Digital Labour Platforms: A study of Workplace Resistance and Unionization in India

Summary

The project aims to analyze and document workers’ workplace resistance and unionization practices in digital labour platforms in India, develop context-appropriate resistance strategies for technology-mediated labour and re-design algorithmic technologies to support precarious workers.

Description

The emergence of digital labour platforms (DLPs) is transforming labouring experiences worldwide. While these platforms offer flexibility and convenience regarding work time and workspace, they also contribute to workers’ insecurity and vulnerability due to the misrecognition of labour and opaque algorithms that manage their work conditions (algorithmic management). This project examines how algorithmic management shapes and affects workers on digital labour platforms in India (e.g. cab drivers, delivery workers, and providers of beauty and home services), documenting their experiences of negotiating algorithmic management and their efforts to resist precarious employment conditions through collective organising, including everyday resistance practices, the formation of worker communities, and unionism. Through qualitative research methods (ethnography, participant observation, in-depth interviews and focused group discussion), we aim to develop context-appropriate resistance strategies for technology-mediated labour and re-design algorithmic technologies to create fairer and more equitable labour practices of incorporating principles of labour justice, transparency and worker participation. Our research sites include West Bengal, New Delhi, Bengaluru, and Trivandrum in India.

Papers

\textbf{Kolkata}

1) Thuppilikkat, Ashique Ali, Dipsita Dhar, Noopur Raval, and Priyank Chandra. “Generative Politics and Labour Markets: Unions and Collective Life in a City in Crisis.” In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1-18. 2025. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713266

2) Thuppilikkat, Ashique Ali, Dipsita Dhar, and Priyank Chandra. ‘Union Makes Us Strong: Space, Technology, and On-Demand Ridesourcing Digital Labour Platforms’. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 8, CSCW2, Article 463 (November 2024): 1-36. https://doi.org/10.1145/3687002

\textbf{New Delhi}

3) Dhar, Dipsita, and Ashique Ali Thuppilikkat. ‘Gendered Labour’s Positions of Vulnerabilities in Digital Labour Platforms and Strategies of Resistance: A Case Study of Women Workers’ Struggle in Urban Company, New Delhi’. Gender & Development 30, no. 3 (December 2022): 667–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/13552074.2022.2127574

\textbf{Bengaluru}

4) Dipsita Dhar, Ashique Ali Thuppilikkat, and Soham Battacharya. “Transversal Unionism: Resisting and Navigating a neo liberal city through identity and labour power.” In Migrant Labour in the Gig Economy: The intersection of labour digitization, platform capitalism, and migration, and resistance, edited by Francesco Della Puppa, Dipsita Dhar, and Nicola Monttagna, London: Palgrave. (Upcoming)

Conferences

1) Thuppilikkat, Ashique Ali. ‘Traditional Trade Unions in Transition: Confronting the Gig Economy.’ Workshop on Labour in the Global South and from a Global South Lens. University of Toronto Scarborough, Ontario, Canada April 02.

2) Thuppilikkat, Ashique and Priyank Chandra. ‘Nudging away from protests and unions?: Exploring Dynamics of Power, Agency and Resistance in Online Communities of Auto-rickshaw drivers in On-demand Ridesourcing Digital Labor Platforms’. International Network on Digital Labor-7 (INDL), Santiago, Chile on 28-30 October 2024.

3) Thuppilikkat, Ashique, Dipsita Dhar and Priyank Chandra. ‘Tech-mediated Resistance and Traditional Trade Union: A Case Study of Kolkata App Cab Ola Uber Union, West Bengal.’ British Sociology Association’s Work, Employment and Society Conference 2023, Glasgow on 13-15 September 2023.

4) Thuppilikkat, Ashique, Dipsita Dhar and Priyank Chandra. ‘Union Makes Us Strong: Experiences of Traditional Trade Union Organizing in Ride Sharing Digital Labour Platforms in Kolkata, West Bengal.’ British Sociology Association’s Work, Employment and Society Conference 2023, Glasgow on 13-15 September 2023.

5) Dhar, Dipsita, and Ashique Ali Thuppilikkat. ‘Gender and Intersectional Inequalities Within Workplace Resistance Discourses.’ British Sociology Association’s Work, Employment and Society Conference 2023, Glasgow on 13-15 September 2023.

6) Dhar, Dipsita, and Ashique Ali Thuppilikkat. ‘The Survival Strategy among the Malayali Diaspora in Malta: Negotiating through the GiG Economy.’ Second Athens Historical Materialism Conference, Panteion University, Athens on 20-23 April 2023.

7) Dhar, Dipsita, Soham Bhattacharya, and Ashique Ali Thuppilikkat. ‘Understanding Gig Economy & Socially Reproductive Labour: A Case Study from India.’ 41st International Labour Process Conference (ILPC 2023), Glasgow on 12 - 14 April 2023.