How Global Solidarities are Shaping Gig Workers’ Movements

Across history, transitions in technology have consistently enforced shifts in the organization and production of work. The material realities of how work relations are interconnected with everyday lives subsequently change. How we commute to work, how we dress for it, and how we spend our time after it are shaped by the nature, location, and structure of work. Labour regimes are interconnected, and on a global scale, the world of work and the web of relations surrounding it, are intricate. 

We cannot but think about work globally, today. It is a shift that is particularly relevant in light of emerging sites, actors, and sources that redefine the nature of work, such as the rise of the gig economy.

The everydayness of gig work, undoubtedly, should make us rethink how labour surveillance is inextricably linked with consumer practices. App purchases are becoming ubiquitous and with that, crucial questions have emerged on the work conditions of gig workers.

What are the consequences of delivery work, how do they navigate conditions of constant movement with timed delivery and the challenges of facing the unknown as the roads become their workplace? 

We cannot but think about work globally, today. It is a shift that is particularly relevant in light of emerging sites, actors, and sources that redefine the nature of work, such as the rise of the gig economy.

Gig work has challenged us to re-imagine informal labour. But is it a new informal, or a visualised informal? 

Wages have gotten interlinked with the actions at work. This has effectively curtailed movement, autonomy and dignity of agency in the modern world. While these concerns may be universal to the experience of work, gig work has been critiqued severely for the intensity to which it curtails movement and spreads precarity.      

Enough scholars have analysed the impact of surveillance on earning in the gig economy. I wish to turn our attention to how gig work borrows from and diverges from the conventional forms of experiences with work.  

Routinised, fast deliveries pose certain alarming concerns on the safety of workers. More and more regularly, gig workers have organised collective action and strikes. These demonstrations have often represented the presence of strong solidarities among the workers, who converge on the basis of certain shared experiences, despite their sites of work being dispersed. 

What allows the forging of these solidarities and the factors attributing to the success of the workers?

The first thing that strikes me is how  the photographs of workers in uniforms display  a sense of belongingness and togetherness. For food delivery agents, uniforms represent a marketing prop for the aggregator company, a pledge of hygiene amongst the agents handling food. They are also inconspicuous as they are disparate across platforms and geographic sites.      

Uniforms serve a variety of roles. For instance, by mobilizing solidarity among gig workers they enable a collective display of strength among the workers. Given the lack of clear employer-employee relationships among gig workers, uniforms play another crucial role as indicators of formal association to the brand as an instance from Australia reveals.  A protest in China demonstrated how by burning the uniform workers resisted the conditions of work offered by the platform employer.         

Given the lack of clear employer-employee relationships among gig workers, uniforms play another crucial role as indicators of formal association to the brand.

The second transformative medium has been social media, which has encouraged collective expression and global interactions. In the post-pandemic world, workers from both small and large establishments have organised frequent strikes to protest declining wages and conditions of work. Amongst gig workers, similar collective action has been growing. Social media posts have been instrumental in circulating ideas, methods of protests and victories.

These collective actions have also played a role in bringing together workers from the Global North and the Global South. Each spatial site has a unique form of protest - ranging from the Valentine's Day protests in the U.K. and U.S.A by platform workers associated with Deliveroo and Uber Eats, and campaigns of the Transport Workers Union in Australia, to organised resistance in Southeast Asia demanding higher  wages and regulations on arbitrary conditions of work.  

Strikes, as a form of traditional form of resistance, train workers to advocate for a broader definition of employee that includes gig workers under legal protection. Combined with social media campaigns, they create channels for legal advocacy and connect workers globally. 

A worker’s status becomes the site of political mobilisation by connecting disparate experiences through platform work and providing a shared sense of belonging      across spatial sites.  By asserting their rights as workers, they further push for legal protection and positive regulations to formally standardise their conditions at work. The striker's appeals to legality push for a vocabulary of justice which allows for different, uncommon experiences of gig workers associated with different platforms, comparable and relatable. It further highlights how thinking globally, both politically and conceptually, can be a valuable exercise theoretically and for political mobilisation.      

