Learning to Strike in the Gig Economy: Mobilization Efforts by Food Delivery Workers in Hyderabad, India

Following the declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), India enacted one of the strictest lockdowns in the world. During this period, only services categorized as essential by the state were allowed to operate. When Swiggy, a major food delivery platform, was not permitted to operate, its app informed customers: ‘As an essential service, we are working hard with local authorities to resume services’ (Ranipeta, 2020). Eventually, given the huge demand for home delivery, Swiggy managed to get itself declared an essential service. Prime Minister Narendra Modi praised ‘home delivery agents’ for ‘selflessly serving others, without caring about themselves’ (Press Information Bureau, 2020). Delivery platforms like Swiggy represented their workers as ‘delivery heroes’, ‘corona warriors’, ‘hunger saviours’ and the ‘backbone of our organization’. Though glorified as essential workers, ongoing reductions in earnings and incentives, accompanied by rising fuel and food prices, triggered a wave of strikes by delivery workers across cities in India and different parts of the world (Abilio et al., 2021; Elbert & Negri, 2021).

This article discusses the protest efforts undertaken by app-based food delivery workers during the first wave of the pandemic in India in 2020. It begins by exploring the factors that helped food delivery platforms enhance their position in the market during the pandemic. It then briefly looks at how labour is organized in the platform economy. A short note on methodology follows this. After briefly describing food delivery work in India, I provide an ethnographic account of two failed but differently organized strikes. The article then discusses the structural factors that weakened workers’ bargaining power during the pandemic, despite being providers of ‘essential services’. I conclude by showing how platforms capitalized on the pandemic to strengthen their power at the expense of vulnerable workers who relied on platforms for their livelihoods.

The novelty of digital labour platforms lies in how they have been able to restructure work by combining algorithmic management with labour precarity, the use of fictitious titles and flexibility. Algorithmic management entails the extraction of minute-level, real-time data (Chan & Kwok, 2022; Rosenblat & Stark, 2016). As owners of digital means of production, platforms enable new forms of accumulation without owning assets—in this case, delivery bikes and smartphones—and without formally employing workers (Burrell & Fourcade, 2021; Srnicek, 2017). Classifying workers as either partners or independent contractors reduces the need to adhere to government regulations and enables the platform to rise as a quasi-regulatory force (Christophers, 2020; Kenney et al., 2020). Platforms provide work on a piece-rate basis, with the time workers spend waiting for work being unpaid (Dubal, 2020). Platform businesses encourage a sense of entrepreneurial spirit amongst the workers, compensating for the lack of direct human supervision (Barratt et al., 2020; Purcell & Brook, 2022). Platform work is further characterized by a tension between worker’s autonomy and dependence on the platform (Hoose & Rosenbohm, 2022). The use of algorithmic management, legal misclassification of workers and the entrepreneurial culture promoted by platforms create new challenges to labour organizing. The way platform workers organize varies by sector because different sectors enable different kinds of mobilizing strategies. In the case of remote-work platforms like Upwork (Anwar & Graham, 2020) or AmazonTurk (Kassem, 2022), workers are much more alienated from one another because they are globally dispersed. While scholarship has shown how remote workers can share solidarity with one another (Malik et al., 2021), there seem to be fewer instances of collective mobilization amongst remote platform workers (Kassem, 2022).

Even within location-based platform work such as cab driving and food delivery, there are variations in organizing collective resistance across regional contexts. However, scholarship makes evident the growth and popularity of digital spaces such as Facebook and WhatsApp as critical for solidarity formation (Tassinari & Maccarrone, 2020, p. 46) across regions, such solidarity often spilling into physical spaces and evolving into collective forms of mobilization (Parth et al., 2021). In some contexts, platform workers engaged in legal battles, fighting for employee status or demanding legal benefits accruing to regular workers (Fredman & Toit, 2019).

Logging out, which resembles stopping machines in the twentieth century, emerged as a new repertoire of resistance in the platform work context (Iazzolino, 2021; Tilly, 1993; Vandaele, 2018). Organizing mass logging out from the app and making other workers do so is much more complicated than picketing at the factory gate. We will see through the ethnographic example discussed below how workers can hinder the functioning of the platform through a combination of online activity (logging out) and offline protest (picketing outside restaurants).

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad from November 2018 till the later part of 2020 as part of my doctoral research on food delivery platform workers. At the time of the strikes in mid-2020, I already had established a close rapport and built trust with several workers in the Mehdipatnam-Tolichowki zone.² I further shadowed a couple of workers as they went from restaurant to restaurant to monitor strike activities.

