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Old Logics, New Technologies: Producing a Managed Workforce on On-Demand Service Platforms

Published: 19 April 2023 Publication History

Abstract

We examine how two prominent food delivery platforms in India, Swiggy and Zomato, produce a managed digital workforce using a combination of algorithmic control and traditional labor management strategies. Our findings draw from interviews conducted with 13 food delivery workers and a critical discourse analysis of news media coverage. We found that the two platforms combine piece wage restructuring, granular datafication practices, and the use of benevolent language as neoliberal social control mechanisms. We find that this combination of technological governance and strategic managerial practices is a mutually constitutive method of control that restructures labor processes, extracts workers’ compliance and consent, and prevents work disruption. We show that contemporary platform companies draw from strategies that have historically been deployed in industrial labor management. By examining how older and newer regimes of social control and exploitation are strategically intertwined in contemporary platform design, we contribute a historically situated understanding of platform labor that moves beyond dualistic interpretations of “traditional” labor management practices and more recent algorithmic modes of control. Our findings contribute to recent debates in tech labor and algorithmic control by examining how contemporary conditions of precarious work reactivate certain past forms of control and in doing so normalize extreme overwork, exhaustion, speedups, and injuries.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2023
    14911 pages
    ISBN:9781450394215
    DOI:10.1145/3544548
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    Published: 19 April 2023

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    Author Tags

    1. digital labor
    2. food delivery
    3. gig work
    4. managed workforce
    5. piecework

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