ILPC 2026

There have been numerous efforts by scholars working in the fields of economic geography, political economy, sociology, etc., to bring back the role of labour as an active agent of change in the world economy rather than a victim of capital’s restructuring. Andrew Herod’s appeal for a conceptualisation of labour as actors and not as reactors in the capitalist mode of production (Herod, 1997, 2001) served as an important call to think about labour agency from a variety of perspectives in the global economic system, whereby labour agency produces and reproduces labour, shapes the geography of capitalism and in turn fashions transformative outcomes for workers (Carswell and De Neve, 2013; Coe, 2013; Coe and Hess, 2013; Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2011; Cumbers et al., 2010; Featherstone and Griffin, 2016; Rogaly, 2009). Many scholars argue that labour agency enables workers to achieve positive outcomes such as improvement in the livelihoods (higher wages, flexibility, autonomy, moving up the job ladder, etc.), social reproduction and social relations (escaping the constraints of class, caste, gender, etc., and avoid discrimination and exploitation from historically entrenched rural relations) (Carswell and De Neve, 2013; Cumbers et al., 2010, 2008; Lund-Thomsen and Coe, 2015). However, much of this has been informed from the perspective of labour in classical firm/factory-based settings. With the emergence of digital platform-based work that is highly commoditised and geographically less sticky than old forms of economic activities (Graham and Anwar, 2018), there is a need to rethink labour agency and its impact on the well-being of workers in the contemporary information economy.

We conducted sixty-five interviews with platform workers in five different countries in Africa on one of the world’s biggest digital job platforms. We selected our participants to represent a diversity of experience. Our interviews were primarily geared to understand the nature and types of work done by workers on platforms, income, interaction with clients and platforms and strategies used to get more work, stay competitive and demand higher wages. The resultant discussion with participants also included the implications of digital work on workers’ lives and livelihoods, meanings and expectations they attach to digital work and challenges faced by workers.

In this paper, we provide a theoretically informed account of labour agency in platform-based work to document new sets of agency strategies/practices which could be understood as reworking, resilience, resistance (Katz, 2004) and ‘reverse engineering’ by platforms workers. We highlight how platform workers exert these agency practices both “on” and “off” the digital work platforms. Building upon Coe and Jordhus-Lier’s (2011) understanding of a ‘variegated landscape for agency potential’ across different sectors, we show different levels of agency among different platform workers, how agency is shaped by their positions in the economic networks/value chains of platform work and also by their social and cultural landscape in which they are embedded. Through insights gained from job quality literature, we develop a heuristic framework to show a variety of agency practices and how these practices impact on both the autonomy and bargaining power of workers on platforms. We argue that labour agency is key for greater autonomy at work and bargaining power and also demonstrate how the lack of collective bargaining on platforms is a major challenge that can further curtail the exercise and potential of agency by workers.