By – Prachi Agarwal
Abstract
Labour struggles at workplaces have historically been associated with mass demonstrations, the picket line, the union hall. Platform work is not known for these kinds of protests. Platform workers are distributed, technologically controlled and often excluded from the normal employment laws. However, this does not mean that resistance does not happen here. It means that resistance takes on a unique approach. Here, the protest is more silent with mass log outs, refusal of orders and manipulation of the system. This article argues that these dispersed and deniable practices amount to genuine labour resistance, and that judging movements by their visibility leaves us unable to see how workers contest power now.
Introduction
During one of the busiest days of the year for deliveries, the new year’s eve, hundreds of workers from India’s digital platforms refused to go online. The organisers claim that the number of those participating in the strike exceeded 200,000. It was as noticeable as a protest by gig workers could get. Platforms raised incentives, riders kept riding, and the companies reported record volumes.
That outcome suggests the conventional strike is a poor fit for this industry. A workers strike at a factory brings results because the production is dependent on those protesting workers. A platform has no factory floor, no fixed shift of employees. What it has, is a divided crowd of individuals whose absence can be bought off one person at a time.
This does not mean resistance has vanished. It means it has been displaced. In the case of deliveries and app drivers, resistance takes place by way of logouts, refusal, information sharing, and the manipulation of incentives of the platform itself. The gig economy does not erase labor resistance, but transforms its modality and its visibility.
Why Conventional Strikes Do Not Easily Work Here
Platforms classify workers as independent contractors and not as merely employees. Non- employees per se, in many jurisdictions, are not included in the statutory machinery of collective bargaining and protected industrial action. However, some courts have started to speak for these ‘non-employees’. In Uber v Aslam, the UK Supreme Court decided that the drivers were “workers” entitled to the national minimum wage and paid leave. It looked past the wording of the contract to the actual control exercised over the drivers. The Indian Code on Social Security has codified gig workers and platform workers for the very first time. It brings them within the social security net, providing for schemes covering accident and health cover, maternity benefits and old-age protection.
So the rights based position is shifting, but the practical position is complicated. The workers have no common platform to share their grievances. The workforce is divided between full-timers and casual earners. While the full timers depend entirely on the platform, the casual earners have different priorities. This means, as labour researchers at Berkeley note, that driver interests are frequently not aligned. There is no supervisor to confront. Since income runs through an account that can be blocked, this becomes a risk no other factory worker has faced.
What Invisible Resistance Looks Like
Considering the issues as discussed above, the workers have found a way around it and decided to put pressure on the companies rather than confrontation.
The most direct tactic is the coordinated logout, in which drivers collectively switch off their apps during peak demand to force surge pricing upward. In the past, Berkeley researchers documented US drivers turning off their apps during high-demand periods a decade ago. Alongside, there is selective refusal of poorly-paid jobs, planned slowdowns, and withdrawal of labour at moments which were meant to hurt the company.
None of this can work if there is no communication amongst the workers. Encrypted group chats have become the infrastructure of platform labour politics. An analysis of existing research regarding platform economy shows that platforms like WeChat enable drivers to organise and coordinate their activities. It helps in exchanging grievances about the lack of transparency in the process of dispatch orders, and notify each other about the situation on the road. In turn, another study identified gig workers who use online forums and social media groups to share information about navigating platform policies and earning more.
The distinction that matters here is between frustration and coordination. A single rider declining a badly paid order is making a personal calculation. Two hundred riders decline the same order in the same district after agreeing to do so in a group chat is something else. The action looks identical from the outside but it produces collective effect while remaining individually deniable.
The Algorithm Becomes the New Boss
There is no concept of a manager in platform work. Work is allocated, priced, rated, penalised, and withdrawn by software. Researchers at the ILO describe how rating systems and similar controls restrict worker autonomy and access to work. Deactivation is the most severe form of penalty that can be imposed and that is issued without an explanation and no appeal.
But a system built on algorithms can be studied. The ILO researchers found that despite limited bargaining power, workers develop both individual and collective strategies to counteract algorithmic restrictions. Keeping a track of when surge pricing starts, choosing the incentives thresholds to chase, turns a hidden management system into something workers can partly expect and control.
The New Year’s Eve strike showed this protest in action. Reports from Bengaluru found the action largely fizzling out as platforms rolled out sharply higher payments. One of the companies was advertising roughly ₹2,175 for nineteen orders in a six-hour window. Some riders had not heard about the strike at all, others knew about it and chose the money. The algorithm was not merely the object of the protest but became the instrument that defeated it.
Can This Become a Social Movement?
There are good reasons for caution. As it is an invisible protest, there is no form of permanency or leadership. This makes it hard to measure and easier for companies to deny anything happened. It rarely produces any structural change and leaves the workers exposed to deactivation.
There is a harder question underneath. Is invisibility a source of power, or evidence of how weak these workers have become? Both, and for the same reason. These actions cannot be traced to anyone, they are hard to punish.A rider who declines an order cannot be sacked for striking. That protection is real. But action nobody sees cannot attract public sympathy, be cited in negotiation, or be turned into legal change. Companies can simply deny it occurred. The shield and the limitation are the same feature.
The fact that invisible and the visible forms of resistance are intertwined is what makes the situation more difficult. The same networks that organise a logout also maintain formal unions and litigation. International institutions have begun to respond. In June 2026 the International Labour Conference adopted a platform economy convention addressing algorithmic management and extending collective rights irrespective of employment classification.
Rethinking What Counts as Resistance
None of this is unprecedented. Labour history has always contained more than marches, go-slows, work-to-rule, sabotage, absenteeism, quiet non-cooperation. We remember the demonstrations because they left records, not because they were the whole story.
The gig economy makes that bias expensive. If resistance is only recognised when it assembles in public, then an enormous amount of contemporary labour conflict simply will not register, and the workforce most constrained from assembling will appear the most content. Visibility is a poor measure of political action, it mostly measures how safe it is to be seen.
Conclusion
The platform model was designed to individualise work, replacing the workplace with an app and the colleague with a competitor. Yet the same workers are rebuilding collective capacity through the very technology meant to fragment them.
I find the New Year’s Eve outcome particularly interesting, not because the strike failed, but because both sides used the same tool. Workers coordinated through their phones platforms answered through the algorithm and outbid them. On that night, the companies won. But the networks that organised the logout did not dissolve when it ended, and they are the same infrastructure that sustains unions, litigation and the next refusal. A lost strike is not the same as a lost capacity. The future of labour resistance may not involve workers standing together in a square. Sometimes it will look like nothing at all, thousands of people, at the same moment, simply not logging in.
About the Author
Prachi Agarwal is a fourth-year student at Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University, pursuing an integrated B.Com LL.B. (Hons.) degree. She is drawn towards research that deals with law, culture, religion and how they shape society and everyday life. Outside her studies, she is passionate about music.
Image source: https://pin.it/2vvbmAX4R