What Thai riders are building is more than just a model of resistance—it is a living blueprint for a new kind of labour politics rooted in collective care and everyday solidarity. Unlike traditional forms of labour power that centre on mass mobilisation or institutional recognition, Thai riders cultivate power through informal infrastructures, including roadside conversations, mutual aid schemes, and networked solidarity.

These are both solidaristic and tactical actions—sharing stories during breaks, pooling money into accident funds, and organising sticker campaigns. In doing so, they are expanding the geography of labour struggle, transforming spaces designed for isolation into sites of political connection. At the heart of this shift, women riders are leading the way—redefining organising not as a matter of law or recognition but as an infrastructure of solidarity built through trust, care, and proximity.

Divergent Politics, Emerging Feminist Infrastructures

Rider organisations in Thailand differ widely in structure and political orientation. These divergences—shaped by funding conditions, legal frameworks, and shifting political climates—produce distinct organising models, each with its own strengths and limitations in building power.

One dominant model, often backed by conservative or apolitical funders, adopts a health and wellness framework. These groups partner with hospitals to offer services such as basic medical checkups or fitness programs. While these initiatives provide tangible benefits, they often sidestep core labour issues, such as wage deductions, accident compensation, and employer accountability. By framing rider needs as public health concerns rather than labour rights, they offer short-term relief but ultimately depoliticise organising efforts and divert attention from structural injustice.

A second approach pursues legal formalisation, echoing traditional, male-dominated union strategies. These organisations encourage riders to register as associations under Thai civil law. While legal status brings recognition, it offers little in terms of enforceable rights—such as collective bargaining or employer obligations. Many riders view these associations as symbolic rather than transformative, lacking the leverage to negotiate meaningful change.

A third orientation follows a union-education model, drawing from existing labour laws and institutional partnerships. These groups offer workshops on legal literacy, social protections, and rights at work—sometimes in collaboration with unions or leftist groups. Yet, these initiatives often assume a world of fixed workplaces and stable employment, making them ill-suited to the flexible, app-governed realities of platform work. For gig workers whose labour is fragmented and opaque, this model often falls short.

The coexistence of these often competing approaches can create confusion, dilute collective momentum, and make it more difficult for riders to find unity or a shared political understanding across networks.

The Feminist Politics of Proximity and Collective Care

Amid these divergent strategies, a fourth and emerging approach—led and shaped by women riders—has begun to redefine what organising can look like in platform economies. This proximity-based model is not built on legal frameworks but rather on building the infrastructure of trust and accompaniment. It cuts across political lines and grows out of the rhythms of riders’ lives: waiting together at rest areas, checking in via group chats, or rallying around crises such as pay cuts, unfair deactivation, or road accidents.

These practices—mutual aid funds, collective monitoring of dangerous delivery zones, and informal education circles—are not just survival tactics. They represent an alternative political strategy: one that builds power not only through collective action but also through collective care. In doing so, women riders are pioneering an organising form that is infrastructural rather than institutional, rooted in daily solidarity rather than formal rights, and oriented toward long-term collective resilience.

This feminist and infrastructural turn does not negate the other approaches—but it offers a grounded, flexible, and deeply political alternative. One that may hold the key to sustaining rider movements beyond temporary mobilisation or symbolic recognition.

This model does not begin with legal codes but with lived experience and everyday social infrastructure: roadside conversations, shared meals, traffic lights, and underpass hangouts. “Don’t start by talking about labour rights,” one organiser explained. “Start by asking how the day’s been.” This ethics of attention and collective care anchors a politics of proximity—not built on formal unions or legal status but on embodied connection, peer trust, and consistent interaction.

Informal rest stops and LINE chat groups become more than just places to vent—they become spaces of trust-building and co-organisation. Rider groups, such as the Southern Riders Association and the Rider Center in Bangkok, operate through semi-formal, decentralised structures. Face-to-face meetings and small group interactions remain core to their functioning, while digital tools like LINE OpenChat serve to coordinate day-to-day updates. But crucially, digital infrastructure supplements—not substitutes—the real work of organising. In this model, trust becomes infrastructure.

It is precisely this flexibility and embeddedness in everyday life that enable the proximity-based model to adapt to shifting conditions—such as platform policy changes, gas price hikes, or accidents—more fluidly than top-down models that rely on external validation or institutional affiliation.

From Infrastructure of Control to Infrastructure of Solidarity

The organising strategies of Thai women-led riders must also be understood in relation to the broader transformation in how labour is governed. Increasingly, labour is no longer controlled primarily through human supervision or hierarchical structure but through logistical systems, digital platforms, and algorithmic management. Workers are scattered across cities and neighbourhoods, their employment relations obscured by technical classifications and subcontracting chains. The infrastructure of platform capitalism—dashboards, ranking systems, incentive schemes—is designed to fragment tasks, disorient movement, and individualise responsibility.

