services continued to operate and shift the blame onto workers for not logging in. Many of the workers who have gone back to their native towns and villages are anxious that their accounts will be deactivated for not logging in.</p>
<p>These issues facing gig workers will be drafted into a set of demands for platforms and government to provide relief. However, many questions remain unanswered. While these measures may address the hardships gig workers face in the short term, it doesn’t address long standing issues that characterise this line of work. The precarity of gig workers stems from the marginal space they occupy in the labour market. As ‘partners’ or ‘independent contractors’, they are not entitled to social protection measures from the government nor are platforms obliged to provide them. Unlike construction workers or domestic workers-who are also informal workers but enjoy recognition of an organised body and some legislative protections-they remain largely invisible to policymakers and government. Getting gig workers this type of recognition will be crucial to ensure their wellbeing. In Karnataka, there are efforts underway to introduce regulations similar to <a href="https://edd.ca.gov/Payroll_Taxes/ab-5.htm" target="_blank">California’s AB5 bill</a> that recognises gig workers as employers eligible for state and employer sponsored benefits. Gig workers have been included in the <a href="https://www.prsindia.org/sites/default/files/bill_files/Code%20on%20Social%20Security%2C%202019.pdf" target="_blank">draft Code on Social Security</a>. However, regulating platforms to make them more accountable and safeguarding worker welfare is long overdue. It is especially urgent at this time - the economic repression that will follow is likely to push more young jobseekers to the platform economy as a stop gap solution in the absence of suitable employment. The conditions of work platforms engender are far from ideal and should not become the model for jobs in the future.</p>
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<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/zothan-mawii-covid-19-and-relief-measures-for-gig-workers-in-india'>https://cis-india.org/raw/zothan-mawii-covid-19-and-relief-measures-for-gig-workers-in-india</a>
</p>
No publisherZothan Mawii (Tandem Research)Gig WorkDigital LabourResearchPlatform-WorkFuture of WorkNetwork EconomiesResearchers at Work2020-05-19T05:41:57ZBlog EntryPlatformisation of Domestic Work in India: Report from a Multistakeholder Consultation
https://cis-india.org/raw/platformisation-of-domestic-work-in-india-report-from-a-multistakeholder-consultation
<b>On November 16, 2019, The Centre for Internet and Society invited officials from the Department of Labour (Government of Karnataka), members of domestic worker unions, domestic workers, company representatives, and civil society researchers at the Student Christian Mission of India House to discuss preliminary findings of an ongoing research project and facilitate a multistakeholder consultation to understand the contemporaneous platformisation of domestic work in India. Please find here a report from this consultation authored by Tasneem Mewa. </b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Report from the consultation: <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/platformisation-of-domestic-work-in-india-report-february-2020/" target="_blank">Download</a> (PDF)</h4>
<h4>Agenda and details of the consultation: <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/domestic-work-in-the-gig-economy-20191116" target="_blank">URL</a></h4>
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<h3>Introduction</h3>
<p>On November 16, 2019, The Centre for Internet and Society invited officials from the Department of Labour (Government of Karnataka), members of domestic worker unions, domestic workers, company representatives, and civil society researchers at the Student Christian Mission of India House to discuss preliminary findings of an
ongoing research project and facilitate a multistakeholder consultation to understand the contemporaneous platformisation of domestic work in India.</p>
<p>This collaborative project is being led by the the Centre for Internet and Society, India (CIS) together with Domestic Workers Rights Union (DWRU) in Bangalore. The research team comprises of Geeta Menon, Parijatha G.P., Sumathi, Radha K., and Zennathunnisa from DWRU, and Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon from CIS. Through a collective research process, this research team has explored the proliferation of digital platforms as a key intermediary in the domestic work sector, and in supporting or challenging deeply rooted structural inequities. For more information on the research project, see the project announcement published on the CIS website [1]. This work forms part of the Association for Progressive Communications’ <a href="https://www.apc.org/en/project/firn-feminist-internet-research-network" target="_blank">Feminist Internet Research Network</a> project, supported by the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.</p>
<p>The multistakeholder consultation was structured in two segments: a) a presentation outlining initial observations and analysis, and b) a semi-moderated open discussion. Together, these sessions aimed to initiate conversations pertaining to the role of digital platforms, the legal classification of domestic and gig workers, and devising regulatory solutions to improve conditions of work. Preliminary findings were based on qualitative in-depth interviews with workers, platform companies, unions, skilling agencies, and labour officials in both Bengaluru and
New Delhi. Feminist approaches were employed in conducting these interviews, and participatory, consensual, reflexive and collaborative research was prioritised.</p>
<p>Situating the lived realities of domestic workers, the event sought to centre the voice of domestic workers in the consultation around the future of their work. The event had attendance from multilingual attendees. The original presentation was made in English, and Geeta Menon translated the presentation and the discussion that followed in Kannada [2].</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Footnotes</h3>
<p>[1] Tandon, A., & Rathi, A. (2019, October 1). Digital mediation of domestic and care work in India: Project
Announcement. Retrieved from <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-domestic-work-india-announcement" target="_blank">https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-domestic-work-india-announcement</a></p>
<p>[2] Rathi, A. (2019, November 16). Domestic Work in the 'Gig Economy'. Retrieved from
<a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/domestic-work-in-the-gig-economy-20191116" target="_blank">https://cis-india.org/raw/domestic-work-in-the-gig-economy-20191116</a>; Tandon, A., & Rathi, A. (2019).
Domestic workers in the ‘gig’ economy [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from
<a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/domestic-work-and-platforms-presentation" target="_blank">https://cis-india.org/raw/domestic-work-and-platforms-presentation</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/platformisation-of-domestic-work-in-india-report-from-a-multistakeholder-consultation'>https://cis-india.org/raw/platformisation-of-domestic-work-in-india-report-from-a-multistakeholder-consultation</a>
</p>
No publishertasneemDigital EconomyRAW EventsDigital LabourResearchResearchers at WorkDigital Domestic Work2020-02-17T09:46:52ZBlog EntryRoundtable on India’s Gig-work Economy
https://cis-india.org/raw/india-gig-work-economy-roundtable
<b>Working in the gig-economy has been associated with economic vulnerabilities. However, there are also moral and affective vulnerabilities as workers find their worth measured everyday by their performance of—and at—work and in every interaction and movement. This roundtable discussion marks the end of our series on 'India’s Gig-work Economy' published by the Platypus blog of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC). In this discussion, the researchers reflect on methods, challenges, inter-subjectivities and possible future directions for research on the topic. Listen to the audio track below or read the transcript for the full discussion.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><em>Originally published by the <a href="http://blog.castac.org/category/series/indias-gig-work-economy/" target="_blank">Platypus blog</a> of CASTAC on September 5, 2019.</em></p>
<h4>Full <a href="http://blog.castac.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/09/CASTAC-roundtable-transcript.docx" target="_blank">transcript</a> of the roundtable in English.</h4>
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<iframe src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/q4G4v46ZlOU" frameborder="0" height="315" width="100%"></iframe>
<h3><strong>Excerpts from the roundtable</strong></h3>
<h4>Part 1: On continuities between traditional and newer forms of work in cab-driving</h4>
<p><strong>Anushree (researcher, taxi-driving in Mumbai):</strong> “Something that came out during field work was the flow of workers from traditional services to app-based services which kind of happened in phases and all these platforms have played a different function in the history of this. While the radio taxis were more important in teaching workers to become professionals in the service economy the new platforms have given them a larger customer base and hired access to audience.”</p>
<p><strong>Sarah (researcher, taxi-driving in Delhi):</strong> “Prior to Ola and Uber there were radio cabs, but they were not the same phenomenon obviously. They used to work in specific pockets better, such as the airport route.”</p>
<h4>Part 2: Regulation of platform companies and platform-work</h4>
<p>The State’s response to disruptive technologies in India has always accounted for worker groups as electoral constituents as well. This means that there are no neat divisions between older black and yellow cabs and the newer ride-hailing app-based cabs. To pacify the threatened black and yellow cab drivers, they were accorded a special category on hailing apps as well:</p>
<p><strong>Anushree:</strong> So there were a lot of issues around the emergence of the app-based platforms and services and how they were disrupting the existing arrangements so in a bid to pacify the yellow and black cab drivers who are already operating in the city, these platform companies decided to go ahead and provide access to traditional taxi services as well. But also the related development that happened there is at the Maharashtra state government also provided another app to the black and yellow Cab drivers and as far as I found out during my fieldwork there hasn’t been any resolution on that front and most black and yellow cab drivers also use the State government made app but they also log into apps and every time I tried to book a black and yellow cab using Ola and Uber I could not get one.</p>
<h4>Part 3: On motivations and perceptions of gig-work</h4>
<p><strong>Simiran (researcher, food-delivery work in Mumbai):</strong> “So, I felt that these non app-based workers had difficulty joining apps because they lack domicile proof to prove they live in the city. There is also a perception that one needs to be English speaking. I am not implying that app-based workers have no rural roots or are all English speaking or educated but this is the perception that was held by non-app workers that was interesting.”</p>
<p><strong>Rajendra (researcher, food-delivery work in Delhi):</strong> “In case of the food-delivery workers in Delhi, they push them to deliver orders on time. This pressure makes them violate traffic rules, they ride on pavements, they break traffic signals. This also disrupts the social understanding of how to move in the city.”</p>
<h4>Part 4: On studying the gig-economy in India: how did you recruit, why?</h4>
<p><strong>Noopur:</strong> Why not order and recruit because so many people seem to be taking this pathway to approach gig-economy workers?</p>
<p><strong>Simiran:</strong> “…One thing is that I have never ordered food online so I wanted to keep it a bit blind that way but also the other thing is that I did not want my first interaction with the worker to be as a consumer or in a consumer-provider relationship. So, I was searching on Youtube, looking for city names and looking for search terms such as strikes or protests. Looking for videos about these things and their views on the companies…This was very interesting because there were also people from non-metro cities, from small towns doing this work who were also very eager to speak to me. They were expressive already and wanting to speak…”</p>
<p><strong>Anushree:</strong> “Apart from them fleet owners and union members were very eager to talk to us. They saw the study as a way to put their voice out. I had to establish my identity as well as a researcher. I used Telegram and facebook groups extensively…I think I relied on Telegram the most. It was also surprising that such a diverse set of people were on that platform. I had never used Telegram before this project but the comfort levels of all the people using it was really surprising. Drivers in the union members group was sort of surprising to me, they were posting images from the road, they were posting audio notes, they were moderating conversations in the group. Telegram was my major source of responses and I also got to know what was happening on the ground.”</p>
<p><strong>Sarah:</strong> “So, when you identify as a researcher and ask them these questions there is a certain expectation of allyship. So, I started asking them what they think is a good customer. That was a good entry point to assuring them that I was on their side. Some of them were still very cautious. We were talking about things like drunk women and they would be quick to tell me that not all women are bad. Or not all customers are bad. But discussing customers and their behavior was generally a good way to connect with them…”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/india-gig-work-economy-roundtable'>https://cis-india.org/raw/india-gig-work-economy-roundtable</a>
</p>
No publisherNoopur Raval, Anushree Gupta, Rajendra Jadhav, Sarah Zia, and Simiran LalvaniGenderDigital LabourResearchPlatform-WorkFuture of WorkNetwork EconomiesResearchers at WorkMapping Digital Labour in India2020-05-19T06:36:34ZBlog EntryNoopur Raval and Rajendra Jadhav - Power Chronography of Food-Delivery Work
https://cis-india.org/raw/noopur-raval-rajendra-jadhav-power-chronography-of-food-delivery-work
<b> Working in the gig-economy has been associated with economic vulnerabilities. However, there are also moral and affective vulnerabilities as workers find their worth measured everyday by their performance of—and at—work and in every interaction and movement. This essay by Noopur Raval and Rajendra Jadhav is the fourth among a series of writings by researchers associated with the 'Mapping Digital Labour in India' project at the CIS, supported by the Azim Premji University, that were published on the Platypus blog of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC).</b>
<p> </p>
<p><em>Originally published by the <a href="http://blog.castac.org/category/series/indias-gig-work-economy/" target="_blank">Platypus blog</a> of CASTAC on August 15, 2019.</em></p>
<p><em>The ethnographic research was conducted by Rajendra and this short essay was collaboratively produced by the field researcher and Noopur (co-PI). The accompanying audio recording has been produced by Noopur.</em></p>
<h4>Summary of the essay in Hindi: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPIfIvp2000" target="_blank">Audio</a> (YouTube) and <a href="http://blog.castac.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/08/Rajendra-Hindi-Transcript-.docx" target="_blank">Transcript</a> (text)</h4>
<hr />
<p>This post presents the observations around the design of temporality within app-based food-delivery platforms in India. It draws on semi-structured interviews by field-researcher Rajendra and his time spent “hanging out” with food-delivery workers who are also often referred to as “hunger saviors” and “partners” in the platform ecosystem in India. Like in the <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/simiran-lalvani-workers-fictive-kinship-relations-app-based-food-delivery-mumbai" target="_blank">earlier post by Simiran Lalvani</a> on food-delivery workers in Mumbai, we also observed that app-based work was structured and monitored along similar lines. However, in this post, we go into a detailed description of how work-time and temporality of work are configured in order to fulfill the promises that app companies make to customers in urban India. Before such app-based services came into existence, there were some popular claims around delivery-time (“30 minutes or free pizza” by Domino’s) but the entire process of food preparation, travel and delivery had not been made as transparent and quantified in a granular way as they are now through popular apps such as Swiggy, Zomato and UberEats. While such companies exist in the other parts of the world and make the promise of “anytime work” to potential workers, as we observed during fieldwork, app-based food delivery-work is anything but flexible. People could indeed start working at any time of the day, but it had real consequences to earn a living wage. While they were free to logout or switch off their app also at their convenience, they would be constantly nudged in the form of calls by warehouse managers as well as through text messages telling them how they were missing out on earnings. It is also important to note that, in India especially, food-delivery as a standardized form of work, exists in a regulatory grey space. In that sense, there is not a lot of clarity on the maximum limit of working hours in a day and in a week. In the following sections, I provide details about how work is structured temporally in this system.</p>