During the strike, I developed familiarity with another 15–20 workers, through my close respondents who were involved in organizing the strike from different zones of the city. I also developed a rapport with the Indian Federation of App-Based Transport Workers (IFAT), which played a limited but significant role in the strike. I had short informal interactions with some of their members during the strike. I sought regular updates through phone calls from some of the workers with whom I had already established rapport earlier. All the names of the delivery workers mentioned here have been changed to maintain anonymity.

I also made physical visits to different restaurants to observe the protests and interact with the protestors during the strike. Some of the WhatsApp groups I joined during the strike provided access to real-time discussions and updates about the strike. After the strike, I interviewed (15–90 minutes long) 10 key organizers and participants to seek their perspectives and obtain more details about the strike. IFAT facilitated a couple of those interviews. However, I could not get interviews with some of the striking workers who had left food delivery work after the strike. I triangulated my field visits with interviews and with observations on the ground, on Twitter and on WhatsApp groups.

There are about 500,000 delivery workers in the food delivery sector who are spread across 500 cities and towns in India, roughly divided between Swiggy and Zomato (Swiggy, 2023; Zomato, 2023). They are paid on a per-delivery basis, supplemented by a range of incentives. Delivery workers have multiple work timings and work in different zones. Different categories of workers consist of those who work full-time, as well as part-time employees, including college students who work on a part-time basis. The workforce is predominantly male and young, with varying educational levels, caste, religion and regional backgrounds. The workforce is characterized by high attrition rates. Amongst my participants, there was an acute sense of stigma related to being a food delivery worker. This was primarily because this work was manual, fluctuating and low-paying. Workers faced stigma as they experienced a loss of respectability amongst their family, neighbours, friends and village acquaintances, which they strongly feared would hamper their marriage prospects.

According to the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) job survey, just before the start of the pandemic, India’s unemployment rate was at its highest in the last 45 years, and this worsened further during the pandemic (PTI, 2019). Within platform work, food delivery was less affected than other labour platforms, such as ride-hailing (Grohmann & Qiu, 2020) or home beauty services, because it remained operational during the lockdown. Food and retail deliveries were amongst the few earning opportunities available for the new pool of unemployed workers. Having emerged from the lockdown restrictions, many jobless young men were willing to opt for any work available to meet their financial needs.

In the initial days of the lockdown, when there was no clarity about the permissibility of delivery service at the national, state and city level, delivery workers faced harassment by the police authorities and, at times, by the Resident Welfare Associations that manage gated communities. For instance, when they were fined or when the police seized their bikes for violating lockdown rules, workers had to ask local politicians to intervene to get the bikes released. With little or no on-the-ground support from the platform, delivery workers often had to resolve such issues by themselves. During this period, their incomes declined because of a reduction in orders as very few restaurants were operational. But even when the volume of orders gradually increased with the easing of the first lockdown in 2020, worker incomes continued to shrink because of cuts made by Swiggy to per-order rates and the ‘incentive’ component of pay. Consequently, workers experienced a 40% to 60% decline in monthly incomes after the easing of lockdowns in the latter half of 2020.

When asked about his experience of working during the pandemic, Imran, an MBA graduate who had been looking for a job even before the pandemic, said sarcastically, ‘We are like social workers who have volunteered with an NGO in our free time doing food deliveries to needy people in return for remuneration that compensates only for the fuel cost’. When the lockdown restrictions began to ease, I trailed another worker, Ghani, on his bike to understand delivery work during the pandemic. He found it easier to work during the lockdown as there was less traffic on the roads, and customers who usually expect delivery workers to come to their door would come down to the gate to collect their food.

Platform labour protests in developing countries such as South America, Africa and Asia increased sharply during the pandemic (Bessa et al., 2022). Between June 2020 and February 2021, strikes in 11 Indian cities were reported, and during this period, Hyderabad witnessed 2 strikes by Swiggy delivery workers (see Table 1). Other small strikes went unreported by the media. There had been protests by delivery workers before, but during COVID-19, the scale of protest in terms of the number of cities and duration of the strikes was more intense. This shows that the workers’ lived experience was different from their heroic portrayals in advertisements (Swiggy, 2020).

In Hyderabad, just as lockdown restrictions were being eased, two strikes took place: a ‘relatively spontaneous’ one in June 2020 and then a planned one in September 2020. In the following two sections, I present ethnographic accounts of these two strikes and discuss the protest strategies used by delivery workers and the obstacles they faced to organize collectively.

