From Welfare to Labour Rights: Shifting Terrains of Collective Action among India’s Platform Workers

Authors

• Gayatri Nair, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, DelhiFollow
• Eesha Kunduri, University of Minnesota, Twin CitiesFollow

Abstract

Digital labour platforms worldwide have deepened the shift towards temporary, piecemeal, casual, and non-standard work arrangements. With significant implications for wages, employment relationships, and social security, the rise of platform work has (re)shaped the experiences of work in urban India in profound ways. Our ethnographic engagements in Delhi and Hyderabad are the basis to highlight three labour issues: of wages, safety, and discrimination, which shape the everyday experience of platform workers and which have consequently been raised by unions and through workers’ collective action. These issues, we argue, demonstrate the need for legislative interventions that regulate labour conditions in platform work, as against the current thrust on social security in policy and legislative debates. Under conditions of neo-liberal globalisation and platform capitalism, we argue that capital-labour relations continue to be negotiated via the state, as seen in collective action struggles by platform workers and their unions that foreground labour rights. The onus, therefore, of ensuring platforms’ compliance with and accountability to regulatory structures and legal frameworks (whether existing, new, or emerging ones) lies with the state.

Recommended Citation

Nair, Gayatri and Kunduri, Eesha (2026) "From Welfare to Labour Rights: Shifting Terrains of Collective Action among India’s Platform Workers," National Law School Journal: Vol. 20: Iss. 1, Article 2.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.55496/NKZL5270
Available at: https://repository.nls.ac.in/nlsj/vol20/iss1/2

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.55496/NKZL5270