From granular to collective resistance: Rethinking workers’ protests in digital cultures

Abstract

As the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic resulted in a near-complete lockdown of the Indian economy, digital platforms were in turmoil amidst raging protests from its workers on issues of repeated pay-cuts and scaling down of incentives when the risks of work were high. This paper examines online gig workers’ protests during Covid-19 in India to understand how the nature of labour resistance is changing with the introduction of platform work and digital cultures. Using the framework of typology of labour resistance in platforms, this study analyzes various strategies and methods platform workers use against forms of labour control. Although organized collective resistance is the predominant framework by which workers’ struggles in industrial capitalism is examined, the nature of platform capitalism and its methods of labour management by the use of data and algorithm necessitates the exploration of new ways of thinking about labour resistance. The absence of an identifiable work-site or fixed hours of work, fragmentation of workers, presence of educated workers in low-skill part-time jobs, and the accessibility of the internet and digital cultures mean that the cyberspace is evolving as the site of expression and contestation of worker right claims. We argue that this development has two important consequences. The first is that these digital spaces give way to the traditional type of organized forms of protests that are identifiable by institutional markers such as workers’ union, collective agreement, membership, leadership and strategies. The wild cat protests and flash strikes that online gig workers participated in various Indian cities under the leadership of the Indian federation of app-based transport workers and all India gig workers’ union, an unregistered umbrella organization of platform and gig workers, to collectivize their demands, coordinate with state-level labour unions, raise awareness and form strategic allies among other workers’ collectives are examples of this kind of protest. At the same time, new forms of resistance are also emerging on a different scale that are distinct from organized collective resistance in three important ways. The first difference is that these new types of workers’ resistance that are granular, individualistic, and ‘invisible’ in the public sphere respond subterraneous to the blockages and choke points of control they encounter in digital platforms as part of their work. The second difference is that unlike organized resistance, they are not spectacular displays of protest, but mundane everyday acts of resistance. Third, the strategies of resistance they utilize range from withdrawal of cooperation to various forms of resourcefulness at work that results in overcoming the restrictive control of the algorithms. Evidence from India also suggests the presence of such acts used to overcome perceived injustices in their place of work by online gig workers.