Gendered Spatialities on Platform: Solidarity and Tensions in Worker Organising Efforts

This study examines intersectional gender spatialities and how they influence and shape the leadership, hiring practices, networks, and worker organising efforts within the platform work model. Drawing on the theoretical constructions of spatiality, the paper explores the spatio-temporal arrangements that resist or reinforce worker unionising and solidarity in the platform economy. Using narrative interviews conducted in the Indian context with platform workers engaged in ride-sharing and delivery services, as well as prominent trade union leaders, this inquiry brings forth the lived experiences of gender intersectionalities. Our findings suggest that worker organising efforts and trade union composition are dominated by patriarchal spatialities, which undermines the rights and concerns of gender-marginalised workers within the platform economy. This, in turn, creates an environment which is unable to foster true worker solidarity and leads to further ‘division of labourers’. The study further finds that many platform companies have systematically encouraged and promoted seemingly gender-progressive moves, especially hiring women in traditionally male-dominated services like driving and food delivery. These strategic decisions have been introduced by companies with the objective of (a) creating gendered tensions that shape and constrain collective bargaining efforts and (b) disrupting worker organising efforts, where the introduction of women can challenge the solidarity and power equations within traditional unions that are male-dominated. Therefore, gendering the workforce is a strategic effort by platform companies to increase tensions that break worker unionising. Men dominate the trade unions and the workforce, thereby producing patriarchal spaces where women have limited visibility and roles and while the ‘introduction of women’ in some of these male-dominated services by the app companies may seem inclusive and progressive, it has reified patriarchy and gender inequalities, further hampering women's representation and unionising efforts in platform work.