Centre for Internet and Society

The Platform Economy’s Gatekeeping of Class and Caste Dominance in Urban India

Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi — 2024-04-19T03:11:44Z

Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi contributed an essay on how gated society management apps like MyGate and NoBrokerHood feed on caste and income inequalities in new datafied forms. The essay features in The Formalization of Social Precarities, an anthology edited by Murali Shanmugavelan and Aiha Nguyen and published with Data & Society.

Ashrit is an experienced platform worker. He has been a delivery worker for three years, job-hopping frequently. Ashrit has worked as a package delivery worker for three platforms: two courier services and a hyperlocal grocery delivery company, which promises compressed ten-minute deliveries over short distances. While navigating the city, he often deals with omnipresent surveillance tools deployed in apartment complexes owned by upper-class and dominant-caste homeowners. Ashrit is used to being screened at every apartment complex he enters, including having his picture taken and verifying details such as his name, mobile number, and the platform he is delivering for. The everydayness of constant identity verification means that Ashrit is not bothered much by it — he said he doesn’t mind the process so much as the delay it causes when customers forget to approve his entry.

MyGate is one such company offering “gated community management,” claiming to service over 25,000 gated societies in India. A competing application, NoBrokerHood, services over 18,000 societies. Apps of this nature have sprung up across urban India in the past five years, offering “society management” services to a niche market of gated societies. Their bouquet of services includes everything from property listings with a commission rate for the platform, security services, accounting services for maintenance and related expenses, and in-app discussion forums for residents. These apps market digital security, which allows residents to regulate entries and exits and make a database of all non-resident visitors in the society. The objective of these apps is to legitimize surveillance as a way of ensuring safety in gated societies. Through a preliminary search online, we found over 20 different companies specializing in digital solutions for gated societies. The industry even had a business exposition in Mumbai on “Housing Society Management,” focused on technology solutions for gated societies.

This study uses the framework of platform urbanism to understand surveillance platforms. Platform urbanism analyzes the growing power of digital platforms in cities. Urban geographers have argued that platforms are a symptom of current models of capitalism, which exploit “idle resources” to produce new forms of urban spaces and value where they might not have existed earlier. Airbnb and Uber are often used as examples of this new form of extraction and value creation from existing assets by monetizing empty rooms and car seats. We argue that platforms offering surveillance services are another instance of this wider landscape of platform urbanism, manufacturing the need for surveillance systems in elite urban enclaves. We use this case study to show that platforms monetize not just idle resources but social inequality and stratification to generate value and capital.

Click to download the full essay

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/the-platform-economys-gatekeeping-of-class-and-caste-dominance-in-urban-india

That Is Not A Livelihood – That Is Helplessness”: Field notes from the Fraazo Delivery Workers Strike in Noida, Greater Noida, and Ghaziabad

Rikta Krishnaswamy — 2024-04-24T02:05:03Z

In this essay, Rikta Krishnaswamy of the All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU) narrates her experiences of organising and supporting delivery workers’ collective action against Fraazo (a now-defunct platform for produce and grocery delivery). Her essay sheds light on the challenges workers face in organising for better conditions of work. She describes how platforms hide behind legal smokescreens and threats of police action to shirk their responsibility as employers. To make matters worse, obscure employment terms and work management systems make it harder for workers to seek redress from the government through labour dispute resolution processes. The essay is illustrative of how digital platforms have exploited and violated freedoms of the gig workers they employ, while facing no accountability. For this to change, gig workers have to be guaranteed employment rights along with collective rights to their data.

We have observed that over time, Indian gig workers across platforms almost certainly face a decrease in overall wages, an increase in working hours, and ever-worsening working conditions. The rhetoric of ‘large-scale employment’ is a false one, as corporates do not consider the gig workers as employees and the workers do not come under the aegis of the country’s labour laws. But the gig workers on these platforms don’t share the corporate and government view at all.

Unlike the capital city of Delhi, the suburbs of Noida, Greater Noida, and Ghaziabad have fewer opportunities even for gig work. Delivery workers across platforms regularly face theft and petty crimes, especially during late-night deliveries. Housing societies prevent them from taking their bikes to customers’ apartments and, in some cases, deny them access to building lifts to carry out deliveries. Despite its dehumanising nature, gig work provides some means of survival in this epoch of rampant unemployment.

