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a journal for labour movements across Asia

By Just Economy and Labor Institute

This article draws on a Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) project, “Women’s Labour Rights in the Context of Digitalisation” (2023–2025), organised by the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD). In this initiative, the Just Economy and Labor Institute (JELI) collaborated with Thai women rider researchers.

Rather than treating workers as passive subjects of exploitation, FPAR positions platform workers—specifically women riders—as co-researchers and primary political actors. The central finding of our collaborative research is that FPAR strengthens the creation of a feminist ecosystem for platform activism by treating the woman worker as a “whole person,” refusing the artificial separation of production and social reproduction. By drawing on workers’ networks of solidarity and their collective emotional intelligence, women riders shift the terrain of struggle from the narrow point of production to a holistic ecology of resistance.

Desire for Freedom and the Cruel Optimism of Gig Work

Empirical data from field research in Thailand (2023–2025) demonstrate the severity of the social reproductive crisis. Riders who earned an average of 700 to 1,000 Baht per day during the pandemic saw their daily earnings slashed by over 50 percent, dropping to a precarious 300 to 400 Baht despite working longer hours. In Southern provinces like Krabi, Trang, and Phang Nga, a survey of 700 women riders revealed that 98% reported their earnings were insufficient to cover basic daily living expenses.

When a worker is classified as an “independent partner,” they lose access to state-mandated social safety nets—such as accident insurance, healthcare, and pension schemes under Thailand’s Labour Protection Act. Algorithmic management systems—including dynamic pricing models, rating penalties, and deactivation triggers—are explicitly engineered to compel riders to work at breakneck paces, routinely ignoring safety protocols and bodily needs. Crucially, the conditions that push workers to self-organise stem from the platforms’ own operational requisites, which demand labour far beyond the limits of physical and social survival.

To understand how workers survive this extraction, we can look through the lens of cruel optimism1 (Berlant 2011)—a condition that occurs when something we desire actually becomes an obstacle to our own flourishing. As riders from a Southern Province recall, the initial days felt like freedom: earning 700–1,000 Baht a day while driving leisurely and taking in the roadside views. However, as platforms systematically adjusted their parameters, this optimism turned cruel.

The platform economy hooks workers using the fantasy of entrepreneurial autonomy, flexibility, and “independent partnership.” In reality, it forces a “slow death”—the physical and psychological wear and tear of a population under late capitalism. The algorithm also functions as an anti-organising architecture, using gamified incentive structures, competitive mechanics, and surge pricing tied to personal acceptance rates to weaponize individual survival against collective solidarity.

Emotions as a Form of Collective Intelligence

Under traditional models, emotions are dismissed as interior, irrational, or counter-productive to hard-nosed labour organising. FPAR, however, approaches emotion as a form of collective intelligence. When women riders gather, their shared anxieties, frustrations, and grief are treated not as private liabilities, but as structural data.

As one single mother balancing a two-year-old child with fluctuating orders noted:

“Exchanging life problems with fellow riders was like releasing the suffering in my heart… it made me feel warm and no longer lonely.”

This affective alignment is the prerequisite for structural resistance; it turns atomized despair into shared analytical power. In a sense, FPAR transforms what Berlant calls an “intimate public sphere”—a space where a collective of strangers share common feelings toward specific issues—into an explicitly political sphere. Research becomes a venue where women workers realize that their personal structural distress is actually a widely shared, systemic condition. By organizing monthly focus groups across provinces, FPAR created an intimate sphere for over 230 female and 50 LGBTQ+ riders in Thailand.

A critical …