Papers presented by Ira Anjali Anwar since 2019
2023 Detroit, MI, United States
"Seeing Like a Gig Company"
Ira Anjali Anwar, University of Michigan
Abstract:
This paper contributes to understanding the digital restructuring of labor relations through an examination of the novel business and labor management practices of on demand gig platforms in the Global South. In the gig context, platformization reflects the brokerage of paid work activities through digital platforms, and is characterized by independent contracting, and non standard forms of employment that lack job security. A key feature of the gig economy is the algorithmic matching of the supply for and demand of labor. Focusing on UrbanCompany (UC), native to India and the largest on demand, home service platform in Asia, I unpack how platforms are not only reconfiguring work practices and employment relations, but also the very socio-economic and political constitution of 1. The business logics and structural boundaries of corporations viz-a-viz labor management 2. The classificatory mechanisms and valuations of service labor, particularly in relation to ‘low power’ gig workers in postcolonial India. Through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of UC’s website, app and blog posts, I interrogate the language and aesthetics of how labor platforms promise and perform ‘public’ and ‘welfare benefits’, particularly for low power gig workers, as a way to gain legitimacy and social currency. I also draw on ethnographic data gathered over two years (from 2020- 2022), including a series of semi- structured interviews with over 30 women beauty gig workers engaged with UC in India. In doing so, this paper seeks to retrieve the socio-economic logics driving labor market platformization, alongside the particular socio-political and cultural textures these logics acquire in the global south. Further, I argue that platform narratives produce a multiplicity of differential classificatory frameworks that are often inconsistent with the dominant, legal positioning of gig workers as ‘independent contractors’. To address this tension, I draw from Fourcarde’s framework of ‘Classification Situations’ and develop a taxonomic system to capture how algorithmic modes of gig worker classification reinvent both– regimes of labor valuation, as well as the very form of the corporation.