On 30 May 2022, striking delivery workers in Noida, Greater Noida, and Ghaziabad—all of whom work for an app-based, fresh produce and grocery delivery platform called Fraazo —approached the All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU). Many of these delivery workers, who are usually referred to as ‘partners’, had lost jobs at banks, data or telecom companies, and call centres during the pandemic, and had joined Fraazo after it started operations in December 2021. They were initially paid a daily wage, called a minimum guarantee (MG) payout, of INR 500 for a 10-hour work shift during which they delivered vegetables, fruits, and groceries to residences near them. Alongwith the MG payout that was disbursed weekly into their accounts, they were also given a petrol surcharge of four rupees for every kilometre they travelled.

The workers told us that on 28 May 2022, the Fraazo head office in Mumbai decided to replace their daily MG payout with a piece-rate payout of INR 45 per delivery. At a time of sky-rocketing fuel prices and inflation, the company decided to remove the petrol surcharge for delivery distances of less than five kilometres (which constitute a bulk of the orders that these delivery workers service). The delivery workers were apprised of these changes the next day by the Fraazo Store Managers, with a promise that the new piece-rate system would bring in more earnings.

The delivery workers rejected this new system outright and demanded that Fraazo restore the earlier payout system with an assurance that in the future, Fraazo will take the consent of the workers before introducing any drastic changes to their service conditions. In addition, they demanded that all delivery riders be provided with accident insurance and paid leaves.

The workers did not view themselves as merely freelance delivery partners. When the store’s operations had just begun, the company faced a lot of challenges in ensuring consistent service. Some delivery partners would help with unloading and sorting produce at the store during or after their work shifts. Even after operations stabilised, many worked overtime (with no pay) at the behest of the store managers to ensure that deliveries were completed to the customer’s satisfaction. A significant portion of deliveries involved carrying 10 kilos of produce to customers’ homes. Delivery workers were entrusted to escalate and resolve complaints as well. Fraazo’s customers complained that the store managers were lackadaisical when it came to providing appropriate support and often called the delivery workers directly to get items replaced.

Anywhere between 25–40 workers were tied to a store, according to the size of the operations, and helped Fraazo set up and smoothly run its services across its various stores in Noida, Greater Noida, and Ghaziabad in the first half of 2022. They usually worked through the week, had no paid sick leaves, and were allowed to take just one unpaid day off during a work week (they often incurred penalties if they took more than one leave). While there were problems with their previous time-wage system, they were dead against the new system of a piece-rate payout. The latter meant that their employer could potentially hire hundreds of workers for a store with no minimum guarantee pay, thereby annihilating the earnings of all the workers.

Click to download the full essay

Contributors

Author: Rikta Krishnaswamy

Images: All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU)

Design: Annushka Jaliwala

Copy edit: The Clean Copy

About the All India Gig Workers’ Union

The All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU) is a registered trade union for all food delivery, logistics, and service workers that work on any app-based platforms in India.

Contact: contactaigwu@gmail.com

Connect: Twitter; Facebook

The views and opinions expressed on this page are those of their individual authors. Unless the opposite is explicitly stated, or unless the opposite may be reasonably inferred, CIS does not subscribe to these views and opinions which belong to their individual authors. CIS does not accept any responsibility, legal or otherwise, for the views and opinions of these individual authors. For an official statement from CIS on a particular issue, please contact us directly.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/that-is-not-a-livelihood-2013-that-is-helplessness201d-field-notes-from-the-fraazo-delivery-workers-strike-in-noida-greater-noida-and-ghaziabad

‘Future of work’ or 21st–century oppressed labour?: Findings from an AIGWU survey with 50 Urban Company housekeeping workers in Bengaluru

Nihira Ram — 2024-05-16T15:29:58Z

n this essay, Nihira Ram shares findings from a survey done by the All India Gig Workers Union with more than 50 migrant workers living in a slum in Bengaluru. The workers primarily provided cleaning and domestic services on the platform, Urban Company (previously UrbanClap).