<h3><strong>Shift-based Work</strong></h3>
<p>When Rajendra spoke to workers in the Delhi-NCR region, they reported that they could choose to work different kinds of shifts like part-time (8 AM – 3 PM or 7 PM – 12 AM), full-time (11 AM -11 PM) or ultra full-time (7 AM -11 PM). While workers could pick their timings or slots on weekdays, it was mandatory to work on the weekends. As mentioned earlier, while companies claimed that riders could log in and out at any time of the day, their pay depended on the number of deliveries they make and the hours they worked. But it’s not that simple. It is not just the wholly quantified units (an hour, a day) that become exigent and overbearing; it was in fact how these rules demanded high levels of alertness and care from the workers. Any kind of carelessness, not paying attention (to time, text message announcements) could be detrimental to claiming pay for the work they had done already. For instance, like a worker described, if he even logged out a minute before the end of the shift, he would lose out on his incentive. Another worker added,</p>
<blockquote>If you log off even five minutes before eleven (pm), a call comes from the company and they ask you to log back in immediately.</blockquote>
<p>In such cases, those managing the backend systems even make these calls to shield workers from the eventuality of losing pay and the hassle of resolving disputed payments later by simply urging and pushing workers to stay on-time and online. In that sense, there is not only an expectation of punctuality and always being-on as a desirable thing, but it is also imperative for the workers to meet these expectations while they interact with the app itself.</p>
<p> </p>
<img src="https://cis-india.org/CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_NRRJ_01.jpg/image_preview" alt="CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_NR-RJ_01" class="image-left image-inline" title="CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_NR-RJ_01" />
<h5>Sticker provided by a food-delivery platform to promote its brand. <em>Source: Noopur Raval, author</em>.</h5>
<p> </p>
<h3><strong>Time of Eating, Time of Sleeping</strong></h3>
<p>Typically, restaurants and food businesses in Indian cities are heavily regulated, especially in terms of closing times. While these rules differ for each city, in and around Delhi, restaurants are expected to close down by 10 pm, and those that seek to remain open for longer need special permissions. With the arrival of app-based delivery companies, the time of food production and consumption has stretched. Also, with the right kinds of permits, cloud kitchens and home-based producers are also allowed to operate through these platforms, thus making multiple food choices and cuisines available until as late as 4 am in the morning. Whose consumption needs are being serviced at these late hours is a question beyond the scope of this post, but it also means that there is opportunity/compulsion for workers to stay up late at night, making deliveries. Not surprisingly, it is also often these late-night shifts that are better incentivized, not just money-wise but also because there is less traffic at night (a constant source of stress in day-time shifts). As other studies have also noted, platform companies, especially food-delivery services that mostly engage bike and scooter riders (Lee et al. 2016) globally, enforce this cruel temporal inversion where being a service-worker in this economy also means working on others’ (customers’) time of leisure and/or comfort. Especially in Delhi, where the winters get brutally cold, ironically, the profitability of delivering hot food increases. However, it is not that straightforward. One worker Rajendra spoke to in March (springtime) explained,</p>
<blockquote>I am not going to work with any of the food delivery company from April onwards because of the hot summer in Delhi, it is very difficult to ride in a day time of summer.</blockquote>
<h3><strong>Temporary Work</strong></h3>
<p>Temporariness is the dominant temporal fate of gig-work at-large—workers in our study (food-delivery as well as ride-hailing) often insisted how gig-work was only temporary until they could become business-owners, find a better job, or fund their education and so on. However, as we observed in food-delivery work, there was also a lot of seasonal movement of workers, a reminder of the contextual, ecological and urban migration continuities that inform, support and shape who comes to the reserve force/waiting zone of gig-work. In classic labour terms, the push and pull factors that move people out of agricultural labour or other kinds of work must be studied with an eye to new forms of easy-entry jobs such as gig-work. On the other hand, there were also other considerations on time such as responsibilities and social obligations to family that made food-delivery work (fast paced, inhering a certain amount of recklessness and the willingness to put oneself at risk) less attractive to some (older men and women with a family) and more to some others (younger single men). This made us think of the way in which Sarah Sharma (2011) emphasizes temporal power over speed discourses (she offers the term ‘power-chronography’) where, the ways in which food-delivery work is temporally arranged, distributed and rewarded, privileges certain actors (the customers but also some kinds of workers) over others in the city’s labour market.</p>
<h3><strong>References</strong></h3>
<p>Lee, Do J., et al. “Delivering (in) justice: Food delivery cyclists in New York City.” <em>Bicycle Justice and Urban Transformation</em>. Routledge, 2016. 114-129.</p>
<p>Sharma, Sarah. “It changes space and time: introducing power-chronography.” <em>Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks</em> (2011): 66-77.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/noopur-raval-rajendra-jadhav-power-chronography-of-food-delivery-work'>https://cis-india.org/raw/noopur-raval-rajendra-jadhav-power-chronography-of-food-delivery-work</a>
</p>
No publisherNoopur Raval and Rajendra JadhavDigital LabourResearchPlatform-WorkNetwork EconomiesPublicationsResearchers at WorkMapping Digital Labour in India2020-05-19T06:33:39ZBlog EntryAnushree Gupta - Ladies ‘Log’: Women’s Safety and Risk Transfer in Ridehailing
https://cis-india.org/raw/anushree-gupta-ladies-log-women-safety-risk-transfer-ridehailing
<b>Working in the gig-economy has been associated with economic vulnerabilities. However, there are also moral and affective vulnerabilities as workers find their worth measured everyday by their performance of—and at—work and in every interaction and movement. This essay by Anushree Gupta is the third among a series of writings by researchers associated with the 'Mapping Digital Labour in India' project at the CIS, supported by the Azim Premji University, that were published on the Platypus blog of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC). The essay is edited by Noopur Raval, who co-led the project concerned.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><em>Originally published by the <a href="http://blog.castac.org/category/series/indias-gig-work-economy/" target="_blank">Platypus blog</a> of CASTAC on August, 1, 2019.</em></p>
<h4>Summary of the essay in Hindi: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty0a_u9lzCE" target="_blank">Audio</a> (YouTube) and <a href="http://blog.castac.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/07/Blog-Post-Audio-Transcript-Devanigiri.docx" target="_blank">Transcript</a> (text)</h4>
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<p>Mumbai, India’s financial capital, is also often considered one of the safest cities for women in India, especially in contrast with New Delhi which is infamously dubbed as the “rape capital” within the country. Sensationalised incidents of harassment, molestation and rape serve as anecdotal references and warnings to other women who dare to venture out alone even during the daytime. The Delhi government recently proposed a policy for free transport for women in public buses and metro trains with the objective of increasing women’s affordability and access and to ensure safety in public transportation. [1] Despite such measures to increase women’s visibility and claims to public utilities and spaces, women who use public transport have historically suffered groping and stalking on buses and trains, which uphold self-policing and surveillance narratives. The issue of women’s safety in India remains a priority as well as a good rhetorical claim and goal to aspire to, for public and private initiatives. Ironically, the notion of women’s safety is also advanced to increase moral policing and censure women’s access to public spaces, which also perpetuates exclusion of other marginalised citizens (Phadke 2007). Further, and crucially, whose safety is being imagined, prioritized and designed for (which class of women are central to the imagination of the safety discourse) is often a point of contention.</p>
<p>In this context, ridehailing services offered by Uber and Ola have come to be frequently cited as safer and more reliable options for women to traverse the cityspace, compared to overcrowded buses and trains. Their mobile applications promise accountability and traceability, enforcing safety standards by way of qualified and well-groomed drivers, SOS buttons and location-sharing features. However, it has increasingly become common knowledge that these alternatives are prone to similar, if not worse, categories of crimes against women. While reports of violence against women in cabs have mostly been outside of Mumbai, due to “platform-effects,” such incidents have widespread ramifications for drivers across the country. Cab drivers who operate via cab aggregator platforms have come under heavy scrutiny not only by the corporate and legal infrastructures of aggregator companies but also in the public eye. On the other hand, platform companies independently, and in partnership with city and state administrations, continue to launch “social impact” initiatives aimed at women’s safety as well as employment (through taxi-driving training). [2] Incidents of violence against women present jarring narratives of risk not only for female passengers but also for the platform-workers, both of whom are responsible for abiding by the constructed notions of safety for women in urban spaces.</p>
<p>In this post, I explore women’s presence as workers as well as passengers/customers in the ridehailing platform economy, in the context of women’s safety, situating the analysis with a focus on Mumbai. The related discourses around risk for female commuters give rise to various interventions and women-centric services through female-only cab enterprises and training more women drivers to mitigate this risk. Through these, I will think through the figure of the woman in the ridehailing economy in Mumbai and by extension in India.</p>
<h3><strong>Platforms in Gendered Cityscapes</strong></h3>
<p>Mumbai’s public transport is comprised of the local train network, BEST buses and auto rickshaws, with the metro being the newest addition to the mix. Unlike in most of India, kaali-peelis (black-yellow cabs) have been a permanent feature of Mumbai’s landscape since the 1950s and, taking a cab is not necessarily a luxury. Against this backdrop, platform companies have sought to make the claims of democratizing public transport and providing safer travel options to women in the city.</p>
<p>Cab drivers on ridehailing platforms in Mumbai are usually domestic male migrants or Muslim drivers from within and outside the city, who are more often than not overworked and stressed due to the falling incomes and rising debts. It is important to recognise the ‘veiled masculinities’ (Chopra 2006) which labor to service the emergent platform economy and the hierarchies of caste and class which are sustained through their labor. The incongruence between the masculinity of a working class man and the demands of the service economy (Nixon 2009) exacerbates emotional pressures in customer-facing services, which can offer an explanation for angry outbursts and conflicts between drivers and customers.</p>
<p> </p>
<img src="https://cis-india.org/CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_AG_01.jpg/image_preview" alt="CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_AG_01" class="image-left image-inline" title="CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_AG_01" />
<h5>Uber’s ad on a billboard in Mumbai promises earnings of more than Rs. 1 lakh per month. Using a woman’s image illustrates the extent of their potential for transforming lives and livelihoods. <em>Source: Drivers’ Union Telegram Group</em>.</h5>
<p> </p>
<p>While Uber and Ola claim that a large number of women drivers work on their platforms, actual experiences of passengers and the male drivers I spoke to, suggested otherwise. Ironically, mass driver-training programs are seen as a quick way to make low-skilled and migrant male workers employable in Indian cities while, despite public-private partnerships to train women, it has been impossible to retain women drivers due to stereotypical perceptions of gender and persistent social stigma. [3] This made the ridehailing passenger woman (upper middle class, affording professional) a stakeholder to design for, while female drivers (but all female workers) appeared as liability for platforms.</p>
<p>These narratives speak directly to the construction of insecurity and risk for women (Berrington and Jones 2002) on public transport systems as they highlight vulnerabilities due to public exposure of women’s bodies. Pandering to a moral panic standpoint and creating personalised or ‘inside’ safe spaces for women to manage risk (Green and Singleton 2006), these platforms can then be imagined as a boundary-setting exercise. Access to public spaces is encouraged but it is delimited by confining the woman’s body to a singular vehicle in the custody of the cab driver. Autonomy and access afforded by the platform manages to transform women—particularly upper class and upper caste women who can afford these services—into potential customers. Their agency is bounded though by tasking the driver to ferry her across the otherwise hostile cityscape filled with ‘unfriendly bodies’ (Phadke 2013). The production of the city’s gendered space goes hand in hand with the confinement/erasure of female bodies in the public space as they embody patriarchal norms even in a city as ‘progressive’ as Mumbai. As demonstrated by studies mapping the movement of women in the city (Ranade 2007), the spatio-temporal factors lend themselves to creating gendered bodies in order to keep patriarchal norms intact. These norms, as I argue in this post, are detrimental not just to women but also other marginalised sections of the urban population, in this case platform workers.</p>
<h3><strong>Terms of Safety</strong></h3>
<p>Male drivers’ social identities as lower class, lower caste individuals do not inspire confidence in the standards of safety boasted by these companies in the eyes of their predominantly upper caste and upper class customer base. Risk to female passengers is further exaggerated due to the closed space in which the service is provided, highlighting the proximity to a potential aggressor by way of these platforms. In specific situations wherein a female passenger is inebriated or is travelling alone at night, drivers report being extra cautious and helpful towards her. Many respondents proudly mention going out of their way to make sure women get home safely, for instance, prolonging waiting time or escorting them to the entrance of their residential buildings or involving the security guard at the gate.</p>
