INTRODUCTION

Remote work has saved many jobs during the ongoing pandemic and a necessity for many jobs during the post-recovery period. Recent evidence suggests that sectors that quickly shifted to remote working arrangements contracted less than sectors which were less amenable to them (Espitia et al. 2021). Countries are now calculating the number of jobs that are capable of being performed from home (for example in Canada, forty-one percent of jobs can be remotely organized (Gallacher and Hossain 2020). These enormous changes in the world of work are arguably a result of the digital revolution (Merritt 2016) that is fundamentally transforming our economies.

The digital sector is now valued at 15.5 percent of the global economy (United Nations (UN) Conference on Trade and Development 2019). However, the jobs in this sector, apart from the high-paying Silicon Valley-type or similar jobs (Fallick, Fleischman, and Rebitzer 2006), are often precarious (Aneja et al. 2018), tightly controlled using algorithms (Alex J Wood et al. 2019), and poor in overall quality of work (Prassl 2018). Most of these jobs are "paid tasks carried out by independent contractors mediated by online platforms" (Koutsimpogiorgos et al. 2020, p. 527).

The central novelty of remote work, or sometimes known as telework, is its "detachment of time and task from location" (Fonner and Stache 2012, p. 242); it is a novel temporal-spatial organization of work (Aroles, Mitev, and Vaujany 2019). This type of work need not be performed strictly from home. Its defining characteristic is the "substitution of communication technology for work-related travel" (Harker Martin and MacDonnell 2012, p. 603). In summary, remote work promises both inclusive (for those who prefer to work from home) and exploitative (new forms of capital accumulation) futures of work.

People who want to work but are not able to perform work consistently in an assigned location–most often in regular offices, like those who live with a disability, a serious or chronic illness, or have caring responsibilities at home (Institute of Medicine (U.S.) 2012) may prefer to work remotely. In fact, research suggests that having meaningful work to perform, whether paid or unpaid, contributes significantly to the health of the person (Bambra 2011). On the other hand, a large body of research points out the negative effects of workplace ostracism because of working outside one's workplace, showing that family lives of those who work from home are negatively affected due to spill-over of work stress (Liu et al. 2013).

Remote work may not be relevant for everyone; for many, it is still a transitory stage until regular, workplace-based jobs can be performed. However, persons with disabilities are a group for whom remote work can be beneficial if it is accessible, inclusive, and available. This is because most of the persons with disabilities don't have accessible workplace-based jobs, as employers have discriminatory attitudes which stereotype them as burdens to the organizations (Tomlinson 1995). In developing countries, this is more so because of structural political socioeconomic conditions (Harriss-White 1996; Mehrotra 2011; Mitra 2018).

Eighty percent of persons with disabilities in the world live in rural areas of developing countries (International Labour Organization (ILO) 2015). Among them, the youth (aged sixteen to twenty-four) often find themselves at difficult cross-roads in transitioning to work from school (Honeycutt et al. 2017). The youth unemployment rate for persons with disabilities is higher than the rest of the youth population in almost all the countries (Mitra 2018). Whether remote work, in the absence of accessible regular work, can provide more opportunities for them is open to debate. In this paper, I argue that remote work, if properly governed, coupled with sensitization of the public as well as employers on the benefits of employing persons with disabilities and the diversified modes of getting them to work, can offer a chance to significantly improve the wellbeing of rural youth with disabilities (RYD) in particular. In addition, I also will discuss the concerns of advocating for an already heavily critiqued work arrangement (remote work) by contextualizing its potentials to rural youth with disabilities.

