Introduction

Globalization is an ambivalent phenomenon. While creating a borderless world of boundless opportunities, it has expanded carceral control with an increasing number of prisons and reinforced borders (Davis 2003). Through growing ‘economic polarization’ in global cities, workers with ‘high’ (or highly valued) skills earn high wages, while workers with non-specialized skills earn paltry wages and lose labour rights (Sassen 2001). But how can this contradiction of abundant opportunities and growing precarity be reconciled? What happens when even privileged workers face the precarity of layoffs and overwork, or when legal immigrants face the risks of detention and deportation? I seek these answers in Indian tech workers’ experiences in India and the US. Drawing on urban ethnography, virtual ethnography, and interviews, I develop the framework of covert carcerality to explain how the seeming privileges of globalization disguise the actual conditions of precarity and carceral constraints—such as surveillance, loss of labour rights, forced mobility and immobility.

Covert Carcerality for Indian Tech Workers

Governmentality, or the dominant mode of governance in the neoliberal regime, marks a shift from overt (e.g., corporal punishment, prisons) to covert techniques of control (Foucault 1978). State and corporate entities deploy discourses of freedom, autonomy, and opportunity to normalize and disguise their restrictive hold over populations. Even surveillance, an essential element of governmentality, is rendered invisible, seamless, and unobtrusive. The overt mechanisms of power do not fully disappear; but welded with more hidden techniques, they masquerade as opportunities for freedom, security, and self-growth.

Recent studies on social inequalities point to this transition to covert techniques. For example, Bonilla-Silva (2014) discusses how post-Civil Rights racism in the US assumes a covert and ‘colour-blind’ form. Purcell and Brook (2022) note how coercive platform-based work creates an illusion of autonomy. Similarly, Banerjee (2022) documents how high-skilled and legally admitted Indian immigrants on ‘dependent’ visas in the US lose their economic potential within the ‘opportunity trap’ of migration.  

Similar discourses of neutrality, freedom, and opportunity operate in the global technology sector. For example, Indian call centre workers develop a ‘neutral accent’ to communicate with their offshore clients (Aneesh 2015). The seemingly ‘neutral’ accent requires Indian workers to suppress their cultural expressions and mimic the dominant cultures of the Global North. Such neutrality also assumes gendered forms. Indian women tech workers cultivate a discourse of ‘respectable femininity’ to reconcile with their experiences of marginality both in ‘neutral’ and ‘modern’ global jobs and ‘traditional’ families (Radhakrishnan 2011).

However, these studies do not explore whether and how these discourses of neutrality, freedom, and privilege relate to the ever-expanding carceral regimes. In other words, can we view high-skilled and high-wage tech workers—the privileged actors of globalization (Sassen 2001)—within carceral contexts? My answer is, yes. As I analyze Indian tech workers’ experiences in India and the US, I see strong evidence of the three following types of covert carcerality.

Carceral Enclosures

With support from the neoliberal state, global tech companies enforce carceral boundaries over workers. For example, in India (as elsewhere in the Global South), tech companies are in Special Economic Zones. Most labour laws remain suspended in these enclosed and monitored spaces. But their beautification as tech hubs or IT parks conceals their carcerality, with manicured lawns, well-paved roads, and glass-walled buildings (see Radhakrishnan 2011).

In the US, carceral enclosures for Indian tech workers are enforced through various immigration laws and policies. For example, temporary and indentured visas like H-1B and L1 subject Indian tech workers to surveillance and restrict their socioeconomic opportunities. Since Indians have the highest number of H-1B visa holders, their transition to permanent US residency takes decades. During this period, Indian workers remain stuck within what Purkayastha and Roy (2023) identify as ‘neutral enclosures’—invisible boundaries, which are disguised as equal opportunities.

Informalization

Global companies recruiting ‘cheap’ labour from the Global South are often allowed to bypass labour regulations. Tech companies which hire workers within Indian SEZs (Aneesh 2006), and local ‘body shops’ which send Indian workers to offshore companies (see Xiang 2007) create their arbitrary policies to maximize profit. As a result, despite their formal-sector affiliations, high-skilled and high-wage tech jobs in India get informalized. Companies break labor contracts with impunity, and subject workers to arbitrary layoffs and overwork (Roy 2022a). In the US, Indian tech workers are hired under clearly coded labour contracts. However the complicated mechanism of immigration, including the practices of surveillance and experience of racism, significantly limit these workers’ labour rights (Roy 2022b).

