A new politics of welfare? The origins and strategies of India's gig and platform workers' unions in the era of digital capitalism

During and after the months of pandemic control measures, newly formed unions of platform and gig workers in India started leveraging electoral contests, campaigns and politics to advocate for and with laws that would regulate platform work and provide workers with social security. This signalled the adoption of direct political interventionism as a bargaining strategy for gig and platform workers' rights. This strategy was built upon the strengths and abilities of workers to coordinate tactically and organise independently, without conforming entirely to existing political formations and ideologies - reminiscent of the historical 'third-wave' movements for informal workers' legal empowerment in India. Drawing on examples of practices of 'political and civil society' amongst gig and platform labour organising in India, this paper demonstrates the unique ways in which new unions of gig and platform workers are both following and deviating from earlier trajectories of third-wave labour movements, as well as from gig and platform workers' movements in the global context. We show in the paper how this is allowing unions to make greater claims for gig workers' social protection and expand the remit of welfare politics in India. We then deliberate whether this signifies a potential movement towards a new 'fourth wave' of labour's legal empowerment for workers in India under digital capitalism.