In a recent high level United Nations (UN) report (2019), it was observed that "the traditional North-South divide" (p. 4) is not displayed in the spread of the digital economy. However, there is a wide North-South divide concerning the employment of persons with disabilities. For example, in Europe, where significant social welfare policies exist for persons with disabilities (Grover 2015), sixty percent of them participate in the labour force as opposed to seventy-two percent of non-disabled people (Fundación ONCE et al. 2019). In India, an enormous 73.6 percent of persons with disabilities do not participate in the labour force. In addition, sixty-eight percent of these people live in rural, underdeveloped areas (Shenoy 2011). For these reasons, this paper will focus on the situation of rural youth with disabilities in India, with occasional comparisons with Canada to provide a comparative perspective. India is also home to a strong disability rights movement with its beginnings in the 1980s (Mehrotra 2011). Another advantage of focusing on India is that it has an economy which is digitizing fast–in fact, at a rate that is second fastest in the world (Kaka et al. 2019) and is ranked eleventh in the Digital Country Index Theoretical Framework (Bloom Consulting and Digital Demand 2017).

Arguably, one of the main weaknesses of the original social model of disability was its relative negligence of the health status of the person. It is one thing to point out the non-inclusive social organization as the cause of disabling barriers, and quite another to forget that in spite of the enabling policies, a person with a disability continues to struggle with one's somatic health condition (Bambra 2011). To be precise, in my view, the original social model underemphasized the health aspect of the person with disability. Therefore, a nuanced theoretical framework is warranted to understand disability in the work context that considers both the livelihood and the health aspects.

Back in the heyday of industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century, disability was often associated with "incapacity to work" (Blackie 2018, p. 3). Although the presence of bodily impairments meant that these people were social outcasts, Blackie (2018) shows that from the point of view of the then booming industrial capitalism, these people were un-exploitable: they were dis-abled to work. Although the predominant critical disability studies scholarship places more emphasis on the cultural manifestations of disability (Flynn 2017), Blackie's (2018) history of disability reaffirms the intricate relationship between disability and labour.

As Costa-Black et al. (2013) note, there have been many advances made to the social model which are widely accepted today. Especially, work disability policy scholars use disability models that "integrate the social perspectives of 'human activities' and 'participation' into the clinical understanding of 'body functions, and structures'" (Costa-Black et al. 2013, p. 75). One such influential model is the "IOM-NRC 1 model" (see figure 1) which adds the dimensions of the "work organization" and "social context factors on pain and disability outcomes" (Costa-Black et al. 2013, p. 77) to the traditional social model. In this model, "disability" is identified broadly as an outcome of barriers in the workplace and the experiences of the person. The "external loads" refer to the way in which the type of work is generally organized, its general mode of production–e.g., digital means–and the broader employer-employee relationship climate. For remote work, external loads could include algorithmically controlled work-related bodily demands (Kuhn 2016; Alex J Wood et al. 2019), such as extended time in looking at mobile phones or computer screens, precarious piece jobs, or uncertain social security futures (Aguilar et al. 2020). These "external loads" are "transmitted through biomechanical forces to create internal loads on the tissues and anatomical forces" (Costa-Black et al. 2013, p. 77). The "physiological responses" activated by the "external loads" are mediated by the person's individual tolerance factors (p. 77).

Figure 1. The IOM-NRC Model (Reproduced from the reprint version in Costa-Black et al. 2013, p. 78)

Alt-text: There are two sections of the figure. The first, titled "the workplace" has interlinked levels connecting external loads, organizational factors, and social context. These levels are connected by arrows to each of the levels of the second section, which is titled "the person." This section has three interlinked levels: the first called "biomechanical loading" with two sub-levels, the first labeled as internal loads and physiological responses, the second called "internal tolerances" with two further sub-levels indicating mechanical strain and fatigue, and a third called "outcomes" with another two sub-levels: plain discomfort and impairment disability. All these levels of the second section are connected to an overarching level called "individual factors."

The "organizational factors" refer to the platform's policies on organizing and managing work. For example, the platform company Uber employs a strict surveillance system on their workers (Berger et al. 2019) which combines with "external loads" to transmit physical stressors. The "social context" refers to the public policy and discourse on disability inclusion. For this study, the social context is represented by India's disability policy and its disability rights movement's achievements (Chandler 2019; Mehrotra 2011).