Nihira highlights the impact that diluted rights and rising exploitation have had on the workers. The workers’ experiences show how they faced mounting costs merely to access work on the platform. Once they joined, the workers faced oppressive working conditions and stringent control by the platform, where rules and processes are designed in favour of the platform, at the expense of its workers. Not only were the workers from highly marginalised backgrounds and more vulnerable to this exploitation, a paucity of alternative jobs and their tenuous position as migrants meant that they were trapped by the platform’s unfair practices for years.

When workers join Urban Company as housekeeping services ‘partners’, they first pay INR 16,000 as ‘joining fees’. After undergoing an uncompensated training programme, which costs them INR 1,000, workers are rebranded as ‘professionals’ who are now eligible to provide the services for which they have been trained.

However, the provision of services comes at a huge cost to the workers. They have to pay INR 6,000 per month in order to receive a number of guaranteed jobs as part of the Minimum Guarantee plan (MG Plan) – or, as the workers refer to them – leads. Urban Company terms this a ‘subscription’.

In essence, Urban Company does not qualify people from whom they generate profit as workers. They consider them ‘professionals’ who are ‘subscribing’ to the platform in order to ‘market’ their ‘services’ to earn an income. Workers are cunningly portrayed as another set of ‘customers’ who buy guaranteed jobs from the platform on a monthly basis, essentially having to ‘pay to work’.

Apart from this monthly subscription, workers are made to pay GST on each job. They are required to purchase company-branded uniforms and bags costing around INR 2,000. Further, they must also buy all cleaning supplies relevant to their work from Urban Company at higher costs than those sold elsewhere (INR 10,000 per month or above). This is despite the fact that workers find these supplies to be of poor quality and thus hazardous to their safety.

The framing of Urban Company ‘partners’ as non-workers is inaccurate for a number of reasons. A majority of the housekeeping workers with whom we spoke were not previously employed in the services sector. Urban Company targeted their slum as part of its recruitment drives in 2018. Knowing that their cleaning and housekeeping services vertical faced a deficit of labour supply despite a perceived spike in demand in Bengaluru, Urban Company aggressively onboarded men from this slum to undergo their training programme and join the company as cleaning and housekeeping ‘professionals’. How, then, is Urban Company merely a platform from which pre-existing workers gain business, and not an employer hiring labour with particular skills for its supply chain?

Click to download the full essay

Contributors

Author: Nihira Ram
Images: All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU)
Design: Annushka Jaliwala
Copy edit: The Clean Copy

About the All India Gig Workers’ Union

The All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU) is a registered trade union for all food delivery, logistics, and service workers that work on any app-based platforms in India.

Contact: contactaigwu@gmail.com

Connect: Twitter; Facebook

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/future-of-work-21st-century-oppressed-labour-findings-from-aigwu-survey-with-50-urban-company-housekeeping-workers-in-bengaluru

Digital mediation of domestic and care work in India: Project Announcement

Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi — 2019-10-10T08:09:34Z

It is our great pleasure to announce that we are undertaking a study on digital mediation of domestic and care work in India, as part of and supported by the Feminist Internet Research Network led by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). The study is exploring the ways in which structural inequalities, such as those of gender and class, are being reproduced or challenged by digital platforms. The project sites are Delhi and Bangalore, where we are conducting interviews with workers, companies, and unions. In Bangalore, we are collaborating with Stree Jagruti Samiti to collect qualitative data from different stakeholders. The outputs of the research will include a report, policy brief, and other communication materials in English, Hindi, and Kannada. This study is being led by Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi, along with Sumandro Chattapadhyay.

Feminist Internet Research Network: apc.org/en/project/firn-feminist-internet-research-network

Introduction to the Project

This project seeks to investigate the mediation of domestic and care work through digital platforms in India. These forms of labour fall within the informal economy, which employs the largest share of non-agricultural workers in the global South [1]. Workers and economic units in the informal economy differ widely in terms of all metrics, including income levels, size and type of enterprise, and status of worker. According to the International Labour Organisation’s Resolution on decent work and the informal economy, it refers to “all economic activities by workers and economic units that are - in law of practice - not covered or insufficiently covered by formal arrangements” [2]. What this implies in practice for workers in the informal economy is greater vulnerability to poor work conditions, poverty, and violation of labour rights [3].

