Platform Predicament – Making Sense of a Datafied Future of Work is a podcast series produced by IT for Change and supported by Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, India Office and the Fair Green Global alliance.

This podcast series aired from December 12th to December 19th, 2022. You can listen to all episodes of this series below, or on your choice of platform here.

You can also check out this blog post that synthesizes key themes emerging from this podcast.

About the Series:

The largest businesses of the world today are set up on the platform model. It is often said that the modern-day capitalist does not own the means of production, but the means of “connection”. It’s worth noting that since 2010, there has been a five-fold rise globally in the number of such digital labor platforms that facilitate online work. The Global South has a large part of this share.

These platform companies are the new, invisible bosses in this datafied world of work, relying heavily on the network effects of data, and algorithmic management tools, to capture vast markets in their respective sectors. While the innovation such platforms have brought in is admirable, it brings with it many important implications for labor law, workers’ data rights, data governance, and corporate governance.
Join us on this podcast, as we speak to our expert guests viz., labor economy researchers, workers’ representatives, platform workers, and platform founders, to understand the origins of platform-based work, how “gig work” intersects with it, what this means for the employment question right now as well as in the coming years. In this series, we also look at the power that data holds in this work model and who holds power over it, what issues of labor rights and data rights of workers emerge, and also what alternative models of platform-based work are coming up in different parts of the world to counter some of the criticisms of the current platform model.

Hosted by: Sonakshi Agarwal

Concept and Research: Anita Gurumurthy, Nandini Chami, Sonakshi Agarwal, Satyavrat KK, Deepti Bharthur, Sreyan Chatterjee

Editing and post-production: Sonakshi Agarwal, Nikhil Dinakurthi, Rahul Das

Artwork: Mansi Thakkar, Nikhil Dinakurthi

Supported by: Yameena Zaidi, Iznallah

Acknowledgements: This podcast is supported by Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, India Office and the Fair Green Global alliance.