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Criminality, Risk, and Labor: Altruistic Surrogacy in Contemporary India

Surrogacy is a form of assisted reproduction in which the gestational labor of birthing a child is carried out by someone other than the intending parent/s. Surrogacy in India has gained a great deal of popularity over the last three decades, emerging as a major transnational commercial hub. Generating close to $2.3 billion in annual revenue (Rudrappa 2015), the industry was largely unregulated, until recently. In December 2021, the Indian state passed the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, criminalizing commercial surrogacy and permitting only altruistic surrogacy for select clients. The Act bans the “commercialization of surrogacy services,” outlawing any possible compensation for surrogate workers, whether it is “payment, reward, benefit, fees, remuneration, or monetary incentive in cash or kind” (Government of India 2021, 2). In effect, surrogacy is legally permitted only if it is “altruistic,” with heavy punitive measures in place for commercial surrogacy. By “altruistic” surrogacy, the state means an unpaid surrogacy (read more...)

Data Borders: Three Years Later

What should we do today? How would you write Data Borders differently today? But what can I do? People often ask me these questions when I present my research on my book, Data Borders: How Silicon Valley is Building an Industry Around Immigrants (Villa-Nicholas 2023), which examines the growing industry of data collection for the surveillance and control of immigrants in the United States. These questions arise in undergraduate and graduate classrooms, at academic conferences, and among public workers in the United States. I respond by advocating for policy protections for immigrant information rights, providing examples of data rights activism, and demonstrating how we are applying techno-imagined futures within my Southern California community to advocate for humane shifts in technological design and data collection. (more…) (read more...)

Gender Dimensions of Platform Work: How Do They Shape Unionizing?

This article is the fourth article in a series about gig and platform worker unions in India written by members of the Labor Tech Research Network. Read the introduction to the series here, the second post in the series here, and the third post here. In January 2024, hundreds of women workers associated with the on-demand home services app Urban Company (henceforth UC) gathered in protest outside the platform’s regional office in Hyderabad, India. The workers, many of whom were working as beauticians on the app, were protesting a slew of platform policies that had steadily eroded their working conditions over time (Figure 1). Most notable of these was the introduction of a new feature called ‘auto-assign’, which requires workers to mark the time slots that they are available to work on the app, following which they are assigned gigs automatically by the platform. The new ‘auto-assign’ policy marked a (read more...)