The starting point of this paper is that the value extraction apparatus of digital labor platforms can be understood only by deploying a ‘reproductive lens’ and not through a exclusive focus on their algorithmic optimization strategies in mediating the labor marketplace. Rooted in an in-depth empirical exploration of the experiences of 19 women and men workers in India’s burgeoning gig economy, it unpacks the specific strategies through which digital labor platforms selectively embed themselves in the traditional sphere of informalized labor relations in order to extract surplus value from the reproductive realm.
Our research demonstrates three main strategies through which digital labor platforms extract value from the sphere of social reproduction.
The first pertains to a totalizing commodification of workers. The institutional order of algorithmically-mediated, entrepreneurial governmentality erected by digital labor platforms, building on the normative disembedding of waged work from the social contract of labor-capital relations, enables a complete subsumption of the worker.
The second sphere of value extraction emerges at the level of the family unit, what we refer to as the “quintessential gig household”. This pliable household structure collectively materializes the flexibility rhetoric of platforms, absorbing many members of the household into gig work rhythms, albeit in ways that implicate capital’s continued ability to appropriate the polyvalence of women’s labor.
And finally, the whole of sociality is recast as a social factory that furthers platform capital accumulation. Institutional relations of social cooperation are subsumed into capital accumulation circuits, building off and entrenching social power hierarchies undergirding labor markets, recasting structural oppression as individual humiliations.
Put together, these findings advance thinking about platform labor relations beyond the narrow zone of waged work and algorithmic managerial control, and open up the space to develop and engage with a more expansive understanding of both the social relations of labor and value generation in the platform economy in order to reorient it towards a feminist economic future.
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