Differentiated Labour

The gig economy has grown rapidly across the Global South, introducing innovative services and generating millions of jobs. As technological change drives demand for flexible, location-based labour, digitally mediated transactions in transport, food delivery, hospitality, and care work have become embedded in everyday life. Drawing on survey data from 1,800 location-based platform workers across four Indian cities ^—^ Chandigarh, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Kolkata ^—^Differentiated Labour examines how digital platforms shape labour markets. The findings indicate that the platform workforce is dominated by young, male, and relatively educated workers, who face a triple-employer problem, economic exclusion, arbitrary intermediary extraction, and a lack of identity and bargaining power. Despite their rhetoric of flexibility, autonomy, and entrepreneurship, platforms reproduce hierarchies of caste, religion, demography, and migration status, thereby consolidating monopsony-like power. Within such structurally constrained conditions, workers carve out partial agency through offline negotiation with customers, strategic engagement with surge periods, information sharing, and occasional collective mobilization. Differentiated Labour argues that bridging the gap between structural exclusion and formal recognition is not merely a question of fairness but a precondition for building a more sustainable digitally mediated labour market.