<p>However, there have also been cases wherein the driver has been under scrutiny either by an overly careful passenger or by the public. One driver reported being surrounded by a crowd at a traffic signal, only to realise that he was being suspected of foul play with the female passenger who had fallen asleep on the backseat of the car. In contrast to their western counterparts, the class differences between drivers and passengers in India exacerbate doubts, fears and insecurities in India which tend to take a caste-purity angle as well. The woman’s body undergoes an exchange of custody in these instances wherein she is deemed incapable of taking care of herself and requires external assistance. Imagining a deterrence effect of ridesharing services (Park et. al 2017) reinforces the logic of guardianship and protectionism for the woman. The risk of carrying her in the vehicle in these situations is borne by the cab driver, operating under a framework of overbearing protectiveness which holds him culpable for any misgivings, assumed or otherwise.</p>
<p> </p>
<img src="https://cis-india.org/CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_AG_02.jpg/image_preview" alt="CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_AG_02" class="image-left image-inline" title="CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_AG_02" />
<h5>Cautionary listicles advise women to not take a cab alone at night, carrying pepper sprays/umbrellas as tools for self-defence, refrain from conversations with drivers or talk continuously on the phone, among other things. The onus of the woman’s safety is either on the individual herself or the driver who is ferrying her. Moreover, the driver is a likely assailant whom the woman should guard against as well. <em>Source: <a href="https://www.hellotravel.com/stories/10-ways-for-women-to-ensure-safety-when-boarding-cab" target="_blank">HelloTravel</a></em>.</h5>
<p> </p>
<p>Notions of safety and risk are embodied in everyday interactions in urban spaces and mediated by disparate infrastructures of knowledge across distinctions of caste, class and gender. These distinctions define constraints which govern social interactions between actors of these categories. Interactions between lower caste or Muslim men and upper caste/class women are circumscribed by what Tuan (1979) describes as ‘landscapes of fear’. Be it the apprehensions about sharing a ride with a passenger of the opposite sex (Sarriera et. al 2017) or reports of gang-rapes by cab drivers, the boundaries of social conduct are laid out clearly by constructing narratives of risk and safety. The protection of the female body and her sexual safety is not her responsibility alone but that of the society as a whole. The so called preventive measures for rape and violence against women produce the dichotomies of frailty and strength (Campbell 2005) in so far as they project the woman as always at risk with the shadow of a potential assault always looming large.</p>
<p>When asked about interactions with women as customers or fellow drivers, drivers performed exaggerated respectability for women. The catch in these narratives however was that drivers justified and extended respect only to ‘good’ customers, where a ‘good’ woman was a certain kind of a moral actor.</p>
<p>Given the prevailing discontent with redressal mechanisms for workers on the platforms, it was not surprising to witness a group of drivers at the Uber Seva Kendra (help centre) in Mumbai, debating whether they should be accepting requests from any female customers at all. Drivers also had to attend mandatory training sessions for ‘good conduct’ with customers wherein they underwent behavioral correction and gender sensitisation lessons. [4] The gendering of the platform economy is baked into these instructions and trainings that reproduce male drivers as figures of safety and constant positive affect.</p>
<h3><strong>Gender, Safety, and Enterprise</strong></h3>
<p>In my fieldwork, I also came across a slew of ventures run by fleet owners and others that sought to service women passengers and employ women drivers exclusively. Claiming to fill in the gaps of inadequate vetting mechanisms in existing platforms, these alternate ventures purportedly smoothened out some anxieties by eliminating the risk of interacting with a man from different socio-economic strata. The premium charged by these companies was telling of the value of safety and affordability of these services for a large section of their intended audience, namely women with higher disposable incomes residing in metropolitan cities.</p>
<p>On the flipside, these enterprises encouraged women to break stereotypical perceptions about women drivers, also giving a nod to increasing and diversifying opportunities of employment for women. However, these ideas remained attractive only in principle and fizzled out sooner or later as most of these ventures did not succeed. A severe capital crunch due to unsustainable business models, limited funding options and lack of substantial supportive ecosystems for training and upkeep are possible reasons for failure. [5] Even so, the idea of a women-centric service continues to remain valuable because of the promise of safety which is produced through considerations of class, caste, gender and religion (Phadke 2005). Any alternative to avoid interaction with men from a lower class or caste background or from another religion (especially Hindu/Muslim in Mumbai) is welcome in a society which is deeply stratified and entrenched in caste-class systems of religion and economy alike.</p>
<h3><strong>Conclusion</strong></h3>
<p>The pervasiveness of the discourses of safety and risk in the ride hailing space became apparent to me during field research. Respondents indicated a heightened awareness of my gender, referring to me as “madam” and taking measures to ensure my safety. They advised me to use a separate phone to interact with drivers and moderated my interactions with drivers on the Telegram group (run by one of the Unions in Mumbai). Union representatives were also diligent in moderating the group to filter out abusive language as a token of respect for women. My apprehensions in interacting with drivers, most of whom were older men from a lower class/caste community, were also indicative of my social conditioning as an upper class and upper caste woman. Self-policing and boundary setting in both physical and virtual interactions, while necessary to some extent, were often rendered useless as the shifting of risks became apparent to me in my interactions with the drivers.</p>
<p>In this piece, I have tried to show how gendered norms govern the construction of safety and risk which in turn regulate social interactions. Limiting exposure in a personal cab as opposed to a public bus/train also heightens considerations of intimacy and proximity to a potential aggressor (often from a marginalised sociocultural background). Women-centric cab services mitigate this by promoting the image of the female driver who breaks social norms. However, these services dwindle till they completely disappear due to a capital crunch or insufficient infrastructural support. Patriarchal contexts reaffirm the woman as a risky object by highlighting narratives of vulnerabilities and insecurities in the ridehailing space. Besides the woman, the cab drivers are held accountable for bearing this risk and ensuring her sexual and physical safety. These patriarchal hierarchies of protectionism are sustained by platform workers’ affective labour which lubricate the wheels of the platform economy.</p>
<h3><strong>Endnotes</strong></h3>
<p>[1] <a href="https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/free-rides-for-women-only-the-starting-point-say-activists/article28111938.ece" target="_blank">https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/free-rides-for-women-only-the-starting-point-say-activists/article28111938.ece</a></p>
<p>[2] <a href="https://www.olacabs.com/media/in/press/ola-foundation-launches-drive-to-enable-sustainable-livelihoods-for-500000-women-by-2025" target="_blank">https://www.olacabs.com/media/in/press/ola-foundation-launches-drive-to-enable-sustainable-livelihoods-for-500000-women-by-2025</a></p>
<p>[3] <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/soniathomas/girl-power" target="_blank">https://www.buzzfeed.com/soniathomas/girl-power</a></p>
<p>[4] <a href="https://yourstory.com/2018/11/uber-gender-awareness-sensitisation-driver" target="_blank">https://yourstory.com/2018/11/uber-gender-awareness-sensitisation-driver</a></p>
<p>[5] <a href="https://www.livemint.com/Companies/bo4534H8mOWo0oG6VQ0xbM/As-demand-for-womenonly-cab-services-grow-challenges-loom.html" target="_blank">https://www.livemint.com/Companies/bo4534H8mOWo0oG6VQ0xbM/As-demand-for-womenonly-cab-services-grow-challenges-loom.html</a></p>
<h3><strong>References</strong></h3>
<p>Berrington, E. and Jones, H., 2002. Reality vs. myth: Constructions of women’s insecurity. Feminist Media Studies, 2(3), pp.307-323.</p>
<p>Campbell, A., 2005. Keeping the ‘lady’ safe: The regulation of femininity through crime prevention literature. Critical Criminology, 13(2), pp.119-140.</p>
<p>Chopra, R., 2006. Invisible men: Masculinity, sexuality, and male domestic Labor. Men and Masculinities, 9(2), pp.152-167.</p>
<p>Green, E. and Singleton, C., 2006. Risky bodies at leisure: Young women negotiating space and place. Sociology, 40(5), pp.853-871.</p>
<p>Nixon, D., 2009. I Can’t Put a Smiley Face On’: Working‐Class Masculinity, Emotional Labour and Service Work in the ‘New Economy. Gender, Work & Organization, 16(3), pp.300-322.</p>
<p>Park, J., Kim, J., Pang, M.S. and Lee, B., 2017. Offender or guardian? An empirical analysis of ride-sharing and sexual assault. An Empirical Analysis of Ride-Sharing and Sexual Assault (April 10, 2017). KAIST College of Business Working Paper Series, (2017-006), pp.18-010.</p>
<p>Phadke, S., 2005. ‘You Can Be Lonely in a Crowd’ The Production of Safety in Mumbai. Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 12(1), pp.41-62.</p>
<p>Phadke, S., 2007. Dangerous liaisons: Women and men: Risk and reputation in Mumbai. Economic and Political Weekly, pp.1510-1518.</p>
<p>Phadke, S., 2013. Unfriendly bodies, hostile cities: Reflections on loitering and gendered public space. Economic and Political Weekly, pp.50-59.</p>
<p>Ranade, S., 2007. The way she moves: Mapping the everyday production of gender-space. Economic and Political Weekly, pp.1519-1526.</p>
<p>Raval, N. and Dourish, P., 2016, February. Standing out from the crowd: Emotional labor, body labor, and temporal labor in ridesharing. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (pp. 97-107). ACM.</p>
<p>Sarriera, J.M., Álvarez, G.E., Blynn, K., Alesbury, A., Scully, T. and Zhao, J., 2017. To share or not to share: Investigating the social aspects of dynamic ridesharing. Transportation Research Record, 2605(1), pp.109-117.</p>
<p>Tuan, Y.F., 2013. Landscapes of fear. U of Minnesota Press.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/anushree-gupta-ladies-log-women-safety-risk-transfer-ridehailing'>https://cis-india.org/raw/anushree-gupta-ladies-log-women-safety-risk-transfer-ridehailing</a>
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No publisherAnushree GuptaDigital LabourResearchPlatform-WorkNetwork EconomiesPublicationsResearchers at WorkMapping Digital Labour in India2020-05-19T06:29:12ZBlog EntrySarah Zia - Not knowing as pedagogy: Ride-hailing drivers in Delhi
https://cis-india.org/raw/sarah-zia-not-knowing-as-pedagogy-ride-hailing-drivers-in-delhi
<b>Working in the gig-economy has been associated with economic vulnerabilities. However, there are also moral and affective vulnerabilities as workers find their worth measured everyday by their performance of—and at—work and in every interaction and movement. This essay by Sarah Zia is the second among a series of writings by researchers associated with the 'Mapping Digital Labour in India' project at the CIS, supported by the Azim Premji University, that were published on the Platypus blog of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC). The essay is edited by Noopur Raval, who co-led the project.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><em>Originally published by the <a href="http://blog.castac.org/category/series/indias-gig-work-economy/" target="_blank">Platypus blog</a> of CASTAC on July 18, 2019.</em></p>
<h4>Summary of the essay in Hindi: <a href="https://youtu.be/KSYcT8XD0H4" target="_blank">Audio</a> (YouTube) and <a href="http://blog.castac.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/07/CASTAC_Sarah_audiotranscript.docx" target="_blank">Transcript</a> (text)</h4>
<hr />
<p>Ride-hailing [1] platforms such as Olacabs and Uber have “disrupted” public transport in India since their arrival. It has been almost seven years since app-based ride-hailing became a permanent feature of urban and peri-urban India with these aggregators operating in over a 100 Indian cities now. Akin to the global story, much has happened – there was a period of boom and novelty for passengers and drivers, then incentives fell. Ride-hailing work has become increasingly demanding with reduced payouts. But what hasn’t received enough attention (especially outside the US) is how these platforms create a deliberate regime of information invisibility and control to keep the drivers constantly on their toes which works to the companies’ advantage. What then are the implications of this uncertainty, which is fueled by app design as well as by the companies’ decision that drivers need little or no information about users? How does service delivery operate in a context where those actually delivering it have little or no idea about the workings of the system?</p>
<h3><strong>When algorithms make us not know</strong></h3>
<p>Algorithmic interactions form the core of the technology in ride-hailing apps through which service seekers and providers interact. As Lee et al. (2015) describe, “Algorithmic management allows companies to oversee myriads of workers in an optimized manner at a large scale, but its impact on human workers and work practices has been largely unexplored… Algorithmic management is one of the core innovations that enables these (cab-riding) services.”</p>
<p>Algorithms are procedural logics that produce different effects depending on the data they receive and the outputs they are optimized for (Wilson, 2016). Moreover, platform companies are not transparent about how their business logics contribute to these “optimizations”, which makes it difficult for all the stakeholders (passengers, drivers, police personnel, etc.) to make an accurate assessment of their functioning. This essay, then, explores how the lack of transparency around algorithmic structures not only prohibits drivers from knowing completely and surely about their work (“why did I get this ride?”, “why did my ratings drop?”) but also how they build tactics of coping and earning from a place of unknowing. Algorithms act as a regulator of work and their inherent structure constrains drivers from knowing fully about their work. Unknowing thus has two aspects: first, drivers do not have access or means to gather information; second, it is difficult to be sure of the existence of the said information in the first place.</p>
<p>In my research on ridehailing in the Delhi-National Capital Region (NCR), there were three things that I asked drivers about which led to ambiguous and inconsistent replies: how rides were allocated, how fares were determined and how ratings worked. While some drivers told me upfront they did not know how these systems worked, others offered explanations that they had devised or heard from somewhere else. For instance, not knowing what they will make per trip means that drivers plan their day in terms of target earnings instead of number of trips. Nearly all drivers I spoke to said they aimed to make Rs 1500-2000 (approx USD 20-25) per day in order to break even, irrespective of whether that goal requires 10 or 15 trips in a day. Yet not knowing what the next trip will earn them means they can’t refuse rides easily. Many drivers expressed discomfort about this fact, especially when compared to other means such as auto-rickshaws and traditional cabs where drop destination is known beforehand and fares can also be pre-negotiated, Unlike ride-hailing drivers, auto rickshaw drivers have the right to refuse passengers.</p>
<p>Many drivers now call passengers after accepting their booking to find out the destination. According to some drivers, this call also helped them understand the kind of passengers they were about to get and sometimes even allowed re-negotiation of the drop location to a mutually convenient spot if it was originally in a congested area. They also felt that assessing passengers before a trip was important so that they could act as mediators in the information gatekeeping process, because the passengers would have seen the fare already. For a driver, the lack of information added many layers of constant negotiation in a single trip—starting from the call to find out the destination to conversations during the trip to gauge potential earnings to finally suggesting alternative drop locations if there are any constraints in accessing the original destination—before they can claim their rightful earnings.</p>