Family Separation

Carceral structures prevent family formation, as evident in the forced separation of the families of undocumented immigrants and refugees (see also Dill 1994; Pargas 2009). However, it seems unlikely that high-skilled tech workers’ families would face such separation. In India, they have the class privilege to acquire material comfort and settle with families in urban locations. In the US, under the family reunification policy since 1965, legal immigrants are allowed to bring their family members. Indian tech workers also have additional means to maintain transnational family ties, such as access to digital technologies and economic capacity to afford international travel. However, covert carcerality limits these workers’ family formations in both countries.

In India, tech workers’ just-in-time work requires 24/7 engagements, which leads to late hours and overwork for 12-14 hours a day (Aneesh 2006). This affects workers’ health and family relations. Especially for women, the dual burden of care work at home and overwork at the office strains family ties and hinders professional growth. In the US, the hidden clauses of family reunification cause family separation. The H-1B visa and its transition to permanent residency enforce years of immobility on Indian tech workers. Leaving the US even to visit aged parents in India may reset the application cycle for permanent residency. The risks of losing the right to reenter the US also remain high. Children who are born in India but grow up in the US, are required to self-deport to India when they lose the ‘dependent’ status as adults before their parents acquire permanent US residency. The ‘privilege’ of high skills and wages does not prevent these family separations.

Conclusion

Indian tech workers’ experiences of global work bear witness to covert carcerality, where the workers, despite their privileges, face carceral conditions. I do not understate the empirical differences between high-wage and low-wage workers, and the material hardships of the latter group. But as a generalizable framework, covert carcerality overturns the myth of opportunities and freedom in a seemingly borderless world and offers some nuanced implications of neoliberal globalization.

• The study of globalization needs to be centred around the prevalence of carceral regimes—that operate in both overt and covert ways. Similarly, privilege and precarity need to be studied relationally within carceral frames.
• While most tech workers face similar constraints, covert carcerality is more severe for ‘cheap labour’ from the Global South, as seen in Indian tech workers’ experiences of overwork and loss of labour rights in global workplaces. Its colonial undercurrents warrant further analysis.
• The blurred distinction of privilege and precarity makes class boundaries porous. Therefore, the goals and strategies of labour and social movements, including the possibilities of cross-sector solidarity, must be reviewed within these fluid and emergent contexts of carcerality.

References:

Aneesh, A. (2006). Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization. Duke University Press.

Aneesh, A. (2015). Neutral Accent: How Language, Labour, and Life Become Global. Duke University Press.

Banerjee, P. (2023). The Opportunity Trap: High-Skilled Workers, Indian Families, and the Failures of the Dependent Visa Program. New York University Press. 

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Davis, A. (2003). Are Prisons Obsolete? Seven Stories Press.  

Dill, B.T. (1994). Fictive Kin, Paper Sons and Compadrazgo: Women of Color and the Struggle for Family Survival. In M.B. Zinn, & B. Thornton Dill (Eds.), Women of Color in US Society (pp. 25–38). Temple University Press.

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Pargas, D.A. (2009). Disposing of Property: American Slave Families and Forced Separation in Comparative Perspective. Journal of Family History, 34(3): 251–274.

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Purkayastha, B., & Roy, R. (2023). Hidden in Plain Sight: ‘Neutral’ Enclosures for High-Skilled Immigrants During Covid-19. Sociological Forum. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/socf.12965

Radhakrishnan, S. (2011). Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational World. Duke University Press.

Roy, R. (2022a). Politics through Precarity: Tech Workers’ Unions in India during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Journal of Contemporary Asia.

Roy, R. (2022b). Immigrant Workers’ Movements in the US: Where are High-skilled ‘Nonimmigrants’? Sociology Compass, 16(6).

Sassen, S. (2001). The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton University Press.

Xiang, B. 2007. Global Body Shopping’: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry. Princeton University Press.

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Rianka Roy is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Connecticut. She studies how globalization creates new tools of power, new pathways of migration, and new forms of resistance. In her dissertation, she examines Indian tech workers’ collective action in India and the US, with a focus on its intersectional varieties.