Delivering food, navigating stigma: the social experience of gig workers in urban India

Abstract

The flourishing literature on platform labour focuses broadly on the themes of labour process, algorithmic management, precarity, classification disputes, and collective action. Drawing on 25 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Hyderabad (India), including being a delivery worker, this article examines how stigma is produced, felt, and navigated by the delivery workers in the platformized food delivery ecosystem. The findings reveal that the portrayal of workers as ‘delivery heroes,’ ‘essential workers,’ or ‘partners,’ by the platform does not match with the experience of stigma that arises from everyday interactions of the workers with the platform, restaurants, and customers. It further demonstrates that platform-mandated dress codes, which is presented as marker of professionalism, in reality stigmatizes workers. The paper argues that occupational stigma forces workers into routine practices of tactical invisibility and moral reframing to preserve their dignity within India’s rigid social hierarchies. The article extends scholarship on platform labour by foregrounding stigma as one of the aspects of platform labour and by demonstrating how global processes of platformization intersect with locally embedded norms of class, status, and respectability.