Accumulation Without Protection: Platform Capital, Precarious Labour, and the Crisis of Social Security Governance in India

Abstract

The rapid growth of platform-mediated labor in India reveals a contradiction within Indian capitalism: a rising workforce supporting platform companies’ valorization strategies while being systematically excluded from social security systems designed for organized labor. Using Marxist political economy, this article argues that recent initiatives—the Code on Social Security (2020), the e-Shram portal (2021), state-level welfare legislation, and the operationalization of four Labour Codes in November 2025—serve as managed accommodations. These measures make precarious labor nominally visible without challenging the underlying capital-labor relations that produce precarity. Drawing on various government reports, surveys, and scholarly studies on gig worker organizing, the analysis identifies five structural failures: rule-making deficits, jurisdictional fragmentation, digital exclusion, enforcement gaps, and suppression of collective voice. The December 2025 Year End Review confirms that these reforms have yet to establish effective welfare mechanisms for gig workers. A dedicated section examines independent gig worker unions through the ‘fourth-wave’ framework of labor legal empowerment, situating collective action within established typologies of labor unrest and informal workers’ movements. The article demonstrates that the issues of rule-making deficit, operational gaps, and suppression of collective voice are interconnected. It concludes that genuine protection for India’s projected 23.5 million gig workers by 2029-30 requires rethinking the state’s relationship with platform capital and ensuring institutionalized collective representation for workers.