THE DISCURSIVE POLITICS OF LABOUR REGIMES: THE CONTESTED EMERGENCE OF ON-DEMAND DIGITAL PLATFORM LABOUR IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

The recent proliferation of on-demand digital labour platforms has witnessed the undoing of conventional ideas of ‘work’ as labour is refashioned using new rhetoric and narratives of entrepreneurship, sharing and technological disruption. Thus far geographical studies examining the regulation of labour through local labour regimes have paid less attention to how such discursive constructions of work are also complicit in governing labour and ensuring the labour regime functions and reproduces itself. Drawing upon poststructural or cultural approaches to the economy which are attentive to the politics of language, meaning-making and knowledge production, I explore the labour market discourses at work in Singapore’s on-demand digital platform labour market. Using semi-structured interviews with on-demand transport workers and discourse analysis of key material on on-demand work produced by institutional actors, media commentators and industry analysts, as well as digital platforms I (i) map out the labour market discourses operating in Singapore and (ii) outline the implications of these discourses on workers’ everyday working realities. In doing so, I bring attention to discursive-material politics that constitute Singapore’s on-demand digital platform labour market and, more generally, the significance of discursive dynamics as key regulatory mechanisms of local labour regimes.