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<img src="https://cis-india.org/CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_SZ_01.jpeg/image_preview" alt="CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_SZ_01" class="image-left image-inline" title="CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_SZ_01" />
<h5>Ridehailing drivers only get the user’s name and pickup location as details about an upcoming trip. <em>Photo by Noopur Raval</em>.</h5>
<p> </p>
<p>Knowing the terms of work—such as when work ends and begins, how the good jobs are being allocated and to whom, and an explanation of one’s income—is a foundation of formal and informal work. Such information is crucial because it allows us to separate our work and personal lives. Knowledge of these obviously quantifiable parameters can help drivers plan their earnings and investments and, crucially, when they can take a break based on much more or less work they have to do in order to meet their income targets.</p>
<p>Furthermore, as drivers showed me, ride-hailing companies spontaneously change the revenue model for “driver-partners” (as they are called) by sending them an SMS right before the change happens, thereby altering trip and mileage targets frequently to keep a degree of unknowability in drivers’ work. This unknowability disincentivizes drivers from going off the road as per their will and helps maintain a steady supply of cabs on the road. As Alex Rosenblat has demonstrated in her study of US Uber and Lyft drivers, they are compelled to accept rides without knowing their profitability. While the app design gives them an option to “choose” to accept or reject a ride, drivers are constrained by lack of adequate information pertaining to the trip as well as the rider in making this choice. The ‘information asymmetry’, as Rosenblat calls it, also feeds into drivers’ mistrust of the companies and their policies (Rosenblat, 2018). Moreover, these feelings and the uncertainty fed by unknowing were not limited to drivers. Passengers also noticed that a ride between two points could cost different prices at different times of day and they were not sure why or how this cost was calculated.</p>
<h3><strong>Unknowability as a form of knowing: A pedagogy of coping</strong></h3>
<p>As I observed in my interactions with drivers online and offline, new drivers often struggled with the degree of uncertainty and unknowability while more experienced drivers had accepted ‘not knowing’ and the opacity of the system as features of their work.</p>
<p> </p>
<img src="https://cis-india.org/CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_SZ_02.jpg/image_preview" alt="CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_SZ_02" class="image-left image-inline" title="CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_SZ_02" />
<h5>Not knowing enough about how much will a ride earn them means drivers are forced to be on the roads, often without a break. <em>Photo by author</em>.</h5>
<p> </p>
<p>Similar to what Rosenblat, Gray et al. and others have observed in the US, in India drivers were constantly engaged in meaning-making through communicative labor, i.e., sharing their experiences with other local drivers online and offline. Agreeing, reassuring, and repeating that drivers actually do not know enough through these discussions also gave them shared confidence in their own abilities and how they were approaching work despite being firmly rooted in unknowing. For instance, when I asked one Uber driver about how ratings worked, they said that all 5-star drivers were matched with 5-star passengers. Another Uber driver said that the higher a passenger’s ratings, the less time they would have to wait for pick-up.</p>
<p>Other forms in which this kind of unknowing manifested was the lack of a fare chart or any minimum or uniform rating system, leaving drivers to offer their own interpretations and coping strategies. For instance, a driver pointed out how very few rides are likely to be available in a specific suburb during hot afternoons and therefore he avoided dropping passengers to that location after 2PM.</p>
<p>How, then, does one learn to cope with such unknowable systems as a worker? And what values does such a pedagogy of coping with algorithmic opacity imbibe? In my fieldwork, apart from answering my questions, drivers were extremely interested in talking about the companies, including news about companies’ stock value, their futures, profits, etc. A persistent rumour in the field was that Reliance, the country’s largest telecom provider, was soon coming up with a competitor ride-hailing app, suggesting that there could be an incentive boom again. In online Facebook groups, drivers often discussed company CEOs’ salaries, comparing them to their own. On the flipside, when videos of ride-hailing and food-delivery drivers getting beaten up or arrested or cheated surfaced, drivers would comment with advice on how to safeguard oneself, how to deal with errant customers and so on. I interpret these practices of making sense of long and short-term work, framed as responses to constant ambiguity and uncertainty, as the development of an “algorithmic gut”.</p>
<p>This gut responds to the anxieties produced by platform infrastructure through a keen awareness of the shifts, the tweaks, the changes and the errors. And it orients how drivers approach and cope with their work by acknowledging that there is a lot unknown (and unknowable) in this kind of daily work. It also guides how drivers focus on the short-term (daily) goal of making profit, such as by tuning into peer groups both online and offline where grievances are discussed, collective action planned, and floating rumours assessed. This gut is an affective, sensorial attunement to how platforms are allocating and shifting power among drivers and plays a generative role in guiding drivers’ work decisions.</p>
<h3><strong>Conclusion</strong></h3>
<p>Uncertainty is an embedded part of a ride-hailing cab’s model of service delivery. For ride-hailing drivers, this ambiguity translates into less control over everyday negotiation of work as well as planning of financial assets for the future.</p>
<p>In my interactions, I discovered that drivers are certain that they will never know more than the company. What this has led to is a driver who is cynical but not entirely pessimistic. Drivers acknowledge that while companies and their structures may be problematic, what will keep them employed is passengers’ appetite for a service like this. They would like to imagine the future of their work but are cognizant of the dual challenge of the present: making money while struggling for self-preservation in order to perform immediate activities. Drivers are cognizant of an ambiguous future and even hesitant to engage in long-term planning. For now, they would prefer better earnings and greater control over how they perform labour. Hence, their focus is on devising specific strategies for known, short-term challenges instead of running after an unknown future.</p>
<h3><strong>Endnotes</strong></h3>
<p>[1] Uber and homegrown Ola both started operations in India as ride-hailing services with the sharing options being added in 2015. Hence, the term ride-hailing has been used to describe these services which also includes ride sharing.</p>
<h3><strong>References</strong></h3>
<p>Davis, Jenny L. 2014. “Triangulating the Self: Identity Processes in a Connected Era.” Symbolic Interaction 37 (4): 500-523.</p>
<p>Dodge, Martin and Kitchin, Rob. 2005. “Codes of life: identification codes and the machine-readable world.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2005 (23): 851-881</p>
<p>Gray, Mary L., et al. 2016. “The Crowd is a Collaborative Network.” Proceedings of the 19th ACM conference on computer-supported cooperative work & social computing. ACM, 2016.</p>
<p>Kitchin, Rob. 2017. “Thinking critically about and researching algorithms.” Information, Communication & Society 20 (1): 14-29.</p>
<p>Lee, Min Kyung, et al. 2015. “Working with Machines: The Impact of Algorithmic and Data-Driven Management on Human Workers.” Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.</p>
<p>Rosenblat, Alex & Stark, Luke. 2016. “Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries: A Case Study of Uber’s Drivers.” International Journal of Communication 10: 3758–3784.</p>
<p>Ruckenstein, Minna and Mika Pantzar. 2017. “Beyond the Quantified Self: Thematic exploration of a dataistic paradigm.” New Media & Society 19(3): 401-418.</p>
<p>Willson, Michele. 2016. “Algorithms (and the) everyday”. Information, Communication & Society 10.1080/1369118X.2016.1200645</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/sarah-zia-not-knowing-as-pedagogy-ride-hailing-drivers-in-delhi'>https://cis-india.org/raw/sarah-zia-not-knowing-as-pedagogy-ride-hailing-drivers-in-delhi</a>
</p>
No publisherSarah ZiaDigital LabourResearchPlatform-WorkNetwork EconomiesPublicationsResearchers at WorkMapping Digital Labour in India2020-05-19T06:35:21ZBlog EntrySimiran Lalvani - Workers’ Fictive Kinship Relations in Mumbai App-based Food Delivery
https://cis-india.org/raw/simiran-lalvani-workers-fictive-kinship-relations-app-based-food-delivery-mumbai
<b>Working in the gig-economy has been associated with economic vulnerabilities. However, there are also moral and affective vulnerabilities as workers find their worth measured everyday by their performance of—and at—work and in every interaction and movement. This essay by Simiran Lalvani is the first among a series of writings by researchers associated with the 'Mapping Digital Labour in India' project at the CIS, supported by the Azim Premji University, that were published on the Platypus blog of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC). The essay is edited by Noopur Raval, who co-led the project concerned.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><em>Originally published by the <a href="http://blog.castac.org/category/series/indias-gig-work-economy/" target="_blank">Platypus blog</a> of CASTAC on July 4, 2019.</em></p>
<h4>Summary of the essay in Hindi: <a href="http://blog.castac.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/07/Role-of-fictive-kinship-in-Mumbai-Hinglish-audio.mp3" target="_blank">Audio</a> (mp3) and <a href="http://blog.castac.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/07/Fictive-Kinship-Gig-Work-Transcript.docx" target="_blank">Transcript</a> (docx)</h4>
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<p>Anthropologists have studied the role of kinship relations at the workplace in terms of how employers (De Neve, 2008) and workers use them (Parry, 2001). By contrast, digital labour scholars focus more on economic wellbeing and questions of fair work. But we know from the work of Mauss, Hart (Hart, 2000; Mauss, 2002) and others that all economic exchanges are also social relations. Additionally, economic and moral logics are different manifestations of the same ‘kernel of human relationships’ (Kofti, 2016). In the context of app-based food delivery work in Mumbai, workers’ actions and decisions were guided by them putting themselves in another’s shoes. Such moral acts of understanding and having understood were, as I will demonstrate, instances of Max Weber’s conception of verstehen or interpretative understanding which was important to understanding individuals’ participation in social relationships. This led me to explore gig-workers’ kinship relations at work, and their role in the existence and reproduction of these workers and this ‘new’ work.</p>
<p>This essay unpacks the values and expectations from the kinship term <em>bhai (brother)</em> in order to understand the morality invoked through its usage by app-based food delivery workers in Mumbai. In doing so, it considers the implications of such kinship sedimentations on the experience of workers in the gig economy, their negotiation with the discipline imposed by the employer and the experience of women workers who operate out of these kinship ties. I was compelled to notice the figure of the <em>bhai</em> – a male friend or acquaintance who would not only recruit but also provide various kinds of support on the job, helping app-based platforms maintain their workforce. I also interviewed female delivery workers in Mumbai and noticed that this brotherhood did not extend to them in the same way.</p>
<p><em>Bhai</em> is a Hindi word for ‘brother’ but in Bambaiyya Hindi (a non-canonical form of Hindi spoken in Mumbai) it signifies an influential or respected male figure who offers support and is trustworthy due to relatedness. <em>Bhai</em> and variations like <em>bhaiyya</em> lubricate daily transactions between auto-rickshaw drivers, grocers, watchmen or any unrelated man and woman with a sociality of kinship.</p>
<h3><strong>The role and functions of understanding by bhais in gig work</strong></h3>
<p>Acts of brotherly help and disciplining reveal that material actions are intertwined with an ethic of care, thereby illustrating the role of kinship as central to the economic work in the gig economy. Historically, the informal work of food delivery in Mumbai has been organised along the lines of caste, region (Quien, 1997) and familial networks. Within gig work, belonging to the city is a requirement as <em>bhais</em> recruit, advice and protect new joinees from their neighbourhood or communities as older brothers. Team leaders who occupy a position between the worker and the middle management at these companies are <em>bhais</em> that discipline, control and maintain the workforce for the company.</p>
<p>Prior to joining, newbies would ask friends about their experience and even make deliveries with their friends to understand the work. Bhais offer support by riding pillion, arriving at ‘unsafe’ delivery locations at night or assisting a worker if the customer was drunk or unwilling to pay for their order.</p>
<p>Like other gig work communities that network to produce tacit knowledge about work (Gray, Suri, Ali, & Kulkarni, 2016) the relationships of brotherhood in food delivery help workers gain knowledge about the rules of the company, while also helping them <em>find a way</em> around the rules. A <em>bhai</em> might offer to make an ID on behalf of those who were unable to do so due to lack of documents or offer an existing ID to those who may have been disabled or blocked by the company.</p>
<p><em>Bhais</em>, on the basis of relatedness due to experience of gig work, understand the needs of other gig workers. I suggest that this is <em>verstehen</em> and not simply a reflexive <em>understanding</em> since they, much like sociologists, also <em>understood</em> the nature of the situation (Tucker, 1965) that creates this relationship of relatedness and the importance of such a relationship in sustaining their future in this work as well as the future of this work.</p>
<h3><strong>Leaning on brotherhood to ‘safely’ deliver food as gig workers</strong></h3>
<p>Companies push a narrative of how working-class, male food delivery workers are safe to interact with because this work leads to working class men now arriving at the doorstep of the protected middle-class domestic sphere. Discourses of safety and trustworthiness are crucial to companies due to the middle-class, Indian anxiety around the separation of working-class men, considered dangerous and potential perpetrators of crime, from middle-class women, the victims of such crimes (Phadke, 2007).</p>
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<img src="https://cis-india.org/CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_SL_01.jpg/image_preview" alt="A sign written in Hindi reads " class="image-left image-inline" title="CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_SL_01" />
<h5>In India, leaving one’s footwear outside before entering ‘sacred’ spaces like homes and temples is considered respectful. A notice outside an Uber Dost office in suburban Mumbai reads jootey-chhapal baahar nikaley or please leave your footwear outside – revealing an extension of the sacredness associated with familial spaces to the work place. (Image credit: author)</h5>
<p> </p>
<p>Since working class men are considered dangerous occupants of public space, how do workers feel safe and carefree in the everyday? The <em>bhai</em> who <em>understands</em> offers material support, protects and guides workers but <em>is also understood</em> as enabling a carefreeness in workers that makes this work and working-class men’s navigation of the public possible. Consider the case of Adarsh, an 18-year-old app-based worker who makes deliveries using a bicycle. Workers started helping him by offering to drop him to the delivery location on their motorcycles if they were headed in the same direction. As he described to me, he felt at ease knowing someone had his back: <em>Abhi ye log support ke liye rehte hai toh apne ko tension nahi rehta hai chalo bhai support ke liye apne peeche khada hai. (One does not feel tense if one knows that there is a brother backing one up)</em>.</p>
<h3><strong>Exclusions from brotherhood in the gig economy</strong></h3>