Women, particularly those with intersectional marginalities, including that of caste and class, are overrepresented in the informal economy globally and in India. Domestic work in particular has been stratified along the lines of caste and gender historically. Further, class has become more salient in producing stratifications in labour relations following urbanisation and gentrification. These intersections have shaped employment relations in the sector in different ways, which range from feudal to contractual models. Digital platforms are increasingly becoming intermediaries in this space, mediating between so called ‘semi-skilled’ or ‘low-skilled’ workers from lower classes, and millions of middle and upper class employers in tier I cities. This is expected to shift the stratification of workers and employment relations in key ways.

Through a feminist approach to digital labour, our project aims to examine platforms offering domestic or reproductive care work. This will be situated within larger feminist critiques around the devaluation and invisibilisation of women’s labour within patriarchal-capitalist economic discourse. The project further seeks to unpack technocratic imaginaries of the platform economy by looking at access and meaningful use of technology and qualifying narratives around labour market optimisation, empowerment, and agency. We will include within this scope two kinds of platforms: marketplaces for workers to post their profiles; and on-demand platforms with algorithmic matching of workers and employers.

Research Questions

Our hypothesis is that platforms are reconfiguring labour conditions, which would empower and/or exploit workers in ways qualitatively different than non-standard work off the platform. In order to interrogate this further, we will study wages, conditions of work, social security, skill levels, and worker surveillance off platforms. This will be used to develop contextual knowledge around the conditions of work among (a) domestic workers on and off platforms in particular, and (b) informal sector workers joining the web-based gig economy in general.

The overarching question that the research will address is, what are the ways in which structural inequalities are challenged or reproduced through the growth of digital platforms in reproductive and care work?

How are relations of social inequality, including along the axes of caste and gender, reworked through digital platforms, especially in a context where domestic and care work remains historically undervalued and dominated by women workers with intersectional marginalities?
How do workers on platforms envision the role of the state, market, and informal networks of kinship in intervening in employment relations?
How is inequality and exploitation in informal labour reconfigured through platforms, with specific reference to work conditions (including hours of work, and physical and mental demands of the workplace), wages, social security, and surveillance?
What strategies of negotiation are being and have been adopted by care workers on and off platforms?
Is collectivisation an aspiration for care workers across different models of employment?
How can negotiation and collectivisation strategies inform the ongoing challenges faced by both care workers and platform workers?

Endnotes

[1] International Labour Office, (2018). Women and men in the informal economy: A statistical picture. Third Edition. International labour Organisation. https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/docu- ments/publication/wcms_626831.pdf

[2] International Labour Organisation, (2002). 2002 ILC Resolution and Conclusions on Decent Work and the Informal Economy. https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/employment-promotion/informal-economy/lang--en/index.htm

[3] Ibid.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-domestic-work-india-announcement

Doing Standpoint Theory

Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi — 2019-12-06T04:59:35Z

Cross-posted from GenderIT, September 1, 2019

Image description: Three speech bubbles on different textures. Artist: Catalina Alzate

Feminist research methodology has evolved from different epistemologies, with several different schools of thought. Some of the more popular ones are feminist standpoint theory, feminist empiricism, and feminist relativism. Standpoint theory holds the experiences of the marginalised as the source of ‘truth’ about structures of oppression, which is silenced by traditional objectivist research methods as they produce knowledge from the standpoint of voices in positions of power [2]. Feminist empiricism does not eschew traditional modes of knowledge production, but emphasises diversity of research participants for feminist (and therefore also rigorous) knowledge production [3]. Relativists have critiqued standpoint theory for its tendency to essentialise the experience of marginalised groups, and subsume them into one homogenous voice to achieve the goal of ‘emancipatory’ research [4]. Relativists instead focus on multiple standpoints, which could be Dalit women, lesbian women, or women with disabilities [5]. We will be discussing the practical applicability of these epistemologies to research practices in the field of technology and gender.

Standpoint theory holds the experiences of the marginalised as the source of ‘truth’ about structures of oppression, which is silenced by traditional objectivist research methods as they produce knowledge from the standpoint of voices in positions of power.

