DIGITAL LABOUR RELATIONS IN THE GIG ECONOMY: PLATFORM-TO-CONSUMER FOOD DELIVERY SERVICES IN GLOBAL NORTH AND GLOBAL SOUTH

The platform business model has been expanding exponentially over time reshaping capitalism as well as work and labour relations within it. In less than a decade, digital platforms have grown from a niche market to engulf different industries and services across the globe, in developed and developing nations alike. These models connect service providers with service seekers over a digital platform where real-time data is processed through intricate algorithmic programming under diverse market conditions to allocate tasks, determine income, and assess the performance of the service providers. These digital platforms being automated, and data-rich digitised institutional environments seek to mediate economic transactions by hiring workers on a piece-rate basis to perform marginal or casual working activities (Kalleberg and Dunn, 2016; De Stefano, 2016; Atmore, 2017; Duggan et al. 2019). Nonetheless, over the advantages received across digital platforms, many scholars argue that there is nothing novel in these platform models and indeed, it holds the potential to undo what the labour unions have been working to do over the past hundred years (Healy et al. 2017; Nilsen et al. 2020). This even encompasses precipitating a ‘race to the bottom’ where workers undercut each other for advantage over wages and other performance expectations. These digital platforms, contrary to what is claimed, do not lend support towards (re)configuring hierarchies, rigidities, and biases in labour relations rather they reinforce them under novel mechanisms. Hence, over time, significant research has been done to examine the changing structural and legal dimensionalities encountered in these digital platforms that highlight how traditional labour relations have undergone sea changes in post-industrialised societies. Nonetheless, no literature has adopted a multi-level analysis that seeks to connect the meso-level workings within these platforms with the broader political-economic context and the micro-level socio-political interactions among the workers. This often ignores analysing the workings within these platforms in context to the broader political, economic, or social arrangements, and secondly, it also ignores that the macro context can influence the workers’ experiences and actions. Hence, this research seeks to explore how are the variations in the individual firm-level configurations and the agential practices among workers related to the broader macro-structural conditions. This research uses labour process theorisation through a critical realist perspective that seeks to create an integrative approach in reflecting on the linkages between the micro-level relations within the broader macro contexts. Hence, a comparative case study approach has been used to explore cross-national variations and similarities in examining how platform-based technologies influence labour relations across distinct tech hubs in Global North and Global South. In this, one hundred and twenty platform-to-consumer food delivery workers have been selected across cities of India [Mumbai and Guwahati] and Italy [Milan and Bologna] using stratified purposive sampling. Observations and unstructured interviews were used to collect the data, which was designed to involve respondents in critical thinking and explore their experiences from both a reflective and experiential perspective. Each interview has been transcribed verbatim and analysed within, and across the cases using the statistical software MAXQDA to store, code and thematically analyse the data.