Dr. Nimmi Rangaswamy and her students Namit Sawhney Tejaswini Yeleswarupu and Ujjwal Sehrawat, exchange student, IIITD published a paper on The Everyday HCI of Uber Drivers in India: A Developing Country perspective at the 24th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing held virtually from 23 – 27 October. Research work as explained by Dr. Nimmi Rangaswamy and her students:
Uber drivers in India are witnessing an early emergence of everyday work formalization predominantly through their engagement with the Uber platform. If a vast segment of the informal employment sector in a country resembles gig work, can companies like Uber bring organisational ability and wage regularity to employment? Despite Uber’s economic model being challenged on several labour fronts under the critical scholarship of the global North, we argue everyday interactions with the Uber platform are ushering organised work practices, improved financial stability for drivers who formerly hailed from the informal employment sector in India. The everyday of driving for Uber is filtered through a conceptual and practical work model drivers gain with due experience of Uber’s platform features. Our ethnographic investigation uncovered the relationship between the controlling demands of the Uber platform and ensuing driver work adaptations. We present findings from a qualitative investigation of Uber ride hailing services impacting drivers to 1. optimize earnings, 2. Link work effort to wages 3. converge towards platform compliance. We highlight engaged and persistent interactions with the Uber platform promoting compliance and bringing structure to the profession of driving for Indian Uber drivers.
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Link to the conference website: https://cscw.acm.org/2021/
Link to full paper: https://programs.sigchi.org/cscw/2021/program/content/63998