On the 20th of June 2020, around 11 a.m., Ghani—one of my close respondents who had worked with Swiggy for about two years—called to inform me about a strike being planned that day in the Mehdipatnam-Tolichowki Zone. Had he not told me about the strike, I would have had no clue about it. I soon reached Shah Ghouse restaurant, a ‘high-demand’ restaurant in the city, where Ghani had asked me to meet him. There were close to 50 delivery workers already gathered there. Ghani introduced me to his colleague Junaid, who added me to the protestors’ WhatsApp group. Within a few minutes, as workers continued arriving, the number increased to 100. ‘There is no need for 100 delivery workers here’, I could hear a voice from the large group of workers. He added, ‘We need to split and send teams of 10 to other restaurants that are in demand during lunchtime as lunch peak will start shortly’. Everyone agreed with this plan and the workers began to disperse to other popular restaurants nearby. I trailed Ghani on his motorbike for the next six hours.

Let us first turn to what triggered this sudden strike action. On the previous night, around 9 p.m., a screenshot of an order whose actual earning should be ₹11, but was shown as ₹1 was captured by an unidentified delivery worker (see Figure 1). According to the Fleet Manager, the miscalculation was due to a technical error. The screenshot went viral the next morning amongst the workers, shared over WhatsApp groups. A screenshot is an important way for workers to share their work experiences on WhatsApp groups. This viral screenshot became a talking point amongst workers, leading to collective anger.

A week earlier, on 13th June 2020, Swiggy had reduced the per-order rates and incentive structure for workers. The per kilometre charges based on incremental distance, which went up to ₹18 per kilometre were reduced to a uniform rate of ₹ 6 per kilometre. A new incentive structure was introduced with lower bonuses. Further, bonuses for late-night deliveries or deliveries during rain or peak bonuses would no longer be counted for incentive calculations. Such ‘changes are not negotiated with workers but rather notified through the app’ (Woodcock, 2021, p. 4). The negative impact of this fare revision became apparent to workers over the course of the week. Immense anger built up amongst the riders, especially given that fuel prices were rising. While previous changes were gradual and piecemeal, such as a reduction in the night-order incentive from ₹20 to ₹10, the reduction in fare and incentive structure post-lockdown impacted all the workers at once.

The main demand during the strike was to revert to the previous per km rates and incentive structure. There was no prior call for the strike by any formal union, nor was it pre-planned by the workers. It was a spontaneous reaction to pent-up frustrations triggered by the viral screenshot, which became a poster for the strike.

Food delivery workers met each other every day near restaurants, albeit for a limited time between orders. Sharing their work experiences during such interactions gradually resulted in the formation of informal WhatsApp groups with 10–25 members (see also Tassinari & Maccarrone, 2020). Fleet managers also encouraged workers to form such informal groups to sort out any issues that arise during work amongst themselves. Even though the strike was spontaneous, the presence of many such informal WhatsApp groups helped to quickly circulate information about the strike and keep workers informed about developments, such as moving from one restaurant to the other and so on.

Mobilization requests were accompanied by messages like ‘This is what will happen if we remain silent’. The absence of a formal union means a lack of leadership and proper mobilization. Due to the instant nature of the strike, some workers, especially part-timers, were left unaware of it until it was over.

A group of workers formed a WhatsApp group at around 11:30 a.m. and initially added 20–30 members they knew directly. These 20–30 members either forwarded the joining link of the group to their friends or received requests from existing group members to add them to the group. Within an hour, the group had 120 members and more members were being added throughout the day. Such WhatsApp groups enabled audio, video or textual communication amongst striking workers, which was necessary for the workers to be connected and coordinate the strike. Real-time updates about the strikes, news in the print, electronic, TV and YouTube media, memes and digital posters that delivery workers made were being circulated in the WhatsApp groups.

During the strike, the striking workers prevented other workers from picking up food and made them cancel the order. In the gathering of about 100 workers at Shah Ghouse, it was decided to form teams of 5–10 members and send them to different restaurants, usually the major ones such as food chains like Mcdonald’s, KFC and BurgerKing or locally popular restaurants like Shah Ghouse, Pista House and Prince Hotel. If a worker refused to take part in the strike and collected food from the restaurant, the striking workers—although they avoided snatching the food packet from their working colleague—nevertheless tried to prevent them from leaving the restaurant with the food and forced them to cancel the order. Striking workers convinced such workers to participate in the strike and the latter mostly cancelled the order and left the premises. Thus, striking workers made several restaurants ‘unserviceable’ on the app, hampering the smooth functioning of the delivery service (see Figure 2).

