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Rethinking Mutual Aid Through the Lens of Social Reproduction: How Platform Drivers Ride Out Work and Life in Bengaluru, India

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  • Kaveri Medappa

Abstract

This paper presents an ethnographic account of the support and mutual aid mechanisms evolved by members of an app-based cab drivers union in Karnataka during the recurrent ‘waves’ of the COVID-19 pandemic. It also describes the app-based-driver-led infrastructures of support that were in place during ‘normal’ times, even before the pandemic. The paper deploys ethnographic methods and a feminist political economy lens to analyse the workings of platform capital and its processes of value extraction. While previous scholarship has presented platform workers’ everyday acts of mutual support as ‘resilience’ or as indicative of the ‘embeddedness’ of labour, this paper adopts an analytical lens drawing from Marxist and socialist feminist scholarship on social reproduction. I draw attention to the ‘productive’ work that everyday practices of support and mutual aid do for ‘technology platforms’ like Uber and Ola, and illustrate the mutual dependence and relation between the (capitalistically) ‘productive’ sphere and the reproductive sphere of life-making, and the heightened crisis of the latter engendered by newer modes of production. This paper reveals the gamut of unpaid and invisible labours which workers expend on an everyday basis and from which platform businesses extract value. It contributes to emergent scholarship on platform work and social reproduction feminism by pointing to spaces outside the home and institutions other than the family in providing reproductive labour that is generative of value for (platform) capital.

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  • Kaveri Medappa, 2023. "Rethinking Mutual Aid Through the Lens of Social Reproduction: How Platform Drivers Ride Out Work and Life in Bengaluru, India," Journal of South Asian Development, , vol. 18(3), pages 383-408, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:soudev:v:18:y:2023:i:3:p:383-408
    DOI: 10.1177/09731741231162450
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    1. Jayati Ghosh, 2020. "A critique of the Indian government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic," Economia e Politica Industriale: Journal of Industrial and Business Economics, Springer;Associazione Amici di Economia e Politica Industriale, vol. 47(3), pages 519-530, September.
    2. Aditi Surie & Lakshmee V. Sharma, 2019. "Climate change, Agrarian distress, and the role of digital labour markets: evidence from Bengaluru, Karnataka," DECISION: Official Journal of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Springer;Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, vol. 46(2), pages 127-138, June.
    3. Webster Edward, 2020. "The Uberisation of work: the challenge of regulating platform capitalism. A commentary," International Review of Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 34(4), pages 512-521, July.
    4. Jonathan Woodside & Tara Vinodrai & Markus Moos, 2021. "Bottom-up strategies, platform worker power and local action: Learning from ridehailing drivers," Local Economy, London South Bank University, vol. 36(4), pages 325-343, June.
    5. Karol MUSZYŃSKI & Valeria PULIGNANO & Markieta DOMECKA & Adam MROZOWICKI, 2022. "Coping with precarity during COVID‐19: A study of platform work in Poland," International Labour Review, International Labour Organization, vol. 161(3), pages 463-485, September.
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    1. Aditya Ray, 2024. "Coping with crisis and precarity in the gig economy: ‘Digitally organised informality’, migration and socio-spatial networks among platform drivers in India," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 56(4), pages 1227-1244, June.

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