Agneeveer is the gigfication of the public sector, where labour pool is a plenty and opportunities are few. The phenomenon of temporary contract work is not new in the public sector as teachers are often contract based. The next step would be to hire tech firms to create a platform for matching agneeveers to security guard work.
The corporates are happy as they have another precarious pool to hire. I see the PMC recruitment booming as agneeveers head overseas to fight in conflict zones for a fee.
The #Agneeveer protests have shown an addiction to a job which gives social protection rather than delivering the goods, the performance, and the optics of working in the public sector. It is not a demographic dividend, a disaster in the making. #Jobs
Agneepath is a common metaphor for the BJP sarkar, it has taken many a baptism by fire by DeMo to Agneeveer. It cannot be blamed for lack of josh, including withdrawing farm laws indicating an ear to the electoral winds of the time.
Being small is not a disadvantage in the commercial realm as thinkers and doers can be catalysts and clients will only respect if actors are original, and clutter breaking.
The problem with reskilling is not the hesitation to learn but the safe space which a person needs to learn, even after making the error. The older one gets, the need for dignity increases.
Near Tanglin as i was on the bus to the city, i came across a name in the street called Taman Nakhoda, which is the captain or master mariner in an Arab Dhow and thought of Indian Ocean connections from the Hadramout to SE Asia. These physical inscriptions are a remainder.
Platform economy delivery riders offer themselves as the last mile infrastructure which is as physical as it can get get as their bodies are on the line. In the gig era, humans are a service too (Pressl 2018).
The characteristic of a gig economy is one of ‘sociospatial atomisation’ where each worker is a discrete dot on the app map as an independent contractor where they compete against each other for the next order (Wells et al, 2020). The paucity of common spaces to gather is a common issue as the workplace has been extended to the scale of the city. The geographically sticky work is however unearthing hidden spatial terrains of rest in the back alleys where the gig economy rider takes a smoke break before the next delivery. Jakarta gig riders have made the common Kopi shop to charge their phones as a base camp (MIT Technology Review, 2022).
There are widespread attempts to include gig workers within the social protection net in Singapore and India.
Holland Village Back Alley where a gig worker is catching a breath
Migration Infrastructure which is tucked into the mundane terrain of the long shadow of the global city, which is 4 MRT stops from Raffles Place. Migrants do not just land up here they pursue courses to align with skill requirements of the construction sector regulator in the home country. Returnee workers and former workers bring new waves of reinforcements as mediators in the process from the village to the global city in a transnational manner.
The politics of skill is vital as who gets to earn is dependent upon who is valuable in terms of skills. A migrant worker with a driving license of a truck makes more than a PhD scholar. Plenty of migrant workers learn in certificates and diploma programs spending substantial sums to upgrade their skills.
The sense of the mobile commons is rich as they are as global as the global parts of the city. There are graduate degree holders in engineering who work as migrant workers in Singapore making who is a migrant as a bachelor body a contested site (Ye 2014).
As mobility is normal now, migrant workers are coming in to build infrastructure here, let us remember that the migrant worker has differing gradations of precarity with many having solid middle-class backgrounds back home.
Change Thinker 