Migrant labour in the digital age exploited

Mail & Guardian

16-05-2025

(Graphic: John McCann/M&G)
The wealth of white South Africa was first built on the expropriation of land, and then the exploitation of black labour, much of it migrant labour. The lives of men from places like Sul do Save in Mozambique and eMampondweni in the Eastern Cape were consumed by the mines. Women left their families to work in white people's homes. Black exploitation — organised through containment and surveillance and legitimated by racism — produced systemic impoverishment.
While remnants of the old system of migrant labour remain, such as the decaying hostels in some of our cities, the passbooks have gone, as have the trains — the metal snakes that carried the men to the mines. Hugh Masekela's Stimela is a song about the past. But new forms of migrant labour still generate corporate wealth, and enable the ease of middle-class life.
In the suburbs and gated communities, the most visible form of migrant labour is the growing number of men making deliveries on motorcycles. A rider from Malawi explains that he cannot begin to enjoy even the most basic pleasures of life until he has saved R30 000. This is the cost of repatriating his body if he is killed on the job. A rider working without making provision for the possibility of death risks binding his family to debt. It has been said that riding a delivery motorcycle is the most dangerous job in South Africa.
The labour movement has always carried limits to its understanding of what counts as work, who counts as a worker and what counts as a workplace. These limits have often been shaped by broader lines of exclusion, such as race, caste, nationality and gender. Domestic work has seldom been taken as seriously as other forms of work. Sex work has seldom been understood as work. When contemporary trade unions draw on narrow understandings of 19th-century ideas and 20th-century experiences, they are unable to take adequate measure of changing forms of work.
Planetary pain
Capital's offensive against unions has been significantly boosted by the rise of the gig economy in general, and 'platform-based' work in particular. By recasting exploitative corporations as 'platforms', and workers as 'independent contractors' or 'entrepreneurs', capital has absolved itself of responsibilities that, in many societies, had come to be seen as basic obligations to workers. It has also enabled new and totalising forms of surveillance.
There is frequently no paid leave, no compensation for accidents, no life insurance or pension and no provision for breaks to rest, use the toilet and eat. Payment is usually for jobs completed rather than time worked, and people are summarily removed from the apps without any kind of due process or recourse for unfair practices.
A motorcycle courier deemed to be an independent contractor is under constant pressure to meet delivery times, navigate dangerous roads and neighbourhoods, and absorb the costs of fuel, maintenance and repairs.
'Platform' work is a planetary phenomenon, as evident in London as in Johannesburg. In India, it is estimated that there are about 7.7 million people working with digital 'platforms'. One study concludes that about 23.5 million will be working this way in five years' time. In Brazil, about 1.5 million people are working through 'platforms'.
The 'platforms' do not only organise the exploitation of labour in new forms of work, such as delivering food using apps. They are also bringing older forms of work, such as domestic work, under their control.
This shift has been accompanied by the development of a more decentralised and less institutionally mediated ideological configuration — shaped by Pentecostal churches, social media, videos and podcasts — that celebrates a vision of individual success. Wealth is presented as virtue, and the entrepreneur as a heroic figure. In this world, many prefer the seduction of Instagram to the community or union meeting, and the hope of making it on their own to collective organisation.
This new ideological landscape intersects with older forms of domination and exclusion. In India, platform workers are mostly from oppressed castes. In Brazil, this form of labour is strongly racialised. A study by the late Eddie Webster and Fikile Masikane found about 90% of food courier riders in Johannesburg are migrants.
Warren McGregor, the programme coordinator of the Global Labour University at Wits, argues that this is one reason why established unions in South Africa have not shown much interest in organising riders and drivers. He explains that the limited support they have received has primarily come from labour support organisations.
As is the case around the world, riders and drivers in South Africa have formed WhatsApp groups to share warnings, organise mutual aid and discuss issues. These networks are a modest but potentially significant step toward self-organisation.
Brazil
In Brazil, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto (MTST) — the Homeless Workers' Movement, which has growing connections to Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa — is the most significant movement of the urban poor. It organises around land and building occupations, offering shelter and solidarity to people excluded from formal housing. Its social base is made up largely of informal and precarious workers — especially women and black Brazilians — many of whom work in construction, domestic service and recycling but still cannot afford to formally rent or own homes in the cities where they labour.
The MTST has extended its work to 'platform' labour. It has supported the formation of cooperatives such as Liga Coop, a driver-owned and managed e-hailing service, and Señoritas Courier, a feminist, worker-owned delivery cooperative. It has also helped to create tools like the chatbot Contrate Quem Luta (Hire Those Who Struggle), which connects clients to marginalised workers. In some occupations, the movement has also established rest spaces where food delivery riders — many working long, isolated hours under algorithmic control — can pause to eat, rest, charge their phones and use the toilet.
India
In India, workers have organised around slogans such as 'Rating nahi, haq chahiye (We want rights, not ratings)' and 'Insaan hai hum, ghulaam nahi (We are human beings, not slaves)'. Committed work by and in support of 'platform' workers has resulted in important advances. In 2023, the state of Rajasthan passed a law extending labour rights and protections to these workers. Last year, draft Bills were introduced in Karnataka and Jharkhand with the aim of enacting similar gains.
The draft Telangana Gig and Platform Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Bill, introduced last month, proposes a Welfare Board, automatic registration of workers, contributions from platform companies, protection against arbitrary deactivation, and mechanisms for resolving disputes. Crucially, it also calls for algorithmic transparency and access to data —issues central to workers' ability to contest how their labour is managed. These proposals are the result of sustained organising by the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union.
In Karnataka, the United Food Delivery Partners' Union (UFDPU) has played a similar role. According to its president, Vinay Sarathy, while companies claim the workforce is transient, 'many workers in this sector work full-time' and are 'compelled to work 12 to 15 hours a day' to earn a basic living. Yet, they remain outside all formal labour protections. 'There is a constant fear of termination of work through ID blocking,' he notes, which leaves workers without income or recourse. Fundamental rights such as the freedom to organise are also under threat.
Despite these hurdles, the UFDPU and other groups have helped secure some social protections for platform workers — but, as Sarathy stresses, 'the central issue — formal recognition of gig workers as workers under labour law — remains unresolved.' One of the UFDPU's practical demands speaks directly to the everyday indignities faced by riders: that restaurants be obliged to allow delivery workers access to toilets. The All India General Strike called for 20 May will include the demand for 'platform' workers to be recognised as workers.
McGregor argues that in South Africa the struggles of 'platform' workers are nascent, and 'an opportunity to change long-standing and traditional modes of organising', and to revitalise the labour movement from below. In this context, even modest forms of organisation — WhatsApp groups, small associations and sporadic strikes — can begin to open fragments of political possibility.
Richard Pithouse is distinguished research fellow at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies, an international research scholar at the University of Connecticut and professor at large at the University of the Western Cape.