<p>App-based food delivery has opened up the historically male-dominated line of work to women in India but that has not insulated it from patriarchal norms.</p>
<p> </p>
<img src="https://cis-india.org/CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_SL_02.jpg/image_preview" alt="A banner outside a Domino's pizza franchise in India seeking delivery personnel reads: VACANCY (Only for boyys)" class="image-left image-inline" title="CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_SL_02" />
<h5>Food delivery work in Mumbai has historically been male dominated work – be it the ubiquitous dabbawallas (carriers of home-cooked meals) or those working as delivery ‘boys’ in udupis, restaurants, fast food companies and with hawkers. (Image credit: author)</h5>
<p> </p>
<p>One married woman worker expressed her discomfort with male riders referring to women workers as <em>bacchi</em> (Bambaiyya slang for younger brother) since it collapsed a sense of formality and familiarity that could be acceptable to young, unmarried girls. Women workers were aware that women have a high attrition in food delivery. They cannot afford to reject kinship constructions because such relations make work possible and tolerable in the everyday so they modulate the correct amount of kinship ties with a ‘respectable distance.’</p>
<p>The brotherhood of workers is not uniform or homogeneous since men’s ability to participate in this fictive kinship can be constrained either due to their identities or inability to support strikes.</p>
<p>Brotherhood absorbs risks for workers and allows workers to be <em>bindaas</em>, presenting an opportunity for tactical resistance. Leveraging brotherhood as a <em>platform</em> (Gillespie Tarleton, 2010), workers would strike and companies having understood the role of brotherhood too, would offer the position of 'team leader' to leaders of such strikes. Most <em>bhais</em> chose moral and affective bonds of brotherhood over such a 'promotion.'</p>
<p>Working in the gig-economy has been associated with economic vulnerabilities, however there are also moral and affective vulnerabilities as workers find their worth measured everyday by their performance of—and at—work and in every interaction and movement. Such a display of <em>verstehen</em> by the delivery workers is a response to engaging with a world of work that continuously measures one’s credibility and ties it to material rewards. It can be read as an attempt to secure an income and guard one’s sense of self.</p>
<h3><strong>References</strong></h3>
<p>De Neve, G. (2008). ‘We are all sondukarar (relatives)!’: Kinship and its morality in an urban industry of Tamilnadu, South India. Modern Asian Studies, 42(1), 211–246. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X0700282X">https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X0700282X</a></p>
<p>Gillespie Tarleton. (2010). Politics of Platforms. New Media and Society, 12(3). <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738">https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738</a></p>
<p>Gray, M. L., Suri, S., Ali, S. S., & Kulkarni, D. (2016). The Crowd is a Collaborative Network. Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing – CSCW ’16, 134–147. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2819942">https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2819942</a></p>
<p>Hart, K. (2000). Kinship, Contract and Trust: The Economic Organization of Migrants in an African City Slum. In D. Gambetta (Ed.), Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations (pp. 176–193). University of Oxford.</p>
<p>Kofti, D. (2016). Moral economy of flexible production: Fabricating precarity between the conveyor belt and the household. Anthropological Theory, 16(4), 433–453. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499616679538">https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499616679538</a></p>
<p>Mauss, M. (2002). The gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge.</p>
<p>Parry, J. P. (2001). Ankalu’s Errant Wife: Sex, Marriage and Industry in Contemporary Chhattisgarh. Modern Asian Studies, 35(4), 783–820. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X01004024">https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X01004024</a></p>
<p>Phadke, S. (2007). Dangerous Liaisons: Women and Men: Risk and Reputation in Mumbai. Economic and Political Weekly, 42(17), 1510–1518.</p>
<p>Quien, A. (1997). Mumbai’s Dabbawalla: Omnipresent Worker and Absent City-Dweller. Economic and Political Weekly, 32(13), 637–640.</p>
<p>Tucker, W. T. (1965). Max Weber’s Verstehen. The Sociological Quarterly, 6(2), 157–165. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.1965.tb01649.x">https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.1965.tb01649.x</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/simiran-lalvani-workers-fictive-kinship-relations-app-based-food-delivery-mumbai'>https://cis-india.org/raw/simiran-lalvani-workers-fictive-kinship-relations-app-based-food-delivery-mumbai</a>
</p>
No publisherSimiran LalvaniDigital LabourResearchPlatform-WorkNetwork EconomiesResearchers at WorkMapping Digital Labour in India2020-05-19T06:25:54ZBlog EntryDomestic Work in the ‘Gig Economy’
https://cis-india.org/raw/domestic-work-in-the-gig-economy-20191116
<b>The CIS and Domestic Workers’ Rights Union (DWRU) are hosting a discussion on the ‘gig economy’ and domestic work on Saturday, November 16 at Student Christian Movement of India, Mission Road, Bangalore. This event is a part of a project supported by the Feminist Internet Research Network led by Association for Progressive Communication (APC) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada.</b>
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<p style="text-align: justify;"><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/FutureofWork.jpeg" alt="Domestic work in the gig economy, 16 December 2019, Student Christian Mission of India, Bangalore" /></p>
<p> </p>
<h4>Presentation: <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/domestic-work-and-platforms-presentation" class="internal-link" title="Domestic Work and Platforms Presentation">Download</a> (PDF)</h4>
<h4>Concept Note: <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/cis-dwru-apc-firn-domestic-work-in-the-gig-economy-concept-note" target="_blank">Download</a> (PDF)</h4>
<h4>Venue: Student Christian Movement of India (29, 2nd Cross, CSI Compound, Mission Road, Sampangi Rama Nagara)</h4>
<h4>Date and Time: Saturday, November 16, 3:00-5:30 pm</h4>
<h4>Location: <a href="https://goo.gl/maps/dCnQhid1eiyLG3DE6" target="_blank">URL</a> (Google Maps)</h4>
<h4>Feminist Internet Research Network: <a href="https://www.apc.org/en/project/firn-feminist-internet-research-network" target="_blank">URL</a></h4>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">Over the last few months, the Centre for Internet and Society, India (CIS) and the Domestic Workers’ Rights Union (DWRU) have been doing research on the platformisation of domestic work in India. In the first phase of the research, we gathered data through interviews with several stakeholders. More information about the project can be found here: <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-domestic-work-india-announcement" target="_blank">https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-domestic-work-india-announcement</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">We now find ourselves in the second phase of the research in which we have prepared a preliminary report and are seeking feedback and inputs from experts. For this, we invite you to a roundtable discussion on domestic workers in the ‘gig economy’.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The participants at the roundtable will comprise of representatives from key stakeholder groups including platform workers (i.e. domestic workers sourcing jobs through platforms), platform companies, domestic workers organisations, civil society researchers and the state labour department.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The event will begin with a presentation of the project and our initial findings. The rest of the time is set aside for a semi-moderated discussion between all participants. To ensure a focused discussion, we are also limiting participation to 30, and are hoping to have a good mix across stakeholder groups.</p>
<h4>If you will be joining us, please RSVP to Aayush Rathi at aayush@cis-india.org.</h4>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/domestic-work-in-the-gig-economy-20191116'>https://cis-india.org/raw/domestic-work-in-the-gig-economy-20191116</a>
</p>
No publisheraayushDigital EconomyRAW EventsDigital LabourResearchers at WorkEventDigital Domestic Work2019-12-06T04:52:11ZEventDoing Standpoint Theory
https://cis-india.org/raw/doing-standpoint-theory
<b>Feminist research methodology has evolved from different epistemologies, with several different schools of thought. Some of the more popular ones are feminist standpoint theory, feminist empiricism, and feminist relativism. Standpoint theory holds the experiences of the marginalised as the source of ‘truth’ about structures of oppression, which is silenced by traditional objectivist research methods as they produce knowledge from the standpoint of voices in positions of power. In this essay published on the GenderIT website, Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi [1] discuss the practical applicability of these epistemologies to research practices in the field of technology and gender.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Cross-posted from <a href="https://www.genderit.org/articles/doing-standpoint-theory" target="_blank">GenderIT</a>, September 1, 2019</h4>
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<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/CatalinaAlzate.jpg/image" alt="Catalina Alzate - Speech Bubbles" class="image-left image-inline" title="Catalina Alzate - Speech Bubbles" /></p>
<h6>Image description: Three speech bubbles on different textures. Artist: <a href="https://www.genderit.org/users/catalina-alzate" target="_blank">Catalina Alzate</a><br /></h6>
<p>Feminist research methodology has evolved from different epistemologies, with several different schools of thought. Some of the more popular ones are feminist standpoint theory, feminist empiricism, and feminist relativism. Standpoint theory holds the experiences of the marginalised as the source of ‘truth’ about structures of oppression, which is silenced by traditional objectivist research methods as they produce knowledge from the standpoint of voices in positions of power [2]. Feminist empiricism does not eschew traditional modes of knowledge production, but emphasises diversity of research participants for feminist (and therefore also rigorous) knowledge production [3]. Relativists have critiqued standpoint theory for its tendency to essentialise the experience of marginalised groups, and subsume them into one homogenous voice to achieve the goal of ‘emancipatory’ research [4]. Relativists instead focus on multiple standpoints, which could be Dalit women, lesbian women, or women with disabilities [5]. We will be discussing the practical applicability of these epistemologies to research practices in the field of technology and gender.</p>
<h4>Standpoint theory holds the experiences of the marginalised as the source of ‘truth’ about structures of oppression, which is silenced by traditional objectivist research methods as they produce knowledge from the standpoint of voices in positions of power.</h4>
<p>As part of the Feminist Internet Research Network, the Centre for Internet and Society is undertaking research on the <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-domestic-work-india-announcement" target="_blank">digital mediation of domestic and care work in India</a>. The project aims to assess shifts in the sector, including conditions of work, brought on by the entry of digital platforms. Our starting point for designing a methodology for the research was standpoint theory, which we thought to be the best fit as the goal of the project was to disrupt dominant narratives of women’s labour in relation to platformisation. In the context of dalit feminis, Rege warns that standpoint research risks producing a narrow frame of identity politics, although it is critical to pay attention to lived experience and the “naming of difference” between dalit women and savarna women [6]. She asserts that neither ‘women’ nor ‘dalit women’ is a homogenous category. While feminist researchers from outside these categories cannot claim to “speak for” those within, they can “reinvent” themselves as dalit feminists and ally themselves with their politics.</p>
<p>In order to address this risk of appropriating the voices of domestic workers (“speaking for”), we chose to directly work with a domestic workers’ union in Bengaluru called Stree Jagruti Smiti. Bengaluru is one of the two cities we are conducting research in (the other being Delhi, with very few registered unions). This is meant to radically destabilise power hierarchies and material relations within the research process, as benefits of participatory research tend to accumulate with the researchers rather than participants [7].</p>
<p>Along with amplifying the voices of workers, a central objective of our project is to question the techno-solutionism that has accompanied the entry of digital platforms into the domestic work sector, which is unorganised and unregulated. To do so, we included companies and state labour departments as participants whose standpoint is to be interrogated. By juxtaposing the standpoints of stakeholders that have differential access to power and resources, the researcher is able to surface various conflicts and intersections in dominant and alternative narratives. This form of research also brings with it unique challenges, as researchers could find themselves mediating between the different stakeholders, while constantly choosing to privilege the standpoint of the least powerful - in this case the workers. Self-reflexivity then becomes necessary to ensure that the project does not slip into an absolutely relativist position, rather using the narratives of workers to challenge those of governments and private actors. This can also be done by ensuring that workers have agency to shape the agenda of researchers, thereby producing research which is instrumental in supporting grassroots campaigns and movements.</p>
<h4>Self-reflexivity then becomes necessary to ensure that the project does not slip into an absolutely relativist position, rather using the narratives of workers to challenge those of governments and private actors.</h4>
<p>Feminist participatory research itself, despite its many promises, is not a linear pathway to empowerment for participants [8]. At the very outset of the project, we were constantly asked the question by domestic workers and unions – why should we participate in this project? Researchers, in their experience, acquire information from the community throughout the process of data collection by positioning themselves as allies. However, as all such engagements are bound to limited timelines and budgets, researchers are then often absent at critical junctures where the community may need external support. We were also told that all too often, the output of the research itself does not make its way back to the participants, making it a one-way process of knowledge extraction. Being mindful of these experiences, we have integrated a feedback loop into our research design, which will allow us to design outputs that are accessible and useful to collectives of domestic workers.</p>
<p>Not only domestic workers and their organisations, many corporations operating these online portals and platforms often questioned the benefits of participating in the project. However, the manner of articulation differed. While attempting to reject the hierarchical nature of the researcher/participant relationship, we increasingly became aware that the underlying power equation was not a monolith. Rather, it varied across stakeholder groups and was explicitly contingent on the socially constructed positionalities already existing outside of the space of the interview. Companies, governments and workers all exemplified varying degrees of engagement with, knowledge of, and contributions to research. Interviews with workers and unions, and even some bootstrapped (i.e. without much external funding) , socially-minded companies, were often cathartic with an expectation of some benefits in return for opening themselves up to researchers. This was quite different for governments and larger companies, as conversations typically adhered to the patriarchal and classed notions of professionalism in sanitised, formal spaces [9] and the strict dichotomy between public and personal spaces. Their contribution seemingly required lesser affective engagement from the interviewee, thereby resulting in lesser investment in the outcome of the research itself.</p>
