Partially Empowering but not Decent? The Contradictions of Online Labour Markets
Online labour markets (OLMs) are new global workplaces that represent the latest wave of offshoring. Indians have a strong presence on OLMs, being freelancers on both international and national platforms, adding to the country’s large and growing informal
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Partially Empowering but not Decent? The Contradictions of Online Labour Markets Premilla D’Cruz
Abstract Online labour markets (OLMs) are new global workplaces that represent the latest wave of offshoring. Indians have a strong presence on OLMs, being freelancers on both international and national platforms, adding to the country’s large and growing informal workforce. Through a critical hermeneutic phenomenological approach, this chapter examines the experiences of Indian freelancers on Upwork using the lens of decent work. The findings underscore that though full-time freelancers report some sense of empowerment in terms of income, quality of life, long-term investments and upward mobility, career development, work-life balance, link with the West and platform checks and facilities, there are decent work deficits across the four hallmarks of full and productive employment, rights at work ensuring human dignity, social protection and social dialogue. Effective pursuit of the decent work agenda on OLMs calls for counterhegemonic initiatives through global social movement unionism that reconciles labour differences across the North-South divide. Keywords Crowdsourcing Misbehaviour India
10.1
Freelancers
Informal sector
Decent work
Introduction
Online labour markets/OLMs are digital workplaces where “labour is exchanged for money, the product of that labour is delivered ‘over a wire’, and the allocation of labour and money is determined by a collection of buyers and sellers operating within a price system” (Horton 2010: p. 516). Representing a new means of livelihood projected to grow to US$ (United States dollar) 5 billion by 2018 (Chan and Wang 2014), OLMs sit at the cusp of neoliberalism and technology. This chapter highlights
P. D’Cruz (&) Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Ahmedabad, India e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 E. Noronha and P. D’Cruz (eds.), Critical Perspectives on Work and Employment in Globalizing India, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-3491-6_10
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case studies of four Indian freelancers on Upwork1 through the lens of critical hermeneutic phenomenology.2 In examining whether OLMs provide freelancers with decent work, the chapter contributes to the growing academic debate surrounding crowdsourcing sites as scholars attempt to understand and theorize the observed dynamics (Lehdonvirta et al. 2014). After a brief description of OLMs, the International Labour Organization/ILO’s decent work agenda is discussed. Freelancer narratives are presented ideographically as lived experiences and nomothetically through ideology-critique. The extent to which OLMs facilitate decent work is then elucidated, with recommendations forwarded for realizing this agenda.
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Understanding Online Labour Markets
Information and communication technologies and devices/ICTDs have evolved to enable members of the labour force to compete directly as independent contractors/freelancers with their international counterparts via Internet-linked crowdsou
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