The main strength of the IOM-NRC model is defining disability in the context of work in two distinct modes. Firstly, the model helps to understand the macro dimensions of disability in work, as an outcome of the way in which work is organized in society. This dimension presents disability in work as a structural feature of society, as a product of non-inclusive decisions. In this sense, the model reinforces the social model (Goodley et al. 2012), in a nuanced way. Secondly, the IOM-NRC model brings out the micro dimensions of disability in work, as an outcome of the stressors induced by the demands of the work a person performs. The previously mentioned external loads apply here in highlighting the channel that creates or aggravates new or existing disabilities. Therefore, the micro dimensions combine with the societal dimensions to elucidate a comprehensive understanding of disability at the work place.

DISCUSSION

Arguably, the fact that the overwhelming majority of persons with disabilities live in rural areas of developing countries makes disability appear as mainly a problem of the Global South. Furthermore, according to the UN, most of the world's poor people live in rural areas of developing countries as well. This is why most of persons with disabilities suffer from poverty (Beresford 1996; Graham, Moodley, and Selipsky 2013; Grech 2009). Given this under-studied relationship between disability and poverty, it is inevitable that any discussion about work engagement policies for persons with disabilities will automatically become policies of poverty alleviation.

Young peoples' contribution towards rural poverty alleviation has been widely researched. Most of this research has focused on improving the entrepreneurial capacities of this population (Ataei et al. 2020; de Guzman et al. 2020). Social entrepreneurships have been considered as a possible employment pathway for persons with disabilities as well (Parker Harris, Renko, and Caldwell 2014). However, there is very limited research assessing the viability of entrepreneurships in developing countries since the ease of doing business in those countries is generally low. There is also an ongoing debate in the West and in newly developed countries such as Singapore concerning unpaid work supported by well-entrenched welfare services (Grover 2015; Zhuang 2016). Similar to entrepreneurships, such welfare policies, particularly targeted at persons with disabilities are of limited applicability in underdeveloped contexts.

For these reasons, improving paid work opportunities that help to build sustainable livelihoods for rural youth with disabilities is an urgent need. The political economy of capitalism in its global polarities of center-periphery relations (Kvangraven 2020) seems to suggest that disability inclusion is a less important priority in the peripheral countries, in comparison to more pressing concerns like hunger and armed conflict. It is at this juncture that the use of remote work arrangements can be considered to offer persons with disabilities a chance to better organize their lives. Moreover, evidence suggests that there is "growing online independence" among rural youth with disabilities (Raghavendra et al. 2018, P. 120). Recent research provide promising accounts of the use of ICTs by rural youth with disabilities (Pacheco, Lips, and Yoong 2019). Therefore, studying whether the digital skills of rural youth with disabilities living in developing countries like India could be mobilized or even leveraged for remote work is timely and pertinent.

The nature and the pace of digitization of our societies is astonishing. There is concern that the new "socio-technical systems" created by digitization will further marginalize the rural communities (Cowie, Townsend, and Salemink 2020, p. 173). However, in a developed country such as Canada, the number one economic need of rural dwellers as reported in a study conducted by the Office of Infrastructure of Canada is "the need for reliable and affordable high-speed Internet and mobile connectivity" (Infrastructure Canada, 2019, p. 6). One fifth of all Canadians live, work, and thrive in rural communities (Infrastructure Canada, 2019). The same report stipulates that only thirty-seven percent of rural households are currently able to access high speed internet as compared to ninety-seven percent of households in urban areas. Moreover, rural Canada contributes thirty percent of the country's GDP (Infrastructure Canada, 2019). In sum, the government of Canada has identified the development of connectivity infrastructure as a top priority for the enrichment of the lives of Canada's rural communities where remote work is expected to play a major role.