<p>The cathartic nature of interviews also speak to the impossibility of the distanced, Platonic, school of research. We were often asked politically charged questions, our advice solicited and information sought. Workers and representatives from platform companies alike would question our motivations with the research and challenge us by inquiring about the benefits accruing to us. Again, both set of stakeholders would often ask differently about how other platforms were; workers already registered on a platform would wonder if another platform would be ‘better’ and representatives of platform companies would be curious about competition. This is perhaps a consequence of attempting to design a study that is of use and of interest to the workers we have been reaching out to [10]. At times, we found ourselves at a place in the conversation where we were compelled to respond to political positions for the conversation to continue. There were interviews where notions of caste hierarchies (within oppressed classes) as a justification/complaint for engaging/having to engage in certain tasks would surface. Despite being beholden to a feminist consciousness that disregards the idea of the interviewer as neutral, we often found ourselves only hesitantly forthcoming. At times, it was to keep the interview broadly focused around the research subject, at others it was due to our own ignorance about the research artefact (in this instance, platforms mediating domestic work services). This underscores the challenges of seeing the interview as a value ridden space, where the contradictions between the interview as a data collection method and as a consciousness raising emerged - how could we share information about the artefact we were in the process of collecting data about?</p>
<h4>We were often asked politically charged questions, our advice solicited and information sought.</h4>
<p>The fostering of ‘rapport’ [11] has made its may into method, almost unknowingly. Often, respondents across stakeholder groups started from an initial place of hesitation, sometimes even suspicion. Several structural issues could be at work here - our inability in being able to accurately describe research itself, the class differences and at times, ideological ones as well. While with most participants, rapport was eventually established, its establishment was a laboured process. Especially given that we were using one-off, in-depth interviews as our method, securing an interview was contingent on the establishment of rapport. This isn’t to suggest that feminist research mandatorily requires the ‘doing of rapport’ [12], but that when it does, it’s a fortunate outcome and that feminist researchers engage with it more critically.</p>
<p>Building rapport creates an impression of having minimised the exploitation of the participant, however the underlying politics and pressures of building rapport need to be interrogated. Rapport, like research itself, is at times a performance; rapport is often not naturally occuring. Rather, rapport may also be built to conceal the very structural factors preventing it. For instance, during instances of ideological differences during the interview, we were at times complicit through our silence. This may have been to further a certain notion of ‘objectivity’ itself whereby the building and maintenance of rapport is essential to surfacing a participant’s real views. This then raises the questions: What are the ethical questions that the suppression of certain viewpoints and reactions pose? How does the building, maintenance and continuance of rapport inform the research findings? Rapport, then, comes in all shapes and sizes and its manifold forms implicate the research process differently. Another critical question to be addressed is - why does some rapport take less work than others? With platform companies, building rapport came by easier than it did with workers both on and off platforms. If understood as removing degrees of distance between the researcher and participants, several factors could play into the effort required to build rapport. For instance, language was a critical determinant of the ease of relationship-building. Being more fluent in English than in colloquial Hindi enabled clearer articulation of the research. Further, familiarity with the research process was, as expected, mediated along class lines. This influenced the manner in which we articulated research outcomes and objectives to workers with complete unfamiliarity with the meaning of research. Among workers, this unfamiliarity often resulted in distrust, which required the underlying politics of the research to be more critically articulated.</p>
<p>By and large, the feminist engagement with research methods has been quite successful in its resistance and transformation of traditional forms. Since Oakley’s conception of the interview as a deeply subjective space [13] and Harding’s dialectical conception of masculinist science through its history [14], the application of feminist critical theory has increasingly subverted assumptions around the averseness of research to political motivations. At the same time, it has made knowledge-production occur in a more equitable space. It is in this context that standpoint theory has had wide purchase, but challenges persist in its application. As the foregoing discussion outlines, we have been able to achieve some of the goals of feminist standpoint research while missing out on others. We also found the ‘multiple standpoints’ approach of relativists to be useful in a project involving multiple stakeholders - thereby also avoiding the risk of essentialisation of the identities of domestic workers. However, unlike the tendency of relativists to focus on each perspective as ‘equally valid truth’, we are choosing to focus on the conflicts and intersections between emerging discourses. Through this hybrid theoretical framework, we are seeking to make knowledge production more equitable. At the same time, the discussion around rapport shows that this may nevertheless happen in a limited fashion. Feminist research may never be fully non-extractive. The reflexivity exercised and choices made during the course of the research are key.</p>
<h4>Unlike the tendency of relativists to focus on each perspective as ‘equally valid truth’, we are choosing to focus on the conflicts and intersections between emerging discourses.</h4>
<p> </p>
<h3><strong>Endnotes</strong></h3>
<p>[1] The names of the authors are in alphabetical order.</p>
<p>[2] Harding, S. (2003) The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, Routledge.</p>
<p>[3] M. Wickramasinghe, Feminist Research Methodology: Making meaning out of meaning-making, Zubaan, 2014</p>
<p>[4] Pease, D. (2000) Researching profeminist men's narratives: participatory methodologies in a postmodern frame. In B. Fawcett, D. Featherstone, J. Fook ll)'ld A. Rossiter (eds) Restarching and Practising in Social Work: Postmodern Feminist Perspectives (London: Routledge).</p>
<p>[5] Stanley, L. and Wise, S. (1983) Breaking Out: Feminist Consciousness and Feminist Research (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).</p>
<p>[6] Rege, S. 1998. ” Dalit Women Talk Differently: A critique of ‘Difference’ and Towards a Dalit Feminist Standpoint.” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 33, No.44, pp 39-48.</p>
<p>[7] Heeks, R. and Shekhar, S. (2018) An Applied Data Justice Framework: Analysing Datafication and Marginalised Communities in Cities of the Global South. Working Paper Series, Centre for Development Informatics, University of Manchester.</p>
<p>[8] Stone, E. and Priestley, M. (1996) Parasites, pawn and partners: disability research and the role of nondisabled researchers. British Journal of Sociology, 47(4), 699-716.</p>
<p>[9] Evans, L. (2010). Professionalism, professionality and the development of education professionals. Br. J. Educ. Stud. 56, 20–38. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8527.2007.00392.x</p>
<p>[10] Webb C. Feminist methodology in nursing research. J Adv Nurs. 1984 May;9(3):249-56.</p>
<p>[11] Berger, R. (2015). Now I see it, now I don’t: researcher’s position and reflexivity in qualitative research. Qual. Res. 15, 219–234. doi:10.1177/1468794112468475; Pitts, M. J., and Miller-Day, M. (2007). Upward turning points and positive rapport development across time in researcher-participant relationships. Qual. Res. 7, 177–201. doi:10.1177/1468794107071409</p>
<p>[12] Dunscombe, J., and Jessop, J. (2002). “Doing rapport, and the ethics of ’faking friendship’,” in Ethics in Qualitative Research, eds T. Miller, M. Birch, M. Mauthner, and J. Jessop (London: SAGE), 108–121.</p>
<p>[13] Oakley, A. (1981). “Interviewing women: a contradiction in terms?” in Doing Feminist Research, ed. H. Roberts (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), 30–61.</p>
<p>[14] Harding, S. (1986). The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/doing-standpoint-theory'>https://cis-india.org/raw/doing-standpoint-theory</a>
</p>
No publisherAmbika Tandon and Aayush RathiDigital EconomyGenderDigital LabourResearchPublicationsResearchers at WorkDigital Domestic Work2019-12-06T04:59:35ZBlog EntryDigital mediation of domestic and care work in India: Project Announcement
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-domestic-work-india-announcement
<b>It is our great pleasure to announce that we are undertaking a study on digital mediation of domestic and care work in India, as part of and supported by the Feminist Internet Research Network led by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). The study is exploring the ways in which structural inequalities, such as those of gender and class, are being reproduced or challenged by digital
platforms. The project sites are Delhi and Bangalore, where we are conducting interviews with workers, companies, and unions. In Bangalore, we are collaborating with Stree Jagruti Samiti to collect qualitative data from different stakeholders. The outputs of the research will include a report, policy brief, and other communication materials in English, Hindi, and Kannada. This study is being led by Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi, along with Sumandro Chattapadhyay.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Feminist Internet Research Network: <a href="https://www.apc.org/en/project/firn-feminist-internet-research-network" target="_blank">apc.org/en/project/firn-feminist-internet-research-network</a></h4>
<hr />
<h3>Introduction to the Project</h3>
<p>This project seeks to investigate the mediation of domestic and care work through digital platforms in India. These forms of labour fall within the informal economy, which employs the largest share of non-agricultural workers in the global South [1]. Workers and economic units in the informal economy differ widely in terms of all metrics, including income levels, size and type of enterprise, and status of worker. According to the International Labour Organisation’s Resolution on decent work and the informal economy, it refers to “all economic activities by workers and economic units that are - in law of practice - not covered or insufficiently covered by formal arrangements” [2]. What this implies in practice for workers in the informal economy is greater vulnerability to poor work conditions, poverty, and violation of labour rights [3].</p>
<p>Women, particularly those with intersectional marginalities, including that of caste and class, are overrepresented in the informal economy globally and in India. Domestic work in particular has been stratified along the lines of caste and gender historically. Further, class has become more salient in producing stratifications in labour relations following urbanisation and gentrification. These intersections have shaped employment relations in the sector in different ways, which range from feudal to contractual models. Digital platforms are increasingly becoming intermediaries in this space, mediating between so called ‘semi-skilled’ or ‘low-skilled’ workers from lower classes, and millions of middle and upper class employers in tier I cities. This is expected to shift the stratification of workers and employment relations in key ways.</p>
<p>Through a feminist approach to digital labour, our project aims to examine platforms offering domestic or reproductive care work. This will be situated within larger feminist critiques around the devaluation and invisibilisation of women’s labour within patriarchal-capitalist economic discourse. The project further seeks to unpack technocratic imaginaries of the platform economy by looking at access and meaningful use of technology and qualifying narratives around labour market optimisation, empowerment, and agency. We will include within this
scope two kinds of platforms: marketplaces for workers to post their profiles; and on-demand platforms with algorithmic matching of workers and employers.</p>
<h3>Research Questions</h3>
<p>Our hypothesis is that platforms are reconfiguring labour conditions, which would empower and/or exploit workers in ways qualitatively different than non-standard work off the platform. In order to interrogate this further, we will study wages, conditions of work, social security, skill levels, and worker surveillance off platforms. This will be used to develop contextual knowledge around the conditions of work among (a) domestic workers on and off platforms in particular, and (b) informal sector workers joining the web-based gig economy in general.</p>
<p>The overarching question that the research will address is, <strong>what are the ways in which structural inequalities are challenged or reproduced through the growth of digital platforms in reproductive and care work?</strong></p>
<ul><li>How are relations of social inequality, including along the axes of caste and gender, reworked through digital platforms, especially in a context where domestic and care work remains historically undervalued and dominated by women workers with intersectional marginalities?<br /><br /></li>
<li>How do workers on platforms envision the role of the state, market, and informal networks of kinship in intervening in employment relations?<br /><br /></li>
<li>How is inequality and exploitation in informal labour reconfigured through platforms, with specific reference to work conditions (including hours of work, and physical and mental demands of the workplace), wages, social security, and surveillance?<br /><br /></li>
<li>What strategies of negotiation are being and have been adopted by care workers on and off platforms?<br /><br /></li>
<li>Is collectivisation an aspiration for care workers across different models of employment?<br /><br /></li>
<li>How can negotiation and collectivisation strategies inform the ongoing challenges faced by both care workers and platform workers?</li></ul>
<h3>Endnotes</h3>
<p>[1] International Labour Office, (2018). Women and men in the informal economy: A statistical picture. Third Edition. International labour Organisation. <a href="https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/docu-&#xA;ments/publication/wcms_626831.pdf" target="_blank">https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/docu-
ments/publication/wcms_626831.pdf</a></p>
<p>[2] International Labour Organisation, (2002). 2002 ILC Resolution and Conclusions on Decent Work and the Informal Economy. <a href="https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/employment-promotion/informal-economy/lang--en/index.htm&#xA; target=">https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/employment-promotion/informal-economy/lang--en/index.htm</a></p>
<p>[3] Ibid.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-domestic-work-india-announcement'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-domestic-work-india-announcement</a>
</p>
No publisherAmbika Tandon and Aayush RathiDigital EconomyDigital LabourResearchResearchers at WorkDigital Domestic Work2019-10-10T08:09:34ZBlog Entry#MappingDigitalLabour - Panel discussion on platform-work in Mumbai and New Delhi
https://cis-india.org/raw/platform-work-india-panel-discussion-20190719
<b>With the rise and popularity of app-based platforms such as Ola, Uber, Swiggy Zomato, and others, there are growing public conversation about regulation of such 'gig-work' platforms and the work conditions of people who work for them. The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) invites you to a panel discussion on Friday, July 19 in our Bangalore office, where the researchers associated with the project will present preliminary findings, and ethical and methodological challenges of studying app-based platform-work in India. Panelists Anushree Gupta, Rajendra Jadhav, Sarah Zia and Simiran Lalvani, who have conducted field studies of ride-hailing and food-delivery work in Mumbai and New Delhi, will share their preliminary field insights along with reflections on what it meant to do such studies, how they went about studying gig-work, and challenges that arose in their work. The discussion will be moderated by Noopur Raval who co-led the project. We invite scholars, journalists, and all interested members of the public to join us for the event. Tea and snacks will be served at 5 pm. </b>
