Critical Examination of Legal Mobilisations by Platform Workers’ Unions in India: A Case Study of the IFAT

Abstract This article examines the legal mobilisations employed by Indian trade unions and labour lawyers when addressing issues in platform-based work. It closely follows legal interventions made by a new-style trade union representing platform workers in India, namely, the Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (‘IFAT’). It shows that despite IFAT’s understanding of the core ambiguity in labour law that platforms exploit, which is the lack of employment status for platform workers, IFAT’s articulation of this issue in its demands from the government, parliament, or courts reflects a misguided approach from a strategic perspective to legal mobilisation. This article argues that trade unions like IFAT must engage in legal mobilisations only upon a consideration of law’s political limitations. Merely seeking gradual changes and deferring radical reforms for later underestimates the intensification and stabilisation that legal forms acquire in supposedly tentative bargains, and the difficulty of renegotiating such bargains through the legal system. The article will conclude with some practical suggestions on how trade unions and labour lawyers can engage in legal mobilisations by mitigating the political limitations of the legal form that stall radical social change achievable through law.