In this context, platform work appears intentionally structured to resist organising. Yet a group of women-led rider groups are subverting this infrastructure of control and turning it into an infrastructure of solidarity.

From mutual aid funds and provincial alliances to cross-border collaborations with Indonesian and Malaysian riders, organisers have created what we call infrastructure-oriented networks. These are not just reactive protest blocs but flexible systems embedded in the logistics of daily gig work. In one central province, for instance, the riders’ fund expanded to over 120 members and became a vital tool for both outreach and retention. Similarly, in Bangkok, riders contribute 100 THB (or USD 3) per month to cover hospitalisation and lost income.

These funds aren’t just mutual aid—they’re political infrastructure. They respond to the common question, “What has organising actually achieved?” with direct, visible benefits. When a platform imposed wage cuts in early 2024, riders mobilised through LINE groups and street chokepoints: log-offs were coordinated digitally, while riders gathered at rest stops to share updates and express solidarity. These tactics halted wage reductions and enhanced the legitimacy of organising networks.

This ability to link digital coordination with spatial organisation of labour is a key strategic asset. Riders have leveraged their position at the last mile of logistics and service delivery to build campaigns that are both highly localised and broadly connected. Unlike traditional unions, which rely on formal membership and contracts, these networks grow through shared struggle, repeated interaction, and communicative labour. They are held together not by legal force but by trust, mutual obligation and solidarity.

Over the past half-decade, Thailand’s rider groups have evolved from informal groups into semi-structured, politically engaged networks. Many have shifted from ad-hoc gatherings to more organised formations with internal decision-making processes. These groups have strengthened their internal infrastructure and cultivated leadership—particularly among women—who often shoulder both organisational duties and emotional care work. This evolution traces a clear trajectory: from survival to solidarity and from solidarity to strategic power.

As their organisational capacity grows, so does their strategic acumen and ambition—shifting from everyday peer support toward coordinated actions and public campaigns. Notably, it was a woman leader from a grassroots rider group who played a pivotal role in engaging dialogue with a national politician—an effort that ultimately contributed to the Human Rights Commission’s ruling recognising platform workers as employees.

Beyond Resistance: Toward a Labour Politics of Building

What is most striking is that Thai riders are not just resisting—they are building. They form their own welfare funds, negotiate partnerships with restaurants and political parties, and lead public campaigns on occupational health and safety. Through this work, they have established a kind of organising infrastructure—resilient and embedded in the lived experience of platform work.

Their legal exclusion from formal labour protections, often viewed as a liability, has paradoxically enabled a more horizontal, experimental form of organising. It has allowed riders to operate beyond the bureaucratic constraints of traditional unions and to sidestep the risks of co-optation posed by state incorporation. But this exclusion also imposes real limits: material, emotional, and political. As our research indicates, burnout, risk exposure, and a lack of long-term resources threaten the sustainability of this infrastructure of activism.

While the feminist and care-centered model of leadership offers a compelling alternative to conventional unionism, its sustainability is not guaranteed. Even as these networks expand, they often face structural exhaustion. According to our survey, economic hardship remains the primary barrier to organising, cited by 69.1% of riders. With many working 10–12 hour shifts under shrinking pay conditions, attrition is common; in one southern province, only one in eight riders is expected to be still doing this work in five years.

Burnout, especially among core organisers—most of whom are women—is another critical challenge. These leaders not only coordinate campaigns and manage group funds but also shoulder the emotional labour of sustaining their communities. When victories are slow and structural reforms stall, even the most committed members may begin to disengage. Without material support and systemic change, care alone cannot sustain the movement.

Yet this doesn’t mean feminist politics is bound to fail—it reminds us that activism unfolds within the constraints of patriarchal and capitalist systems. These limits only underscore the urgency of building stronger infrastructures of care—they are symptoms of the broader terrain in which we struggle.

The organising practices of Thai riders illuminate the next frontiers of worker power. This power will not be built solely through centralised formal coalitions. Instead, it will emerge from messy, place-based experiments: log-off protests, roadside gatherings, mutual aid networks, and digital-to-physical organising circuits.

These everyday practices may appear fragmented, but together, they form the scaffolding of a new labour politics—one attuned to algorithmic governance, logistical infrastructures, and gendered, collective care. What’s needed now is resourcing—to sustain these political spaces, deepen organising strategies, and enable the ongoing transformation of control infrastructures into infrastructures of solidarity.