DOHA, Qatar — The digital economy promises convenience and flexibility, connecting customers to delivery riders, transport providers, and online freelancers through a few taps on a screen. But when roads flood, electricity fails or extreme heat makes working dangerous, who bears the cost of keeping these services running?
At the annual Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q) Lecture on the Global South, De La Salle University scholar Cheryll Soriano presented “Politics of Suturing: Infrastructural Labor and Survival in Platform Work,” exploring how Filipino platform workers navigate extreme weather, unreliable infrastructure, and financial insecurity through personal resources and community networks.
Organized by the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South (#IAS_NUQ), the annual lecture series brings scholars and experts together to examine issues shaping societies across the Global South. Each talk creates opportunities for the Northwestern Qatar community to engage with new ideas, perspectives, and debates on developments with local and global relevance.
The lecture reflects NU-Q’s broader commitment to examining how technology, media, and globalization shape lives and communities across the Global South, bringing research into conversation with the social and economic challenges facing the region. Soriano's research brings together two areas of inquiry: the material and social infrastructures underpinning platform economies in Southeast Asia, and the intersection of platform labor with climate vulnerability. Her findings highlight how digital work can create opportunities while shifting significant costs and risks onto the people who perform it.
“For marginalized segments of the workforce in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, platform work has enabled significant gains,” she said, “including greater visibility for their labor and opportunities to develop digital skills.” Yet these opportunities exist alongside precarious working conditions and limited social protection.
These vulnerabilities are particularly acute in the Philippines, where climate hazards threaten both outdoor and remote workers. Ranked first in the World Risk Index for several consecutive years, the country faces high exposure to extreme weather, deep social vulnerabilities, and limited capacity to cope with disasters. Yet its platform labor market continues to expand, even as climate change intensifies the risks workers face.
One worker's observation helped shape Soriano's inquiry: “You have a choice where and how you do the work, but we don't.” While customers may choose when and where to order a service, workers have less control over the conditions in which they must deliver it.
The hidden costs of convenience
Digital platforms can exercise considerable control over workers through performance ratings, access to jobs, and other algorithmic systems. Yet this control is not necessarily matched by responsibility for workers' welfare.
Many platform workers are classified as independent contractors, leaving them outside protections typically associated with formal employment. Vehicle maintenance, equipment, connectivity, and climate adaptation can become individual expenses rather than shared responsibilities.
Soriano's research documents how extreme weather magnifies these burdens. Riders risk illness or vehicle damage when navigating flooded roads. Care workers in beauty, cleaning, and repair face similar risks traveling to clients’ homes, often at irregular hours, with disrupted public transport making journeys more difficult.
Remote workers face similar dilemmas. Power outages can force some to purchase generators or additional internet connections, while others have had to relocate their families to places with more reliable infrastructure.
The ability to work online remains dependent on material resources and environmental circumstances that are often overlooked in discussions of technological progress. “Soriano’s research reminds us that behind every digital transaction are people navigating the very real uncertainties of everyday life,” said Marwan M. Kraidy, dean and CEO of NU-Q.
“Understanding the digital economy requires us to look beyond the technologies that connect us and examine the people and communities whose labor sustains them. Scholarship from and about the Global South is essential to these conversations to help us better understand the inequalities shaping our shared future.”
How workers bridge the gaps
To explain how workers sustain their livelihoods amid these pressures, Soriano introduced the concept of “suturing”: the practices through which people repair the gaps left by failing infrastructure and inadequate support systems.
Workers improvise gear, shield phones and parcels from rain, and trade information on flooded roads, traffic, and repair shops through messaging groups on Viber, Messenger, and WhatsApp, in a practice known as digital bayanihan, the Filipino spirit of communal mutual aid, adapted to digital tools.
Platforms and public institutions are able to shift the costs of maintaining these systems elsewhere because the work that keeps people and livelihoods going is often unpaid or underpaid.
One coping mechanism is “sachet capitalism,” an economy built around buying everyday necessities in small, affordable quantities as and when needed. This mirrors the small transactions of gig work in which workers sustain themselves through micro-purchases while remaining available around the clock to meet customers’ immediate needs.
A lesson from the Global South
As platform economies expand worldwide, governments, companies, and consumers must confront who bears the costs of climate adaptation and whether the convenience of digital services depends on transferring risk to workers least equipped to absorb it. The implications reach beyond Southeast Asia, reflecting conditions of postcolonial capitalism shared across many cities, such as Nairobi, Dhaka, and Mumbai.
Soriano's lecture called for a broader understanding of digital development, one that considers not only technological innovation and economic opportunity but also the human labor and material conditions that make them possible.
“Understanding the digital economy requires us to look beyond the technologies that connect us and examine the people and communities whose labor sustains them,” said Kraidy. “Scholarship from and about the Global South is essential to these conversations to help us better understand the inequalities shaping our shared future.”
