Ambivalent Activists: Indian Tech Workers Organizing as Citizens and Immigrants [9781503650343]

Overview

Tech workers, an elite group within a major global industry, face the precarity of layoffs, overwork, and a general loss of job security. But how do their privilege and precarity coexist? And how do the workers respond to this condition of precarious privilege? Ambivalent Activists answers these questions by focusing on Indian tech workers and their activism in two countries: India, where these workers are citizens, and the United States, where they are immigrants. India receives the largest share of outsourced tech work, while the United States is the largest global recruiter of tech labor, where Indian immigrants hold the highest number of temporary visas to work in tech companies. Through comparative analysis, Rianka Roy argues that Indian tech workers face what she terms "covert carcerality" or an insidious form of prison-like labor control that governments and tech corporations enforce on elite but racially marginalized workers—turning the workers into high-income cheap labor. Workers under covert carcerality organize for their rights in mostly ambivalent, non-disruptive ways, with no intention of bringing about systemic change, but rather aiming for short-term resolutions to labor disputes and passive power building. Using theories of carceral control, governmentality, and counter-conduct, Roy offers incisive observations about labor and migration in neoliberal times.