Conclusion: Cheap Labour Regime in Platform Capitalism

This concluding chapter conceptualizes platform capitalism as part of a broader cheap labor regime that institutionalizes super-exploitation and deepens precarity in the Global South. Drawing on labor regime theory, it demonstrates how platform companies externalize production costs onto workers, suppress earnings, and employ algorithmic management to intensify and extend working hours. Workers shoulder both labor and reproduction costs, producing structural dependency under conditions of declining income. The chapter identifies five interlocking dimensions of this cheap labor regime: (1) workers’ dependency on precarious markets, (2) inter-capital competition that pressures wages downward, (3) algorithmic labor control, (4) state intervention privileging capital, and (5) fragmented and weak forms of worker resistance. These dynamics show that super-exploitation persists irrespective of employment classification, whether workers are framed as “partners” or employees. Platform capitalism thus represents a digital articulation of enduring cheap labor regimes long embedded in peripheral economies, from plantations to garment industries.