<p> </p>
<h4>This project is supported by research assistance from the Azim Premji University.</h4>
<h4>Download: <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cis-india/website/master/img/CIS_MappingDigitalLabour_PanelDiscussion_20190719_web.jpg" target="_blank">Poster</a> and <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cis-india/website/master/img/CIS_MappingDigitalLabour_PanelDiscussion_20190719_flyer.jpg" target="_banner">Flyer</a></h4>
<h4>Session Recording: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1lwpb3jRMQ" target="_blank">Video</a> (YouTube)</h4>
<hr />
<h3>Agenda</h3>
<p>5:00 pm - Tea and snacks in the CIS lawn</p>
<p>5:30 pm - Introduction to the project (Sumandro)</p>
<p>5:40-6:20 pm - Reflections based on field studies by the speakers (Anushree, Rajendra, Sarah, and Simiran)</p>
<p>6:20-6:40 pm - Speakers' responses to questions posed by the moderator (speakers and Noopur)</p>
<p>6:40-7:15 pm - Open discussion (moderated by Noopur)</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Speakers and Moderator</h3>
<p><strong>Anushree Gupta</strong> is a Research Associate at Tandem Research. She is interested in studying the embeddedness of technology in society, with a focus on technical workers. Her research interests include technology mediated work, digital technologies and labour sociology. Her masters thesis examined the structure and dissemination of training in vocational education institutes (ITIs). Anushree has worked professionally on software development projects, including game development and social media analytics. She holds an MA in Development Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and a B. Tech. (ICT) from DA-IICT, Gandhinagar.</p>
<p>Anushree studied dimensions of platform-work among taxi drivers in Mumbai for this project.</p>
<p><strong>Rajendra Jadhav</strong> is working as a research consultant, research fellow, researcher and research mentor with various non government organisations and academic institute for last 12 years. Rajendra has worked with Tata Institute of Social Sciences Mumbai as a Research Officer, as Program Director for PUKAR’s Youth Research Fellowship Program, and with National Dalit Watch - NCDHR, New Delhi as a National Coordinator for Research and Advocacy. Rajendra has pursued MA in Media and Cultural Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.</p>
<p>Rajendra studied dimensions of platform-work among food delivery persons in New Delhi for this project.</p>
<p><strong>Sarah Zia</strong> is an education reporter working with Live Mint, and has previously worked with the Times of India and has undertaken an independent study of mobility and transport in Delhi (focusing on paratransit in Delhi and the Delhi Ring Railway). Sarah has pursued MA in Mass Communication from AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi.</p>
<p>Sarah studied dimensions of platform-work among taxi drivers in New Delhi for this project.</p>
<p><strong>Simiran Lalvani</strong> is currently working as a Consultant at Microsoft Research on a Future of Work project. She has an MA in Development and Labour Studies from the Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi.</p>
<p>Simiran studied dimensions of platform-work among food delivery persons in Mumbai for this project.</p>
<p><strong>Noopur Raval</strong> is a PhD researcher at the University of California Irvine where she studies issues of labor technology. She has also worked with the Wikimedia Foundation and Microsoft Research in the past. She is interested in questions of intersectionality, and is an avid consumer of popular culture and food.</p>
<p>Noopur is a co-principal investigator of this project (along with Sumandro).</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/platform-work-india-panel-discussion-20190719'>https://cis-india.org/raw/platform-work-india-panel-discussion-20190719</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroRAW EventsGig WorkDigital LabourPlatform-WorkResearchers at WorkEventMapping Digital Labour in India2019-07-20T11:58:19ZEventManuel Beltrán - Institute of Human Obsolescence - Cartographies of Dispossession
https://cis-india.org/raw/manuel-beltran-ioho-cartographies-of-dispossession
<b>Join us at the Delhi office of CIS on Thursday, April 4, at 5 pm for a talk by Manuel Beltrán, founder of the Institute of Human Obsolescence (IoHO), which explores the future of labour and the changing relationship between humans and machine. Cartographies of Dispossession (CoD), their current project at IoHO, explores the forms of systematic data dispossession that different humans are subject to, and investigates how data becomes both the means of production as much as the means of governance. </b>
<p> </p>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/ManuelBeltran_IoHO.jpg/image_large" alt="Manuel Beltrán - IoHO" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Manuel Beltrán - IoHO" /></p>
<h6>Image credit: Manuel Beltrán</h6>
<h3>Institute of Human Obsolescence - Cartographies of Dispossession</h3>
<p>The Institute of Human Obsolescence (IoHO) explores the future of labour and the changing relationship between humans and machine. Our work develops from a scenario in which forms of manual and intellectual labour traditionally performed by humans are increasingly automated by new technologies. In this context we investigate and challenge the socio-political and economic implications of new forms of labour, such as the production of data. The IoHO developed several projects exploring the production of data as a form of labour, as a different paradigm through which to interrogate and challenge dynamics of ownership over the production of data and the economic and governance objects emerging through it. Previous lines of inquiry around the framework of Data Labour Rights include Data Basic Income, Data Cooperative, Data Production Labour series, Investigative Discussion Sessions and Data Workers Union.</p>
<p>In this talk founder of the IoHO Manuel Beltrán, will introduce the work of the IoHO and discuss their current project Cartographies of Dispossession (CoD). CoD explores the forms of systematic data dispossession that different humans are subject to, and investigates how data becomes both the means of production as much as the means of governance. The project looks at the implications of how the dispossession of data unequally occurs in different contexts, through different means and for different purposes.</p>
<p>Instruments such as the Right Of Access provided by GDPR emerge from a European context but the flows of data operate in a transnational scale. We are exploring the potential and limits of this instrument in combination with others such as the Right To Information in India as tools to investigate and repossess our production of data across borders. We are particularly interested in feedback and discussing in how to think further about this last part.</p>
<h3>Manuel Beltrán</h3>
<p>Manuel is an artist and activist. He researches and lectures on contemporary art, activism, contemporary social movements, post-digital culture and new media. As an activist, he was involved in the Indignados movement in Spain, the Gezi Park protests in Turkey and several forms of independent activism and cyber-activism in Europe and beyond. In 2012 he co-founded the art collective Plastic Crowds and since 2013 he is head and co-founder of the nomadic school and artistic organization Alternative Learning Tank. In 2015 he founded the Institute of Human Obsolescence, through which he explores the future of labour, the social and political implications regarding our relationship with technology and the economic and governance systems surrounding the production of data.</p>
<h4><a href="http://speculative.capital">http://speculative.capital</a></h4>
<h4><a href="https://dataworkers.org">https://dataworkers.org</a></h4>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/manuel-beltran-ioho-cartographies-of-dispossession'>https://cis-india.org/raw/manuel-beltran-ioho-cartographies-of-dispossession</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroPracticeArtRAW EventsDigital LabourResearchers at WorkEvent2019-04-01T08:00:05ZEventCISxScholars Delhi - William F. Stafford (Nov 03, 6:30 pm)
https://cis-india.org/raw/cisxscholars-delhi-william-f-stafford-thursday-nov-03
<b>We are delighted to have William F. Stafford, PhD candidate in UC Berkeley, present on "Public Measurements, Private Measurements, and the Convergence of Units" at the CIS office in Delhi on Thursday, Nov 03, at 6:30 pm. Please RSVP if you are joining us: <raw@cis-india.org>.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><em>CISxScholars are informal events organised by CIS for presentation, discussion, and exchange of academic research and policy analysis.</em></p>
<hr />
<h2>Public Measurements, Private Measurements and the Convergence of Units</h2>
<p>In this discussion I will focus on a comparison between the standard government prescribed meters for autorickshaws and taxis and the role of ridesharing apps as instruments which take measurements, as the basis for the calculation of fares, and the more general questions which arise for commerce, technology and their regulation. I will organise the paper around the observations of a paratransit operations engineer on the distinction between public and private instruments, and explore the possible implications of new forms of commercialisation of location and proximity and reactions to such developments for understanding questions of fairness and corruption.</p>
<h2>William F. Stafford</h2>
<p>William F. Stafford, Jr., is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley. William's research focuses on the auto-rickshaw meter in New Delhi, as a way to engage with classical questions concerning the relationship between measurement, quantification and delimitations of domains of labour. William's general interests concern the analytics of labour and the reconfiguration of what are often taken as its axiomatic aspects. Before joining Berkeley, he studied Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Delhi School of Economics.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/cisxscholars-delhi-william-f-stafford-thursday-nov-03'>https://cis-india.org/raw/cisxscholars-delhi-william-f-stafford-thursday-nov-03</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroCISxScholarsData SystemsDigital EconomyResearchers at WorkDigital LabourNetwork EconomiesHomepageEvent2019-03-13T00:30:39ZEventMock-Calling – Ironies of Outsourcing and the Aspirations of an Individual
https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_mock-calling
<b>This post by Sreedeep is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. He is an independent photographer and a Fellow at the Centre for Public Affairs and Critical Theory, Shiv Nadar University, Delhi. In this essay, Sreedeep explores the anxieties and ironies of the unprecedented IT/BPO boom in India through the perspective and experiences of a new entrant in the industry, a decade ago. The narrative tries to capture some of the radical
hedonistic consequences of the IT-burst on our lifestyles, imagination and aspirations delineated and fraught with layers of conscious deception and prolonged probation.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>best start (the advertisement)</h2>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_01_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_01_Resized" class="image-left" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_01_Resized" /><br />
<em>In the darkest hours of night, they remain awake serving some other continent across the oceans.<br />
The sparkling exterior complements the sleeplessness.</em></p>
<p>Colorful half-pagers listing job openings in dedicated sections of dailies for the ‘educated’ and ‘experienced’ have been common in post liberalized India. When the eyes cruise through the various logos and offerings of the MNCs in these over populated pages, one gets reminded of a decade when the front, back, and inside pages of newspaper supplements overflowed with job offerings in the lowest ranks of the IT. BPO vacancies which littered the folios primarily sought to lure fresh college pass-outs ‘proficient in English’. Back then, one was yet getting familiar with names such as ‘Convergys’, ‘Daksh’, ‘Global-Vantage’, ‘EXL’, ‘Vertex’. It made one wonder why they needed so many people to ‘walk-in’ week after week, and how they made thousands of ‘on the spot offers’ with ‘revised salaries’ following ‘quick and easy interviews’ and ‘fastest selection processes’. What these selected people actually did, once they got in, was another mystery altogether.</p>
<p>Some of these MNCs promising nothing short of a ‘best start’ to one’s career, that too with the ‘best starting salaries for a fresher’, often came to college campuses for recruitment. They conducted large scale interviews and generously granted immediate offer-letters to final-year students, at the end of each academic year. I happily overlooked the (fine) print, the text, design, and all the other details of these BPO ads. In fact, I never bothered to figure out what the acronym meant till such time when I was in desperate need for a gadget make-over. My age old Range-Finder camera deserved to be disposed and displaced by a Digital SLR. That was the summer of 2003...</p>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_02_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_02_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_02_Resized" /><br />
<em>The iconic ship building of Convergys – one of the first amongst the many that stood alone fifteen years ago, surrounded by far-‐away sketches of multistoried constructions and a cyber-‐hub that was yet to be born and the eight lane highway leading to Jaipur, about to be built beside it.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>say something more about yourself (the interview)</h2>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_03_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_03_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_03_Resized" /><br />
<em>Call flow and traffic flow is fast and furious both inside and outside such centers of info-exchange and mega-data transmissions every second every day.</em></p>
<p>“You have mentioned in this form that your aim is to ‘do something different’. How would you relate that to your decision to work in a call center?” I was asked.</p>
<p>I had given more than couple of interviews, to get rejected on both occasions, and by then had realized what exactly they preferred to hear and the kind of profile that they wanted to hire. I was in no mood to miss my lunch and waste another day in the scorching heat traveling to one of these hotels where the interviews were conducted. I was tired of waiting for hours sipping cold water and looking at formally dressed men and women being dumped from one room to another – going through a series of eliminating rounds before reaching the interview stage, when they politely conveyed “…thank you very much, you may leave for now, we’ll get back to you…”, especially, to all those lacking a ‘neutral English accent'.</p>
<p>On the first occasion, I took great pleasure and interest in observing every bit of it. On the second, I was getting a hang of it. On the third, I felt like a school kid appearing for an oral examination at the mercy of the schoolmaster and was perennially requested at every step to say something (more) about oneself. But, I had no grudges. Neither the posh ambience nor the polite attitude of the employers towards hundreds of candidates walking-in everyday was comparable with the interview-scene of Ray’s ‘<em>Pratidwandi</em>’ [1]. The scene was acting out in reverse. Now they needed us (in bulk) more than we needed them. Any English-speaking dude eager to believe in the promises of the new-age-profession, even with less or ordinary qualifications, or with no desires to seek further qualifications, was in great demand, like never before.</p>
<p>On the fourth occasion, I thought that I had my answers ready.</p>
<p>“Well, your CV suggests something else. Why don’t you contemplate choosing a creative profession?”</p>
<p>The extra curricular activities’ column on my CV was getting reduced in size with each passing interview that I chose to face. Later I felt that I could have said something else instead of answering, “Madam, I am from a middle-class family, where creativity is not given much space beyond a point.”</p>
<p>I was reminded that I should use her first name instead of uttering ‘Madam’ repeatedly. “But, most of the creative minds come from the middle-class background”, she refuted.</p>
<p>“May be I don’t have much of confidence in my creative abilities.”</p>