As part of the Feminist Internet Research Network, the Centre for Internet and Society is undertaking research on the digital mediation of domestic and care work in India. The project aims to assess shifts in the sector, including conditions of work, brought on by the entry of digital platforms. Our starting point for designing a methodology for the research was standpoint theory, which we thought to be the best fit as the goal of the project was to disrupt dominant narratives of women’s labour in relation to platformisation. In the context of dalit feminis, Rege warns that standpoint research risks producing a narrow frame of identity politics, although it is critical to pay attention to lived experience and the “naming of difference” between dalit women and savarna women [6]. She asserts that neither ‘women’ nor ‘dalit women’ is a homogenous category. While feminist researchers from outside these categories cannot claim to “speak for” those within, they can “reinvent” themselves as dalit feminists and ally themselves with their politics.

In order to address this risk of appropriating the voices of domestic workers (“speaking for”), we chose to directly work with a domestic workers’ union in Bengaluru called Stree Jagruti Smiti. Bengaluru is one of the two cities we are conducting research in (the other being Delhi, with very few registered unions). This is meant to radically destabilise power hierarchies and material relations within the research process, as benefits of participatory research tend to accumulate with the researchers rather than participants [7].

Along with amplifying the voices of workers, a central objective of our project is to question the techno-solutionism that has accompanied the entry of digital platforms into the domestic work sector, which is unorganised and unregulated. To do so, we included companies and state labour departments as participants whose standpoint is to be interrogated. By juxtaposing the standpoints of stakeholders that have differential access to power and resources, the researcher is able to surface various conflicts and intersections in dominant and alternative narratives. This form of research also brings with it unique challenges, as researchers could find themselves mediating between the different stakeholders, while constantly choosing to privilege the standpoint of the least powerful - in this case the workers. Self-reflexivity then becomes necessary to ensure that the project does not slip into an absolutely relativist position, rather using the narratives of workers to challenge those of governments and private actors. This can also be done by ensuring that workers have agency to shape the agenda of researchers, thereby producing research which is instrumental in supporting grassroots campaigns and movements.

Self-reflexivity then becomes necessary to ensure that the project does not slip into an absolutely relativist position, rather using the narratives of workers to challenge those of governments and private actors.

Feminist participatory research itself, despite its many promises, is not a linear pathway to empowerment for participants [8]. At the very outset of the project, we were constantly asked the question by domestic workers and unions – why should we participate in this project? Researchers, in their experience, acquire information from the community throughout the process of data collection by positioning themselves as allies. However, as all such engagements are bound to limited timelines and budgets, researchers are then often absent at critical junctures where the community may need external support. We were also told that all too often, the output of the research itself does not make its way back to the participants, making it a one-way process of knowledge extraction. Being mindful of these experiences, we have integrated a feedback loop into our research design, which will allow us to design outputs that are accessible and useful to collectives of domestic workers.

Not only domestic workers and their organisations, many corporations operating these online portals and platforms often questioned the benefits of participating in the project. However, the manner of articulation differed. While attempting to reject the hierarchical nature of the researcher/participant relationship, we increasingly became aware that the underlying power equation was not a monolith. Rather, it varied across stakeholder groups and was explicitly contingent on the socially constructed positionalities already existing outside of the space of the interview. Companies, governments and workers all exemplified varying degrees of engagement with, knowledge of, and contributions to research. Interviews with workers and unions, and even some bootstrapped (i.e. without much external funding) , socially-minded companies, were often cathartic with an expectation of some benefits in return for opening themselves up to researchers. This was quite different for governments and larger companies, as conversations typically adhered to the patriarchal and classed notions of professionalism in sanitised, formal spaces [9] and the strict dichotomy between public and personal spaces. Their contribution seemingly required lesser affective engagement from the interviewee, thereby resulting in lesser investment in the outcome of the research itself.

The cathartic nature of interviews also speak to the impossibility of the distanced, Platonic, school of research. We were often asked politically charged questions, our advice solicited and information sought. Workers and representatives from platform companies alike would question our motivations with the research and challenge us by inquiring about the benefits accruing to us. Again, both set of stakeholders would often ask differently about how other platforms were; workers already registered on a platform would wonder if another platform would be ‘better’ and representatives of platform companies would be curious about competition. This is perhaps a consequence of attempting to design a study that is of use and of interest to the workers we have been reaching out to [10]. At times, we found ourselves at a place in the conversation where we were compelled to respond to political positions for the conversation to continue. There were interviews where notions of caste hierarchies (within oppressed classes) as a justification/complaint for engaging/having to engage in certain tasks would surface. Despite being beholden to a feminist consciousness that disregards the idea of the interviewer as neutral, we often found ourselves only hesitantly forthcoming. At times, it was to keep the interview broadly focused around the research subject, at others it was due to our own ignorance about the research artefact (in this instance, platforms mediating domestic work services). This underscores the challenges of seeing the interview as a value ridden space, where the contradictions between the interview as a data collection method and as a consciousness raising emerged - how could we share information about the artefact we were in the process of collecting data about?

