Anita Gurumurthy, Khawla Zainab, and Sadhana Sanjay conducted a study of Indian women workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) in the post-pandemic moment, and this research report extensively lays out its rationale, process, and findings. Through a qualitative study based on interviews with AMT workers, the report shows how an intertwining of economic necessity and familial validation makes microwork on digital platforms an optimal choice for small-town Indian women from upwardly mobile households in a global digital economy. As a workplace, AMT demands an exacting adherence to the rules of the platform, but enjoys absolute impunity. The study, thus, reflects how digital labor platforms, like AMT, engage in global labor arbitrage, exploiting gendered and racial faultlines in the digital economy. Pointing to the urgent need to address gender and redistributive justice, the authors propose policy recommendations for the government, multilateral institutions, and digital labor platforms as well as advocacy strategies for trade unions and civil society organizations. Findings from this study were first published as a research paper for the Review of Women’s Studies 2021 issue on Gender and Covid-19 of Economic and Political Weekly (EPW).
This research was conducted as a part of our ‘Re-wiring India's Digitalising Economy for Women's Rights and Well-being’ project, supported by the European Union and FES.