The situation of digitization in developing countries, while similar to that of Canada, is even more promising (Kaka et al. 2019). In India, there is potential for multi-faceted development in rural areas. But what this means in relation to the hierarchical social relations shaped by protracted poverty is relatively under-studied. Digitization of agriculture in particular, is not just expected to sustain the growth trajectory of India, but also revive its pandemic-affected downturn (KPMG et al. 2020). With forty-nine percent of workers being engaged in rural agriculture (Mehta and Awasthi 2019), recent cross-disciplinary research emphasizes the need of digitizing agriculture in India to increase its sluggish fourteen percent contribution to the GDP (KPMG et al. 2020). India's strong performance in platform use (LIRNEasia 2018), especially in e-commerce, poses much promise for farming as well (KPMG et al. 2020). However, the urban-rural stratification in the country is permeated predominantly by class, caste, gender, and disability (Harriss-White 2003), with clear intersectionalities among these and other factors. In addition, the twenty-two percent urban-rural digital divide in India (LIRNEasia 2018), one of the largest in Asia, seems to act as a barrier for the rural youth with disabilities to engage in remote work. The exacerbation of these inequalities in the digital economy (Aneja et al. 2018) is in contradiction with the economic potentials of remote work (Espitia et al. 2021). The exploration of this digital-development antinomy (Aneja et al. 2018; Berger et al. 2019; Kvangraven 2020) warrants a political economic approach (Beckert and Streeck 2008) that articulates its relationship with the trajectory of global capitalism (Pini and Leach 2016). Therefore, it is imperative to understand how remote work can impact the wellbeing of rural youth with disabilities, to arrive at a mutually informed "critical analysis" and "social action" regarding disability in the rural space (Collins 2019, p. 3).

The ongoing digitization of rural areas can offer enabling chances for earning a livelihood among persons with disabilities, particularly for rural youth with disabilities in developing countries. Remote work is such a major possibility. However, the outcomes of remote work for rural youth with disabilities which include but are not limited to their wellbeing, livelihoods, health, quality of life, and social relations are understudied.

Research on remote work often compares it with workplace-based work. Conceived this way, working remotely is a deviation from the supposedly better work that is performed in workplaces. However, what is common to both these types is the exacerbation of exploitation of workers; this is the fundamental logic of capitalism (Marx 1972). Therefore, if capitalism is seen not just as an economic formation but also as a social relation (Beckert and Streeck 2008), it is the changing nature of the latter that needs to be taken in to consideration in studying a novel form of labour like remote work. Remote work introduces a new social relation in which exploitation is further made "abstract" (Marx 1972) and impersonal. This is why conversely, neoliberal capitalism is able to concoct creative means to extract surplus labour while offering lucrative consumption options in return.

For critics of new working patterns in contemporary capitalism, remote work does not amount to any revolution in work; rather, it reinvents old exploitative patterns in a new mode with the aid of new technology. Remote work is a novel "temporal spatial working pattern" (Aroles et al. 2019, p. 215), and can be defined as "work done independently of time and place with the help of ICTs" (Pyöriä 2003, p. 166). For this reason, only knowledge work and not physical work, can be organized this way, which highlights the turn towards capital accumulation in the production of knowledge. For Pyöriä (2003), remotely based knowledge work is defined by the following criteria: "(1) use of information technology; (2) independent design of important aspects of the job; and (3) at least upper intermediate vocational training (a college degree)" (p. 167). However, the contemporary modes of remote work—–e.g. for gig jobs—seem to defy the last two criteria. More work is tightly controlled (Wood et al. 2019) and having a college degree is not so important to participate in such work (Kuhn 2016).

