Platform Driver Resistance and Platform Company Strategies to Reduce Driver Militancy

This chapter examines the dynamics of platform driver resistance and the counter-strategies employed by platform companies to suppress labor militancy under platform capitalism. It situates drivers’ acts of defiance—ranging from everyday infra-political practices such as rejecting low-paying orders or voicing dissent online, to more organized collective mobilizations through associations and unions—within the structural context of super-exploitation in the Global South. While fragmented and individualized by design, platform work has nonetheless produced diverse forms of resistance that challenge algorithmic control and deteriorating working conditions. In response, platform companies deploy a sophisticated repertoire of control strategies that combine coercion, fragmentation, gamification, co-optation, and disinformation. These strategies not only weaken solidarity and class consciousness among drivers but also reframe systemic exploitation as individual failure, thereby sustaining the ideological myth of independence and entrepreneurship. Through divide-and-rule tactics, the selective recruitment of driver leaders, and the orchestration of counter movements, platforms effectively depoliticize resistance while reinforcing their labor regime. Yet, despite the tightening grip of platform control, resistance continues to re-emerge in multiple forms, demonstrating that workers do not passively accept conditions of super-exploitation. Instead, platform drivers persistently contest their subjugation, ensuring that the conflict between labor and capital within the platform economy remains an open and evolving struggle.