Gig Economy and Digital Labour in Iran: What Space for Workers’ Rights between Public Discourses and Legal Practices?

How and why have public discourses – mirrored in legal practices –portrayed (or ignored) gig workers in Iran? What is the agency of digital workerism (Brown, Quan Haase 2012; Englert 2020), within the context of the Iranian platform-based economy?

This paper reflects on these questions, investigating digital labour from a dual perspective: the first one exploring the forms of hybrid capitalism; the second one navigating practices of labour alienation.

It aims to tackle the structural economic changes occurred in post-revolutionary Iran vis-à-vis the Islamic republic’s hegemonic discourses and political practices. This study draws from a) the discourse analysis of primary and secondary sources in Persian, such as newspapers, official May Day speeches, advertisements and billboards; b) the examination of the Labour Law, legal documents and policy reports, in order to understand any potential links between precarity, exploitation and gig economy.

Using Snapp, Iran’s first taxi and ride-hailing platform, as a core example, this paper constitutes one of the first academic attempts to assess the exchange of labour via a digital platform in Iran, with a specific focus on the plethora of short-term contracts and independent workers.

As existing working practices are being transformed, the paper contends that the hyper-precarisation of Iranian gig workers is mirrored in 1) non-standard work arrangements; 2) a systematic and potentially confrontation between workers’ autonomy vs workers’ exploitation.