Though it is hard to know how many of the estimated 700–1,000 workers in the zone took part, many workers did not log in. Logging in and then rejecting orders would lead to workers being penalized. Moreover, the company would easily identify the participants because rejections are automatically recorded, resulting in access to the app being denied for the day.

In the retail sector, goods are circulated through global supply chains and pass through transportation nodes such as ports, airports and warehouses. Companies like Amazon and Flipkart work on the just-in-time model and have fulfilment centres where the goods are checked, packed and transported further. Such nodes are potential ‘chokepoints’ in the system to exercise collective worker resistance (Bonacich & Wilson, 2008; Moody, 2019). However, in the case of hyper-local food delivery, there is no single pickup point or node because the food is picked up from multiple restaurants spread all over the city. Nor do workers have a single fixed workspace that they could picket. Swiggy’s city office was closed during this strike due to the lockdown, with the staff working from home. Any issues had to be resolved through Google forms or by calling Swiggy’s call centre. Despite the lack of a single space to protest at, the many popular restaurants spread across the city became crucial sites of the strike.

Although preventing food pickups was a crucial part of the strike strategy, it came with its own challenges. The restaurants are not only spread across the city, but several popular restaurants are often within a single zone. Workers are allocated a particular zone in the city based on their preferences or the platform’s requirement. A delivery worker is confined within one or two zones, unlike taxis that ply across the city. The spatial spread of restaurants makes it challenging to picket every restaurant in the zone unless planned very well. Besides the few high-volume restaurants, there were many other pickup points where striking workers could not prevent order pickups, or if prevented, could not be sustained for more than a couple of hours. Some pickup points included apartments in residential zones, juice centres, chat centres and food vans. As Swiggy had diversified into delivering groceries, supermarkets, chicken shops and similar stores were added to the already long list of places that needed striking workers. Moreover, a strike in this work setting has to be sustained almost 24/7, unlike in other work settings with a clear start and end time for work.

Being present striking outside a restaurant brought about unwanted visibility for workers. Workers were relieved that the mandatory wearing of face masks helped keep their identities anonymous on CCTV cameras at restaurants. They were also cautious in choosing pictures to upload on WhatsApp groups or social media platforms, picking only those photos in which masks covered the faces of the striking workers. This is because platform companies such as Swiggy ‘are unsurprisingly hostile’ (Prassl, 2018, p. 65) to any efforts by their ‘partners’ to collectively organize and, as a reprisal, can suspend their IDs. Blocking an ID means that access to work is denied, which could be permanent or temporary at the discretion of the platform management. Because of this fear, those who were striking alerted one another to logout from the app and turn off the GPS location on their mobile phones. Several workers recalled having their IDs suspended during a strike in 2019 for being physically located near a picketed restaurant. Thus, while the spatial spread of the points of protest made it a challenge to render most restaurants ‘unserviceable’, the fear of being ‘seen’ by digital technologies also deterred workers from striking or being physically present at protest sites, thus adversely affecting a strong show of united strength to Swiggy.

At the restaurants, the picketing workers had to encounter the restaurant management, who prevented workers from picketing by either using their security guards or by calling the police. At Shah Ghouse restaurant, the restaurant manager summoned a few delivery workers and asked them why they were picketing. Unconcerned with their issues, the striking workers were instructed not to gather in front of the restaurant. When the delivery workers refused to move, the restaurant management resorted to verbally abusing them to make them move away from the restaurant. The workers dispersed to the parking space beside the restaurant and continued preventing pickups.

The workers used their networks to invite local media channels that post content on social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook. Two YouTube channels covered the strike. At 1 p.m., a news reporter came to Shah Ghouse. A voice message was soon posted on the WhatsApp group asking workers to assemble at Shah Ghouse. The protesting workers shared their grievances with the reporter and chanted slogans against the company. Workers shared the video clip on their WhatsApp group, requesting members to share it widely and post it across social media platforms.

At 2:49 p.m., a screenshot of a blocked ID was shared on the strike WhatsApp group. After some investigation by workers, it turned out that it was an old screenshot of a rider that someone had shared to dissuade workers from striking. Giri, Vijay, Sajid and others were furious and upset with this incident because it gave the impression that the management had started to suspend workers. Striking workers could not verify the authenticity of the person who had posted that message or of the worker whose ID had been blocked. The screenshot nonetheless created fear amongst the group members that the management had started blocking IDs. Vijay began getting calls from workers enquiring whose ID had been blocked. He had to convince multiple callers that the screenshot was not genuine.

