Beyond 'Hidden Transcripts': Geographies of Collectivization among Platform Workers in India
ICGC Commons for Critical Inquiry (537 Heller Hall) and Zoom.
The ‘uberization’ of work through digital labor platforms has posed significant challenges to workers’ unionization and collective bargaining rights globally. The blurring of employer-employee relationships through technological supervision and algorithmic management have meant greater precarity for gig/platform workers, as these platforms conveniently escape labor regulations by labeling workers as ‘independent contractors,’ ‘partners,’ and ‘professionals. In India, where informality has been the norm, these challenges are compounded by weakening rights of labor vis-à-vis capital, aided by the ‘pro-business’ state. This talk investigates the implications of global shifts in capital-labor relations for local politics of collectivization and unionization, drawing on long-term, collaborative, and politically engaged work with the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union (TGPWU) in Hyderabad, India.
About the Speaker
Eesha Kunduri is pursuing a Ph.D. at the Department of Geography, Environment and Society at the University of Minnesota. Her research spans the domains of labor studies and urban studies. She is broadly interested in understanding how identities shape the way people experience development processes and outcomes, and has recently written on caste reconfigurations among industrial and home-based workers in Indian cities. Prior to joining UMN, she worked as a Research Associate with New Delhi based think-tank, Centre for Policy Research (CPR), for over four years. During her time at CPR, she worked on projects pertaining to lived experiences of work and migration in metropolitan and small cities in India, on state-citizen engagements in urban India, and on comparative experiences of migration and urbanization in New Delhi and Johannesburg. Eesha holds an M.A. in Development Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi and a B.A. (Hons.) in Economics from the University of Delhi.