Platform-based remote work is the fastest growing sector in remote work (Kaka et al. 2019). The decreased wage growth of an economy with little or no slack could be explained by the large number of platform economy workers who are not usually counted in data concerning the formal economy (Kostyshyna & Luu, 2019). For example in Canada, just under one-third of Canadians participate in this type of work while part-time workers, youth and people in provinces with historically high unemployment rates were most likely to participate in informal employment (Kostyshyna and Luu 2019). It is noteworthy that fifty-eight percent of youth and twenty-six percent of seniors are reported to be participating in platform work in this nationally representative survey (Kostyshyna & Luu, 2019). Ontario reported a nearly thirty percent rate of participation in platform work.

Precarious work is not a new phenomenon, "as 'working 9-5' is not the way most people make a living today" (Hardill and Green 2003, p. 215). Marxist scholarship effectively shows why capitalism always produces precarious workers in its exploitative cycle (Ruyter and Brown 2019). What is relatively new is the use of ICTs to organize work at "digital-based points of production" (Gandini 2019, p. 1044). In other words, the predominant form of remote work today, is not regular workplace-based jobs being performed from home, but rather, work performed for a platform company which does not organize work in workplaces (Berg and ILO 2018). The supporters of this type of work claim that its very flexibility invites people to participate in the labour force (Aneja et al. 2018). Especially, groups who don't generally participate, such as women and persons with disabilities, are given better options to engage in work (Mariscal et al. 2019). Greater economic growth is forecast with increased labour force participation (Aguilar et al. 2020; Bandaranayake 2020).

For many, platform work does not offer a promising future of work. Flexibility is paradoxically accompanied by precarity (Prassl 2018). There is ample evidence which suggests that platform work strips workers of their rights (Frenken et al. 2020; Graham, Hjorth, and Lehdonvirta 2017; Kuhn 2016; Prassl 2018), diminish their social security (Aguilar et al., 2020; Aneja et al., 2018; ILO (Colombo, Sri Lanka) & Tandem Research (Velha Goa, India), 2019; Wood et al., 2019a), and wipe away the quality and meaning of work (Kuhn 2016; Scully-Russ and Torraco 2020; Alex J Wood et al. 2019; Alex J. Wood et al. 2019; Wood 2019). Algorithmic control is the central means by which the platform companies control their workers (Alex J Wood et al. 2019). These control mechanisms are significantly different from the Taylorist control channels that entail extensive usage of informational management tools. In summary, for the critics of platform work, it is a new mode of exploitation that neoliberal capitalism has devised in pursuit of better profits (Borowiak 2019; Zwick 2018).

The debate about platform based work, or remote work in general, is constituted by this antinomy. Both the supporters' and critics' views can be plausibly justified. In resonance with Adorno's views on the individual and collective grounds of society, being that there is an antagonism between the two versions (Adorno 2002), it is helpful to understand that they both have equally plausible answers and reactions to a deeper structure of capitalist development. Hence, there is no easy resolution for the two views, such as by introducing a theoretical distinction like micro and macro, or structure and agency as is often done in social science (Archer 1995). This approach does not offer a better scientific view in explaining the digital economy's nexus with development. On the contrary, this antinomy might suggest that a new theory of division of labour that accounts for the new forms of labour involved in remote work, and a new theory of the state as the principal political agency whose sovereignty impacts platforms (Bratton 2015) are imperative if a holistic understanding of remote work is to be generated.

In the countries of the Global South, informal economies are larger than the formal ones. This means that most of the people of working age in these countries, either don't work, resulting in high unemployment, or work in the informal sector under extremely poor conditions of work (Aneja et al. 2018). The articulation between remote work, whether platform based or not, and informal sector work is an under-researched topic, as it connotes a new formal-informal relation. The empirical evidence suggests that mobility from the informal sector to remote work has dramatically increased over the past decade (Graham et al. 2017).

What's more, remote work can significantly solve the issue of unemployment of rural youth with disabilities. The International Labour Organization (ILO) (2015) has constantly warned that the lack of meaningful work opportunities for persons with disabilities in general and for rural youth with disabilities in particular might lead to worsened poverty (Aguilar et al. 2020; International Labour Organization 2015). As pointed out before, scholars have also observed the relative lack of research on poverty of persons with disabilities (Beresford 1996; Graham et al. 2013; Grech 2009; Harriss-White 1996), while affirming their interrelation.

