‘Affording’ racialised labour subjectivity

Asia’s troubled colonial history provides a historical, political, and racial setting to the hegemony and injustices against migrant labour in modern-day labour governance. Rather than alleviating it, the burgeoning platform economy has complicated the racialisation of labour, as it blurs the spatial boundaries of (physical and online) processes of employment and labour, thereby collapsing the roles and politics between ‘employer’ and ‘worker’. This chapter seeks to unpack the deeply entangled interplay between migration, race, labour, and platformised capitalism by situating it in a former colony - Hong Kong. I wish to argue how workplace-related (racial) aggression stems from a near-colonialist mindset that is rooted in colonial rule but passed on through Chinese subalterns. This ‘subaltern colonialist ideology’ manifests through labour and everyday practices and is contemporised in the algorithmically managed gig economy. As importantly, through selected cases, I wish to outline how minority workers exercise their creative resilience through the tactical use of social media platforms, amidst increasingly neoliberalised labour conditions and authoritarian governance.