The calls for mobilization are supported by law-based discourse and advocacy relying on precedents from different national jurisdictions. This also echoes the strength of combining global strategies of resistance, and pro-workers thought. Gig worker unions have welcomed the U.K. Supreme Court’s decision to recognise Uber drivers as workers, supported drafts of a new regulatory framework in the European Union to improve work conditions of platform workers,  a new Australian legislation to protect gig workers, and a 2024 Singaporean legislation to “provide for the rights, obligations, protections and representation of platform workers.” They have also lobbied for a central legislation for 7.7 million gig workers in India.      

Conventional forms of strikes and unionisation have enabled a shared language of collective action demanding legal interventions in the arena of platform work.

These victories have come despite the State’s hesitation towards accepting the demand with full support, and ongoing efforts for stronger protective regimes continue to resist this. The success of these movements may be partial in terms of the demands accepted by the employers. The methods of bargaining and the wide spectrum of demands are instrumental in understanding labour mobilization and the implications of gig work. Economic benefits and social security construe recurring demands. 

In a recent  video posted on the streaming platform, Youtube,  the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union, equated gig work with slavery.  The video challenged the centralised position of customer feedback in gig work, which   perpetuates surveillance of the workers’ movement, dilutes their autonomy, and renders them vulnerable to mistreatment from rogue customers. By extending the conversations beyond that of economic considerations alone, the protestors are able to highlight the nuances of everyday unfair labour practices. Stronger lobbying for recognition of dignity, for being accorded the legal status of a worker, and to receive the coverage of protective legislations have expanded the scope of potential rights gig workers could obtain.

Conventional forms of strikes and unionisation have enabled a shared language of collective action demanding legal interventions in the arena of platform work. These examples may represent the workers' resistance and collective bargaining. But they remain silent on the social identities of the workers.      

Growing protests have centred on demands to recognize gig workers as employees. The urgency of securing worker status to claim rights has emphasized shared struggles across platforms, often overlooking differences shaped by social identities. While research is gradually starting to examine the racial and gendered dynamics of gig work to understand worker precarity. These issues remain underexplored even within grassroots movements, as the primary focus remains on achieving legal recognition from employers.

As the notions of dignity associated with forms of labour vary across sites, social identities and solidarities have been instrumental to labour movements.

How do ethnic, regional, community, racial, gender or caste minorities navigate collective action?           

Looking at women in gig-work in India, and globally, may provide important insights. In India, women involved in gig-based care work have resisted “digital patriarchy”  through sit-in protests (such as the one against Urban Company in June 2022), and silent protests where they collectively go offline from the platform.  The Gig and Platform Service Workers Union used digital patriarchy to highlight how platforms, despite their illusion of flexibility, reinforce gendered coercion through routine platform work. The rising instances of sexual exploitation draw attention to how women workers remain confined to tasks labeled as "feminine," such as providing salon services in clients' homes, exposing them to unsafe environments without safeguards against such acts or domestic abuse. The voices of the workers explain how clients equate service producers with domestic servitude who have been traditionally unpaid and disrespected within the Indian social fabric.

Such service applications for salon facilities and household tasks are not unique to India -  Airtasker and Taskrabbit globally offer these services. In the globally unfolding protests there is little collective focus on gender-specific issues such as higher incidence of sexual abuse that sustains silences among workers perpetuating acceptance, and  tolerance  of such behavior. There have been some success stories. In January 2025 Mexico secured formal rights to gig workers, workers have been demanding parental benefits in the U.S. However, these remain exceptions rather than the norm. The fight for legal worker status must incorporate the unique experiences of gig work, revealing how it sustains, adapts, and reinforces existing social inequalities. 

As the notions of dignity associated with forms of labour vary across sites, social identities and solidarities have been instrumental to labour movements.  The platform-based work mobilisations require singular yet interconnected experiences that transcend geographical boundaries, revealing the universality of labour challenges in a digital age. We must examine how conventional inequalities are embedded within these new regimes and how they manifest in efforts to challenge the growing domination and surveillance of platform systems. The intersection of social and economic identities creates opportunities for political mobilization, warranting greater attention both in grassroots movements and scholarly discourse.

Megha Sharma is an Assistant Professor at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore