the head of the National Domestic Workers Association in the U.S.

who said that, you know, the domestic workers are the original gig workers.

And I quite agree with that.

Hello. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Newport Raval.

Newport is a postdoctoral research fellow at the AI Now Institute at New York University,

who has done some great work looking at the gig economy in India, in particular around Bangaluru, and looks at parts of the gig economy that I think we don't talk about so much.

You know, in this conversation, Newport provides a really great outline of what the gig economy

in India actually looks like, and we talk about the experience of workers in the beauty and wellness space

of, you know, platform work that gets not nearly as much attention as, say, food delivery

workers or ride-hailing workers. I think Newport makes a really good point when she actually

talks about how, you know, there is an over emphasis on Uber, whether it's in the research

on the gig economy. but I would say just in

general about, you know, our perspective on the gig economy more broadly. It can be really easy

to reduce what is going on in the sector to, you know, what Uber is doing because it's one of the

most powerful and visible companies in the sector that helped to kind of set the model that many

companies later followed.

But certainly, there is a lot more that is going on there that, you know, we need to understand and

think about. And I would say that Newport also makes the point that it can be easy to, you know,

draw a simple distinction between global North and Global South when we're talking about the

gig economy and what happens in it. But she really emphasizes that,

you know, it's probably more important that we look at the local context and how they impact how

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