From Workers to Elite Citizens: Indian Tech Workers’ Identity Spectrum in Activism

• In Event: 20402 - Worker Resistance in New Fields of Activism

Abstract

In labor movements, workers typically mobilize around their class identities, but these identities also intersect with citizenship and migration status, and other social affiliations of race, caste, religion, and gender. But what happens when workers experience class privilege along with social precarity? What identity discourses do labor organizers develop then? These inquiries drive my research on Indian tech workers in India and the United States. I draw on 68 interviews, data from participant observation of two unions in India and three immigrant organizations in the US, ethnography and virtual ethnography. As the largest group of outsourced and migrant labor in the global technology industry, Indian tech workers represent a high-income group. Ironically, global technology companies hire Indian tech workers for their “cheap labor” by racializing them as non-white workers from the Global South. Apart from systemic wage devaluation, various constraints imposed on their labor and citizenship rights turn Indian tech workers into what I call “high-income cheap labor.” In response to this seemingly paradoxical status, Indian tech labor organizers in India and the US develop a “worker-to-elite citizen” identity spectrum. In their activism, when Indian tech workers highlight their precarious experiences as cheap labor, they identify themselves as “workers.” But often they spotlight their privileged status as high-income and skilled workers to gain political leverage. On such occasions, these workers distance themselves from their labor identity, and identify as “elite citizens” who are capable of contributing to the state and the economy. In this paper, I will discuss three dominant discourses of identities that Indian tech labor organizers develop in the “worker-to-elite citizen” spectrum—(1) precarious workers; (2) privileged elite citizens and (3) ambivalent allies.

Author

• Rianka Roy, Wake Forest University