Persons with disabilities, across all types—who have visual, hearing, locomotor, learning, and intellectual impairments—face serious problems of "accessibility, cooperation among welfare agencies, technical aids and welfare services in relation to work" (Östlund and Johansson 2018, p. 18). Most persons with disabilities self-accommodate their own accessibility needs in the absence of environmental accommodations (Hogan et al. 2012). The barriers to the accessibility of work environments are comprised of "physical, social, and communicative difficulties" (Östlund and Johansson 2018, p. 20) which are part and parcel of performing a regular job. Arguably, the inaccessibility of the environment is the fundamental barrier persons with disabilitiesface (Hogan et al. 2012). Other barriers include the exhaustion of needing various assistive devices, confusing regulatory regimes governing work disability policies, and poor welfare services (Östlund and Johansson 2018). Many of these experiences are those of persons with disabilities living in developed countries with strong welfare regimes. Much work needs to be done in the Global South to identify the experiences of rural youth with disabilities.

The accessibility of the environment, or in concrete terms, the digital space, is significantly enhanced by various digitally enabled assistive technologies. This is the crucial import of the digital revolution in regards to disability. Those who couldn't travel to workplaces due to sickness or disability, and those who couldn't work in regular workplaces due to environmental barriers can now seek out the opportunities online. This is why remote work is a promising pathway for work for rural youth with disabilities.

For the purpose of this paper, what is relevant is the examination of how rural youth with disabilities can engage in remote work. Such remote work includes but not limited to gigs associated with platforms, freelance work, commerce using platforms, or other unpaid work. Rural youth with disabilities can perform such work only if the technology used is accessible and if they possess the required skills to do them. Accessibility of the environment is essential for disability inclusion (Cook and Polgar 2015). Remote work for rural youth with disabilities can make sense only if the technology used for these purposes are accessible to start with. In the last decade, there has been a rapid increase in the universal design of ICTs aimed at improving their accessibility to persons with disabilities (Persson et al. 2015). ICT, a mobile phone or a computing device often connected to Internet, is a cheaper form of technology and indicates significant use across people at different income levels (Lazar and Stein 2017). Compelling evidence from rural areas of many developing countries show that ICTs have made enormous progress in assisting the persons with disabilities to engage in their daily activities of life (Darcy, Yerbury, and Maxwell 2019; Dobransky and Hargittai 2006; Don, Salami, and Ghajarieh 2015; Hurulle, Fernando, and Galpaya 2018; Vihara Innovation Network 2019). Therefore, it seems that these technologies may have the potential to improve the wellbeing of rural youth with disabilities by creating new remote work opportunities.

Both the Internet and the devices it employs–smart phones and computers–need to be affordable if they are to be used for remote work purposes. In a recent nationally representative survey conducted in India (LIRNEasia 2018), eighteen percent of the respondents claimed that the cost of the data is the main barrier concerning the use of the Internet. In the same report, a considerable percentage (twenty-two percent) claimed that the speed of the Internet is also a limiting factor. Furthermore, adequate digital skills are necessary to use smart phones and computers for work purposes. Various digital based assistive technologies such as speech-to-text, text-to-speech, e-Braille displays, e-prosthetics, and so on serve well to bridge the gaps of user experiences between disabled and non-disabled people. It is quite possible that rural youth with disabilities can make use of these ICTs and assistive technologies to improve and direct their digital skills for effective work engagements (Bastien et al. 2020).