At Creamstone, a popular ice cream parlour, when around 3:30 p.m. one rider came to pick up an order, the striking workers gheraoed him and told him not to pick it up. He refused to oblige and went into the restaurant and collected the food. They encircled him again when he returned to his bike and forced him to cancel the order. ‘It is my wish that I will not participate in the strike, I want to work. Let me work. If you guys want to strike, go ahead. I am not stopping you guys’, he said. Eventually, however, he had to get his order cancelled after increased persistence by the striking worker.

By the evening, the striking workers were experiencing difficulty in stopping food pickups from restaurants. Workers began posting messages on the WhatsApp group about orders being picked up from restaurants like Creamstone and Burger King. Due to the lack of clear leadership, many workers informally led the strike resulting in multiple people giving directions. There were insufficient striking workers who could prevent pickups at all the major restaurants within a zone, and motivate workers sitting on the fence to protest. Some delivery workers chose not to turn up to work that day and some others feared the consequences of participating in the strike.

As the day went on, I witnessed striking workers getting into heated arguments with non-striking workers in some restaurants, sometimes even resulting in physical fights between these two groups. Unaware of the strike, a part-time worker picked up his order from Burger King around 4 p.m. and was about to start the bike to proceed for delivery. Giri, who is a middle-aged, full-time worker, along with other workers involved in the strike, spotted that worker and was furious with him. When they found out that the worker was working for Swiggy and not Zomato (the worker was not wearing a uniform), Giri’s polite and soft tone suddenly changed to one that became loud and angry. He shouted at the worker, ‘Are we mad here trying to strike since morning and you come and pickup the order!?’ He snatched the food from him and waited for the worker to get his order cancelled even as he continued yelling at him. Meanwhile, about 10–15 passersby surrounded the two of them. After the order got cancelled, Giri took the food as spoils of the strike. Another striking worker called Vijay told Giri to hand back the food. Giri refused and left taking the food along with him. Witnessing all this, Ghani angrily said, ‘Our own people are cheating us by working behind our back even while we were on strike. Some workers turn up at the restaurant as if they are here for the strike, but they want to see if they can work’. I met some workers who were undecided about striking but who had logged off work and were simply waiting for the opportunity to resume work.

However, Vijay, Sai and a couple of other workers who were all friends were upset with Giri’s behaviour. ‘This is not how we should be going on strike’, Vijay told me later when we discussed the incident. ‘Either we stop the worker before he goes to collect the order or we get the order cancelled and give him the food. We should not take the food. It would give the wrong impression’. There were a couple of other instances where angry, protesting workers snatched collected food packets and Swiggy used this to file police complaints on striking workers who had snatched food in a fit of emotion (Staff Reporter, 2020).

From this, we can see that striking workers face multiple difficulties in their strategy to strike by preventing food pickups. On one hand, they had to deal with the spatial dispersion of work, ensure sufficient presence of striking workers all over the city, and confront co-workers who continued to work. Such confrontations sometimes ended up in nasty fights resulting in strained relations with workers. On the other hand, they had to encounter and work around the surveillance measures used by platforms and deal with hostile restaurant management and the police, who all sought to break their protests. Amongst the striking workers, there were varying levels of involvement, like picketing at the restaurant, taking on a leadership role and taking on coordination responsibilities to ensure the presence of striking workers at all major restaurants.

Around 7 p.m., one of the organizers of the strike reached out to the Fleet Manager on the phone. The worker subsequently shared that senior managers firmly stated that there would be no restoration of the previous earning and incentive structure. By dinnertime, the number of restaurants accepting orders increased. On the same day, a few more zones in the city went on strike. However, they were not coordinated or pre-planned. There were also zones where no strikes took place, but the zones in which the strike did happen were ones that had a high volume of orders. By night the strike had cooled down.

Workers were upset that their demand was not met. Meanwhile, in the WhatsApp group, some workers shared messages about the futility of resorting to strikes. The creator of the group (Naresh) was also angry about the fact that rather than using the group to mobilize, a few people were constantly discouraging the strike organizers, thus lowering the morale of all the members. ‘If you cannot support then don’t support. But at least don’t put discouraging messages’, he wrote. Someone texted in the group that if people were not interested in the strike, they could leave the group. Afraid of being blocked, on the 21st of June Naresh removed me and other members to close one of the WhatsApp groups.