<p>The conversation continued for quite long. I did not fall short of sentences to cover up this process of conscious deception. She was busy evaluating my English and was possibly overlooking the content of my answers while making points on a piece of paper as she kept asking questions regarding hobbies, movies, etc. I was asked to listen to men talking in American accent and was instructed to choose between options that summarized the probable conclusion of their conversation. Then I was asked me to wait outside.</p>
<p>The interview with the Senior Process Manager from Pune was supposedly the last round, I was told. A charming voice from across the table made me feel as if he had been waiting to hear from me since the time we met long ago, “So, how is life?”</p>
<p>“Great Sir”.</p>
<p>“Great? You don’t get to hear that too often. Okay, please say something about your self.”</p>
<p>There seemed to be no end to this essential inquiry about ‘the self’ at any stage! I started with my name and ended with my ambition, which was to make a career in a call center.</p>
<p>He must have found it useless to discuss the work profile with me. Truly, I had no idea about what I was supposed to do on the deck. But, I did not miss any chance to convey how keen I was to learn and deliver. This was followed by a discussion on salary, which was short, because as a fresher, I was in no position to bargain.</p>
<p>While passing the offer letter, the HR lady formally made a point to emphasize the formal dress code in the office. Looking back, I presume it was my appearance that prompted her to state the code. With the hair almost touching the shoulders, and a face not shaven for more than a month, the loose fit denims incapable of keeping the shirt tucked, I must have made a sufficient impression to instigate concern in her mind, although unknowingly. Jaswindar (the man who thought smoking bidi in the lawns of the corporate cathedral is quite cool) replied, “I don’t have any formal wear. Does the company pay any advance for buying some?”</p>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_04_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_04_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_04_Resized" /><br />
<em>Cyber Hub @ midnight – the nerve centre of several corporates.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>what if they find out (the first day)</h2>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_05_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_05_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_05_Resized" /><br />
<em>Even sky is not the limit. The exchange of information and its pace defies border – political or physical.</em></p>
<p>A cold current ran through the spine of several candidates, especially the first timers, with every signature they put on the bottom left of each page of the agreement of the terms and conditions that required them to be graduates. Obviously, quite a few of them were not graduates. What if they found out that they were not? But they did not. I guess, they never cared to verify the certificates enclosed in the pink file. Nor did they care to figure out what happened to those tax-forms, provident fund forms, insurance forms signed and submitted by the 124 employees joining job on the 9th of June. Lengthy spells of instructions related to form-filling on the first day were forgotten, as most of them were happily distracted or disinterested. The crowd was busy checking out each other – the vending machine and its options, the fancy phone and its features – also enquiring or narrating previous call center experiences, the hassle in missing or getting the first pick-up for the day...</p>
<p>While these strangers were desperate to know or let the others know ‘something more about themselves’, the junior officials instructing us ‘where to tick’, ‘what to remember’, ‘how to write’, ‘when to stop’ were not in a position to exhibit how irritated they were with the tough task of managing so many recruits. Things got even worse with the daylong induction lectures on training, transport, finance, assets, ‘our motifs’ and ‘your expectations’, ‘your contribution’ and ‘our expectations’. Thankfully, there was good lunch, free internet access (quite unthinkable in those days of expensive cyber cafes) and AC cabs to follow. I fancied my relief from the heat and hostel food for the next few weeks of my paid holiday without any sense of remorse.</p>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_06_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_06_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_06_Resized" /><br />
<em>The Convergys building (now taken over by Vedanta) on a full moon night. The plush lawns used to be a breeding ground for generating dust haze. The compound is highly protected/exclusive zone. Epitome of global connectivity ensures complete disconnection with the local surroundings.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>my camera vs their camera (getting trained)</h2>
<p> <img src="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_07_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_07_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_07_Resized" /><br />
<em>The ever-expanding city with all its imposed notions of urbanity on an area essentially rural leaves no scope for the evolution of the public space. On the contrary, any space outside the strict confines of these gated nations/notions invite threats of the highest order or at least it is perceived to be so.</em></p>
<p>What if they find out? No, they didn’t.</p>
<p>For the next one and a half months, we loitered around in the mornings, nights, evenings, and graveyard shifts of the classrooms and cafés (though not in every corner as mobility was highly restricted and under severe surveillance), at times enjoying and at times sleeping through the training sessions, impatiently waiting for the salary to get transferred to the Citi Bank account which they had opened for us to be swiped-out the moment the money arrived. Their surveillant eyes were not technologically advanced enough to guess the respective reasons to take up the job casually and remain appointed before absconding. A host of young fellas kept counting the number of day remaining:</p>
<ul>
<li>While the trainer with 3 kids in 7 years (now needing one more) with a ‘do it or I’ll make you do it’ attitude reminded us that prostitution is oldest customer care service, and the role of a customer care executive is one of the most prestigious ones and definitely not deplorable just because we work at night (as do the docs and cops).</li>
<li>While listening to the trainees whose primary interests varied from stock exchange to cooking for the wife to horse breeding and extending till the ‘search for truth in Himalayas’. In a free speech session in VNA (Voice and Accent Training), fitness was synonymous with Baba Ramdev for some folks and euthanasia meant mass-killing. And what about capital-punishment? “Would have known if I attended the college debates”, someone proudly said. The trainer was kind to say “Then talk about censorship”. The girl with colored hair was quick to question, “Is that an automated cruise?”</li>
<li>While cruising through the consonants, diphthongs, vowel sounds, and imported ‘modules’, rapid ‘mock-calls’ and learning to intonate. We bit the ‘B’s, kissed the ‘W’s and by the time we rolled the ‘R’s, reached the soft ‘T’s and faded ‘P’s, I felt that the next big revolution was here. Tongue, lip, throat, teeth tried their level best to ape the ones across the Atlantic to the norms of their phonetic culture.</li>
<li>While obviously not uttering the obvious that this entire system was a consequence of service being subcontracted to places where establishment and labour costs were way more cheaper.</li></ul>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_08_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_08_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_08_Resized" /><br />
<em>Walls can guard the flow of trespassers but the walls can rarely be guarded against the practice of public urination. An employee relieves himself in the middle of a graveyard shift on his way back after a quick smoke during the miserly half an hour break.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>keeping balance (the absconding case & the attrition list)</h2>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_09_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_09_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_09_Resized" /><br />
<em>The building came first as isolated blocks of self-sufficient units generating its own electricity and meeting its own needs. The infrastructure external and essential to its sustenance is still in its nascent stage.</em></p>
<p>In between the lines of the Punjabi beats in the moving cab or Pearl Jam playing on the i-pod in full volume to resist the former; before and after ‘hi bro’, ‘hey dude’, ‘yo man’, ‘yap buddy’; from weekend <em>masti</em> to an inspirational night-out, we constantly juggled with call-center jargon and silently yapped about:</p>
<ul>
<li>How to revolt against ‘IST’ (Indian Stretchable Time)</li>
<li>Why the ‘pick-up time’ hadn’t been SMSed yet</li>
<li>Why the fucking cab driver did not come fucking five fucking minutes earlier</li>
<li>How often to ‘login’ early and ‘logout’ late</li>
<li>Why the ‘systems were running slow’</li>
<li>What should be the perfect ‘call-opening’ and ‘call ending’</li>
<li>How to handle ‘high call flow’</li>
<li>How to ‘sale’ a product to the ‘disinterested customer’</li>
<li>How to ‘appease’ the dissatisfied ‘enquiring consumers’</li>
<li>How to ‘empathize’ with an ‘irate customer’</li>
<li>How to keep the ‘call control’ while making the customer feel empowered</li>
<li>How to avoid ‘escalating’ the call</li>
<li>How to make full use of the two ‘fifteen minutes breaks’ and one ‘half hour break’</li>
<li>Why not to say – “I am sorry to hear that” – to a recently divorced customer</li>
<li>Whom to give the extra food coupons</li>
<li>What to do to in order to know when your calls are being monitored</li>
<li>How to reduce the ‘AHT’ (Average Handling Time)</li>
<li>How to increase the ‘C.Sac’ (Customer Satisfaction) scores</li>
<li>Why not to take two ‘consecutive weekend-offs’</li>
<li>What to write in the ‘feed-back forms’</li>
<li>Which friend should be referred to get compensated for the ‘referral’ before leaving the job</li>
<li>What else could be done to maximize ‘P4P’ (Pay for Performance)</li></ul>
<p>Soon after swiping the card and clearing the balance, many of us became what they called, ‘an absconding case’ and added our names to the ‘attrition list’. The ‘cost-effective-labour’ (not ‘cheap labor’), stopped coming to office just before ‘hitting the (production) floor’ without bothering to formally say a bye, and without multiplying the hundreds of dollars that their clients had invested in our training and maintenance. Some of us had to get back to our colleges, which had re-opened. The others either complained about the team-leader or the work pressure till the time they got a call from some other call-center across the road offering a slight increment, but the same work. Others changed jobs as they habitually did twice or thrice a year to acquire a new ambience and acquaintances only to get bored yet again. One chap was smart enough to hold two offices simultaneously. The rest either perished without a trace or sat on the same chair hoping to climb the ‘vertical ladder’ by pleasing the bosses and putting more working hours while executing the ‘communicative tools’ and ‘navigation skills’ that they remembered from the training days. They were the ones the industry hoped to retain. They were also the ones too particular about their performance. Habitual consumption and consistent conflicts between the personal mornings/mourning and the professional nights took a consistent toll.</p>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_10_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_10_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_10_Resized" /><br />
<em>The city sleeps. Metros come to halt. Signs of human existence disappear. But thousands of people continue with the calls in each floor of these buildings answering queries and collecting unpaid amounts catering to a different time zone altogether.</em></p>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_11_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_11_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_11_Resized" /><br />
<em>Different floors and different corners of the same floor cater to different clients across the globe.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>after-call wrap-up (remains of the flirtatious feed-back)</h2>
<p>I-cards hung like nameplates around the neck all the time along with codes that were generated from the distant land. Punching these plastic cards ensured automated entry, strictly confined to those floors where we had some business. Forgetting to carry them required prolonged human intervention to convince the security that we did deserve to get in. Losing it lead to penalty. Hiding/absconding beneath one of the many call center note-pads I found the Separation Clause 4b: “upon separation from the company, you will be required to immediately return to the company, all assets and property including documents, files, book, papers and memos in your possession.”</p>
<p>The termination clause 6.b.i. of one of the appointment letters stated - “During the probation period you are liable to be discharged from the company’s service at any time without any notice and without assigning any reason”. But I guess the employees left the company more often without any notice or assigning any reasons. The company, most often, had no answers for this unwanted discharge to its owners across the oceans. IT abroad/onboard was not advanced enough to predict/prevent people who made the industry look like a make-shift arrangement; a probation that would rarely lead to permanence.</p>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_12_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_12_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_12_Resized" /><br />
<em>A common sight of fleet of cabs (a service which is outsourced to external vendors) outside the building waiting for scheduled drops and pick-ups.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>is there anything else that I can do to help you/me</h2>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_13_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_13_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_13_Resized" /><br />
<em>As the piling debris suggest infrastructural work perennially in progress.</em></p>
<p>Between the cafeteria cleaned once every hour and the adjacent murky road side dhaba; between the latest cars in the parking lot and the rickshaws waiting for those who couldn’t yet afford to pay the car-installment; between the fiber-glass windows and the jhopris (visible once the curtains were lifted) – new heights were achieved and new targets were set that were globally connected, locally disconnected.</p>
<p>In a site, which is otherwise devoid of consistent water supply, electricity and public transport (running it servers on generators 24X7), the vertical-limits of the translucent fiber glass and false roofs prepare the suburbs. The soothing cubicles confirm to the global standards of ‘how a city ought to look’ from a distance.</p>
<p>Just like the enormous demands of the IT industry, which has created its support sectors (catering, security, transport, house-keeping etc) to stray around the BPOs trying to extract their share of profit, I moved around its orbit as well for some time. Why and how there is a bit of BPO in most my creative endeavors and in the purchase of digital devices between 2003-2008 doesn’t require any further explanation.</p>
<p>I got better and better with my mock-calls.</p>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_14_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_14_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_14_Resized" /><br />
<em>Surrounded by the debris of development and standing tall with its emphatic presence, such an imposing architecture seems like a myth that constantly challenges the harsh realities that envelop it. The pillared peak is so representative of its desire to remain connected with the ‘distant-impossible’ 24x7.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Endnote</h2>
<p>[1] The protagonist in the film violently revolted against the lack of basic amenities in the interview-space and against the idea of calling so many people for just a couple of vacancies, when people were expected to be selected not on the basis of merit, anyway.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>The post, including the text and the photographs, is published under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International</a> license, and copyright is retained by the author.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_mock-calling'>https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_mock-calling</a>
</p>
No publisherSreedeepSpaces of DigitalDigital LabourResearchers at WorkRAW Blog2015-08-06T05:00:33ZBlog Entry