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Writer's pictureDamni Kain

Caste Out: How Social Hierarchy and Exclusion Affect Gig Workers in India


The cover illustration depicts a gig worker, likely a food delivery person, standing at the gate of a residence. The worker is wearing a red uniform, face mask, and a large insulated delivery backpack. They hold a black takeout bag in one hand, extended toward the gate. A surveillance camera is mounted on the wall above, watching the scene, highlighting issues of monitoring. The worker's body language suggests they are waiting or about to deliver, framed against a closed blue gate, evoking a sense of exclusion and separation. The visual captures themes of isolation, surveillance, and the invisible barriers that gig workers often face in their daily jobs. The image is for "Caste Out: How social hierarchy and exclusion affect gig workers in India."
Illustration by Soumya Singh

“Restaurants have a separate entry so their customers do not see us. They make an arrangement from the back gate of the restaurant itself, they do not let us come in front, and guards keep a check on this. They do this so that no one sees us, for the restaurant’s cleanliness, to avoid crowding, etc … they can give many reasons. But you know they feel Ghin (disgust) towards riders if we enter their place.”

Shehzaad is one of the seven million platform workers in India, part of an expanding global industry. For my research with gig workers in Delhi, I travelled around the city, sometimes riding pillion on their motorbikes, sometimes in auto-rickshaws following their bikes. For this, I aligned my day with theirs, arriving at their ‘zone’ of work as per the gig slots they pre-booked. I waited with them for orders at restaurants, and accompanied them in delivering the orders to the customers.


While the academic discourse on gig work has highlighted exploitative work conditions in the industry, Shehzaad is pointing out something unique. He describes what he faces as a worker, but specifically as a gig worker who is, by default, ascribed “low-caste” status in the metropolitan city of New Delhi.


As a social reality, caste is an all-pervasive phenomenon marking the economic, political and social hierarchy prevalent in South Asia. The caste system provides the basis for exclusionary social categories that rank people at birth. Caste apartheid, including caste-based violence as a form of systematized oppression, affects more than 260 million people worldwide (Equality Labs, 2019).


The image shows the make-shift entry for gig workers in a popular restaurant in New Delhi from the back as the workers are restricted to enter from the front gate of the restaurant from which the customers enter to dine.
The alternative entry (back side) for gig workers in a popular restaurant in New Delhi. [Image: Damni Kain (clicked during fieldwork in New Delhi)]

In this context, I was struck by how Shehzaad defined the experience of caste in a single word — “Ghin” — a feeling of disgust and repulsion rooted in the notions of “purity” and “pollution” (Dumont, 1981) attached to the bodies of people in a caste society.


Bodies kept at a distance


Even when the workers’ caste is not explicitly known, the feeling of Ghin in a caste society towards gig workers marks them as bodies to be kept at a distance. As people from different castes are expected to not mingle, marry or dine with each other, caste is practised socially through separation, withdrawal, demarcation and segregation. In other words, untouchability is the central premise of the caste system in India and more widely, in South Asia.


As Shehzaad elaborates —


“Some customers don’t even take it (the orders) from our hands, they ask us to keep it outside. In the “instructions” section (of the apps) we receive such requests. We have to use separate lifts in many gated housing societies which are meant only for workers and labourers. Residents have their lifts, but we cannot use them. We need to follow all such orders for a good rating.”

‘Do you practise any particular ways to avoid this humiliation?’, I asked. Shehzaad replied, ‘Yes, I avoid the uniform many times … but you know the company asks us to always wear it and also click selfies before we start our gig to show them the proof that we wear it’.


 

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The platforms insist on the brand’s ‘uniforms’ — bright shirts with bold logos - as a marker of professionalism and for publicly promoting the company’s presence on the streets. But this same shirt becomes a signifier of the worker’s identity. Within the ‘high aesthetics’ of many restaurants, there are separate passages for the entry and exit of gig workers. Following the logic of caste-based segregation, they do this to ensure the delivery of goods and services without ‘polluting’ the space of the largely middle-class, upper-caste, Hindu consumers.


Being visible and invisible


The worker’s body is made simultaneously visible and invisible through the uniform. On one hand, separate entry and exit passages for gig workers prevent them from being visible in front of diners. On the other hand, the same uniform makes them hyper-visible in the dirt, messiness and congestion of the streets, where workers are socially perceived to ‘belong’. This duality reveals that the movement of the workers is hidden and disciplined, defining access to spaces on the basis of class and caste.


This image shows a separate collection point at the back of McDonalds cafe from where the gig workers are required to collect food. Customers use the front gate to enter.
A separate food collection point at McDonalds, New Delhi for gig workers. [Image: Damni Kain (clicked during fieldwork in New Delhi)]

Workers are moving advertisements for the platforms, traversing the streets, marketing and displaying the brand. It not only shows the presence, scale and expansion of their business model but also makes the worker’s body a signifier of the speed of the platform itself. In this process, the worker’s movement is reduced to a mere cog in the company’s logistics.


Understanding caste in the platform economy is a pre-requisite for analysing the economic, legal and social questions around platform work in India and more widely South Asia — which is crucial for workers, platforms and state policies. Caste operates in the gig economy in multiple ways. To fully understand how this works, we cannot simply search for single instances of overt discrimination in the sector. To appreciate the complexity, we must not only look inward to understand the cases of active discrimination. We also need to place the gig economy within the structurally hierarchical logic of caste as it determines the spatial, temporal and social access of gig workers in a caste society.


This piece was originally published in The Sociological Review Magazine.


Damni Kain is a PhD Candidate and a Gates-Cambridge Scholar at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge. She completed her M.Phil from the University of Cambridge as a Cambridge Trust and Commonwealth Scholar, where her research on caste and gig work in India was awarded the prestigious BASAS (British Association for South Asian Studies) Master's Dissertation Prize.


Damni's research interests include ethnographic explorations of the gig economy and the future of work, labour, and caste. Post her M.Phil, Damni worked as a Lecturer at Jindal Global University, India. She has also previously worked at the Oxford Internet Institute's Fairwork Foundation, Centre for Internet and Society, the Indian Parliament and the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology where she contributed to parliamentary interventions on a range of policy issues at the helm of technology and labour rights.


Damni is a member of the Advisory Board at Political Pandora.


 

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