For a person with a disability, "livelihood"—"the means to secure the necessities of life" (Stienstra and Lee 2019, p. 2) associated with work—may not be the only reason why they work. In the first place, persons with disabilities were excluded from many work environments because of their bodily impairments. Understandably, even in accessible and inclusive work environments, whether analog or digital, the impairment as a health condition persists. Therefore, any consideration of the outcomes of work that ignores health, and narrowly focuses on income related factors, is incomplete. This means that the outcome measure of remote work should consider both the livelihood and the health of the worker. To be sure, these considerations are equally important to workers without disabilities. Nonetheless, the intricate relationship of disability with one's body and its health make these considerations front and center for rural youth with disabilities.

What still needs to be clarified is why wellbeing is a better outcome measure than health or livelihood improvements. The Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW) (2016) defines wellbeing as follows:

The presence of the highest possible quality of life in its full breadth of expression focused on but not necessarily exclusive to: good living standards, robust health, a sustainable environment, vital communities, an educated populace, balanced time use, high levels of democratic participation, and access to and participation in leisure and culture (p. 11).

As seen, wellbeing is a multidimensional concept (Mitra 2018; Mitra, Brucker, and Jajtner 2020). Some distinguish mental wellbeing from physical wellbeing (Rose et al. 2017), and subjective wellbeing from objective wellbeing (Cummins et al. 2010). What's more, it encompasses a human experience more nuanced than simply income and health. "Quality of life" is also an applicable multidimensional concept which considers different types of wellbeing (Hersh and Johnson 2008, p. 6). But its applications typically focus more on how this quality of life is achieved through health determinants. For this study, a concept that combines livelihood (income) and quality of life (health), contextualized in the broader social structure (Goodley et al. 2012) is needed. Wellbeing thus fulfills this role adequately. Therefore, a robust definition of wellbeing with subjective and objective components needs a contextual definition, which is best identified by the very rural youth with disabilities who experience it.

Whether remote work can improve the wellbeing of rural youth with disabilities who demonstrate lower self-esteem and quality of life (Mitra 2018) is an open question, requiring empirical evidence. This is especially true for developing countries where research on the lives of rural youth with disabilities is rare (Grech 2009). However, the wide-ranging and convincing evidence about the positive impact of work on wellbeing, in contrast to the level of wellbeing of people without work (Bambra 2011) indicates that there could be positive outcomes of remote work on wellbeing as well. Two supplementary points need to be made here. Firstly, the wellbeing of rural youth with disabilities may include dimensions that those without disabilities may have not shown in the previously cited research. Secondly, although the outcomes of remote work on wellbeing may appear to be less than workplace-based work (Felstead and Henseke 2017; Gallacher and Hossain 2020), the impact on wellbeing for those who have not been working for a long time, or for those who were structurally excluded from the labour force—like rural youth with disabilities—may be different. What these studies suggest is that more empirical research is needed to assess them.

Work is central to the way we sustain human life on the planet. Moreover, it is a fundamental feature of our "human condition" (Arendt 1989). Paid work is only one way that rural youth with disabilities can be included in work. There have been a number of criticisms pointing out how the discourse of neoliberalism translate the demands for better social welfare for rural youth with disabilities as issues of getting them jobs (Grover 2019; Helman 2019). As alternatives, work in social enterprises and volunteering have been proposed (Hall and Wilton 2015). However, there are also robust arguments that present the non-participation of persons with disabilities in the labour force as an economic cost, valued at US$1.37 to 1.84 trillion globally (Buckup 2009). According to the ILO (2009), developing countries lose 7 percent of their GDP by excluding persons with disabilities from work. Even the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (article twenty-seven) preserves the rights of persons with disabilities for accessible work environments. What is doubtful is whether developing countries like India have the means to create accessible work opportunities that can regain the supposed lost GDP. Like the blind gentleman from Shan, Myanmar who told me during my field work in 2018, that "there aren't a lot of choices for us [PWD], we need income, we need to have a living and support the family." For persons with disabilities in developing countries, a lack of choices and insufficient income characterize their working conditions. As Harris-White (1996) claims, not only does disability cause poverty, but poverty itself is a primary condition of disability that results in minimal work opportunities (p. 10). Added to that, there is conclusive evidence that persons with disabilities incur "sizeable extra costs" (Mitra et al. 2020, p. 480) for living in comparison to those without disabilities. To address these complex issues surrounding the work lives of rural youth with disabilities, both welfare and work inclusion policies are needed.