Although some workers wanted to continue striking the next day, a Sunday, thinking that their strike would have more impact on a day which usually saw more orders, there was barely any response to the idea on the WhatsApp group. The workers resumed work with the reduced fare. In the interim period between this strike and the next (discussed below), the price of petrol increased from ₹73 in June 2020 to ₹85 in September 2020. With no restoration of the previous earning and incentive structure, the anger amongst workers continued to accumulate. With limited employment opportunities, the workers had no option but to continue working with a lower earning structure.

Though the short and spontaneous protest action did not succeed in securing its demands, it served as a primer for future collective action (Snow & Moss, 2014) and gave workers the hope that a better-organized strike might yield results. Communication with other zones was established, which paved the way for the next strike.

This article contributes to the globally emerging literature on food delivery workers by providing an ethnographic account from India of the challenges delivery workers face in fostering collective action. Although global just-in-time logistics are vulnerable to disruption at various nodes or choke points (Bonacich & Wilson, 2008; Moody, 2019), in the case of hyper-local logistics, such as food delivery, workers have little power to disrupt operations. Mobilizing a diverse and spatially dispersed workforce to prevent food pickups at several high-order volume restaurants in different localities proved challenging (Vallas & Schor, 2020).

This article demonstrates that the attempts at collective action amongst Hyderabad’s delivery workers were hindered by a combination of factors. One factor was the heterogeneity of the workforce, shaped by the diverse aspirations, commitments and interests in platform work, which made concerted action very difficult to organize. A second factor was the specific context of the pandemic, during which the need to hang on to any available job became more pressing than ever before. This made workers who might otherwise have been willing participants, like Ghani, more hesitant to participate in an action that could jeopardize their sole source of income. A third factor regards the nature of platform work itself—the spatially dispersed features of which make it particularly challenging for workers to halt work across the sector. The absence of a single site, office or factory makes it near impossible to down the tools all at once. Finally, there is the very nature of the platform model itself, which allows platforms to reject any responsibility for their ‘executives’, while using a string of tactics to break all forms of resistance, ranging from blocking IDs to offering incentives or using threats and app-based surveillance tools to onboarding new recruits. Even a homogenous labour force would struggle to organize under such conditions. Platform workers are therefore left with a weak bargaining position and poor work conditions. Workers face a dilemma between work and strike. Their attempts at collective mobilization did not bring about any lasting changes. The pandemic and the strikes that followed revealed the paradoxical reality of food delivery workers being ‘essential’ and yet unable to use their position to improve their work conditions. The support of the people was more visible during the August 2020 strike in Chennai, when a video of a delivery worker went viral on Twitter, following which the company released a statement that the workers are fairly paid and that fare reduction is misunderstood.

In the absence of a strong union, workers nonetheless seek to organize into loosely structured formations that articulate their struggle (Iazzolino, 2021). WhatsApp groups help in ‘developing shared consciousness’ (Tassinari & Maccarrone, 2020, p. 45) and ‘strengthening a sense of collective identity among dispersed’ (Pasquier & Wood, 2018, p. 1) delivery workers, but such groups are easily infiltrated by management-friendly workers who identify the main striking worker and pass on information to management. The management uses such information to threaten the striking worker with a police case.

Providing the ‘essential services’ tag to food delivery reveals the important role Swiggy played during the pandemic. This tag further enhanced the platform’s role of serving the public while obscuring its commercial interests (Dijck et al., 2018). The pandemic has further strengthened Swiggy’s market position and made visible how dependency on the platform has increased for customers and restaurants to access each other and for workers to access a basic livelihood. But the essential tag, which gave legitimacy to the companies to operate while symbolically praising workers as heroes, did not translate into better work conditions; instead, it allowed things to get worse. Swiggy successfully reduced the earning and incentive structures during the pandemic, even when fuel prices and the cost of essential commodities were increasing. Food delivery platforms engaged in exploitative work practices while charging restaurants high commissions, promoting anti-competitive practices and forcing discounts. While workers’ collective efforts to resist these changes were largely in vain in Hyderabad and other parts of India, this article has drawn on their experiences to highlight some key factors that continue to thwart collective action in the platform economy.

I am thankful to the anonymous reviewers and Carol Upadhya, Geert De Neve, Nandini Sundar, Kaveri Medappa and Rebecca Prentice for their feedback.