A political economic approach to studying disability in the work context would place a spotlight on the "commodification of labour" under contemporary capitalism which results in the economic exclusion of by persons with disabilities (Russell 2002, p. 119). Moreover, what appears to be a liberating avenue for rural youth with disabilities may actually be a form of commodifying an untapped labour pool. Felstead and Henseke (2017) show that remote working arrangements are more about converting traditional forms of paid employment to on-demand jobs. Since "the costs associated with purchasing, building and maintaining sites as places of work can be high and are difficult to justify if usage levels are low" (p. 196), remote work is an innovative capitalist exploitation method that seeks to keep these costs at low levels by transferring the costs to the households of the workers.

It is well-established in the literature that persons with disabilities are heavily reliant on their families, and family support is a crucial component of their wellbeing (Rose et al. 2017). Remote work, often but not necessarily performed from home, changes the dynamics of those households. As Felstead and Henseke (2017) note, there are nuanced distinctions between "households, the residential units of everyday life, and families, the more ambiguous, symbolic terrain in which kinship is represented" (p. 214). These are "a locus of meanings and relationships" (p. 214). What remote work can possibly do is to fundamentally alter the meanings associated with families and households for rural youth with disabilities. "Work-life balance," defined as the "satisfaction and good functioning of work and home, with a minimum of role conflict" (Clark 2000, p. 751 quoted in Felstead and Henseke 2017, p. 198) might be a difficult thing to achieve in the context of remote work. There is an intrinsic relationship between disability and class, ever since disability was defined by the incapacity to work. Over the past decades, critical disability studies scholars have focused on disability as an identity, and they were right to do so (Flynn 2017). However, in so doing, this assertion also inadvertently pushed the class agenda out of the disability studies discourse. Capitalist societies are essentially comprised of classes: those who own the means of production and those who sell their labour to earn a living (Marx 1972). This is true for disability as well. The life experiences of affluent people with disabilities is starkly different from those of poor people with disabilities (Beresford 1996; Grech 2009). The latter group, as shown before, live in rural, developing contexts.

CONCLUSION

The discussion presented throughout this paper suggests that remote work presents both opportunities and concerns for rural youth with disabilities in developing countries. On the one hand, remote work can offer new work opportunities for rural youth with disabilities who are transitioning from schools to the labour market, who otherwise would have remained unemployed either due to lack of work or for inaccessibility of workplaces. On the other hand, remote work is a new form of exploitation that seeks to commodify labour further, with serious repercussions on the work-life balance. Empirical research is needed to understand whether this type of work can improve the wellbeing of rural youth with disabilities.

For Schlozman, Verba, and Brady (2011), the idea of the "public commons" means "a space, open to all citizens, where political discourse and contestation take place; where citizens gather to discuss and possibly influence public policy; where they inform each other about relevant facts and share and debate their preferences" (p. 121). Furthermore, they take the view that the Internet adds "a virtual space for citizen communication;" an "Internet commons" (p. 121). Conceiving the Internet as a commons, a space not privatized but commonly shared—and if possible, publicly owned—is well warranted. Many of the governance issues of the Internet (van Eeten and Mueller 2013) can be better negotiated by treating it as a problem of the commons.

As a way forward, governance of remote work creating avenues to improve wellbeing can be achieved if the Internet which provides the background for this type of work is understood as a commons. Better governance of the Internet can also help to mitigate the exploitative practices of employers, along with a focus on creating equal opportunities for marginalized people such as rural youth with disabilities. The role of the state is of paramount importance in this type of equality-oriented governance. For this reason, democratic governance of the Internet may be linked to the democratization of the state.