We were often asked politically charged questions, our advice solicited and information sought.

The fostering of ‘rapport’ [11] has made its may into method, almost unknowingly. Often, respondents across stakeholder groups started from an initial place of hesitation, sometimes even suspicion. Several structural issues could be at work here - our inability in being able to accurately describe research itself, the class differences and at times, ideological ones as well. While with most participants, rapport was eventually established, its establishment was a laboured process. Especially given that we were using one-off, in-depth interviews as our method, securing an interview was contingent on the establishment of rapport. This isn’t to suggest that feminist research mandatorily requires the ‘doing of rapport’ [12], but that when it does, it’s a fortunate outcome and that feminist researchers engage with it more critically.

Building rapport creates an impression of having minimised the exploitation of the participant, however the underlying politics and pressures of building rapport need to be interrogated. Rapport, like research itself, is at times a performance; rapport is often not naturally occuring. Rather, rapport may also be built to conceal the very structural factors preventing it. For instance, during instances of ideological differences during the interview, we were at times complicit through our silence. This may have been to further a certain notion of ‘objectivity’ itself whereby the building and maintenance of rapport is essential to surfacing a participant’s real views. This then raises the questions: What are the ethical questions that the suppression of certain viewpoints and reactions pose? How does the building, maintenance and continuance of rapport inform the research findings? Rapport, then, comes in all shapes and sizes and its manifold forms implicate the research process differently. Another critical question to be addressed is - why does some rapport take less work than others? With platform companies, building rapport came by easier than it did with workers both on and off platforms. If understood as removing degrees of distance between the researcher and participants, several factors could play into the effort required to build rapport. For instance, language was a critical determinant of the ease of relationship-building. Being more fluent in English than in colloquial Hindi enabled clearer articulation of the research. Further, familiarity with the research process was, as expected, mediated along class lines. This influenced the manner in which we articulated research outcomes and objectives to workers with complete unfamiliarity with the meaning of research. Among workers, this unfamiliarity often resulted in distrust, which required the underlying politics of the research to be more critically articulated.

By and large, the feminist engagement with research methods has been quite successful in its resistance and transformation of traditional forms. Since Oakley’s conception of the interview as a deeply subjective space [13] and Harding’s dialectical conception of masculinist science through its history [14], the application of feminist critical theory has increasingly subverted assumptions around the averseness of research to political motivations. At the same time, it has made knowledge-production occur in a more equitable space. It is in this context that standpoint theory has had wide purchase, but challenges persist in its application. As the foregoing discussion outlines, we have been able to achieve some of the goals of feminist standpoint research while missing out on others. We also found the ‘multiple standpoints’ approach of relativists to be useful in a project involving multiple stakeholders - thereby also avoiding the risk of essentialisation of the identities of domestic workers. However, unlike the tendency of relativists to focus on each perspective as ‘equally valid truth’, we are choosing to focus on the conflicts and intersections between emerging discourses. Through this hybrid theoretical framework, we are seeking to make knowledge production more equitable. At the same time, the discussion around rapport shows that this may nevertheless happen in a limited fashion. Feminist research may never be fully non-extractive. The reflexivity exercised and choices made during the course of the research are key.

Unlike the tendency of relativists to focus on each perspective as ‘equally valid truth’, we are choosing to focus on the conflicts and intersections between emerging discourses.

Endnotes

[1] The names of the authors are in alphabetical order.

[2] Harding, S. (2003) The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, Routledge.

[3] M. Wickramasinghe, Feminist Research Methodology: Making meaning out of meaning-making, Zubaan, 2014

[4] Pease, D. (2000) Researching profeminist men's narratives: participatory methodologies in a postmodern frame. In B. Fawcett, D. Featherstone, J. Fook ll)'ld A. Rossiter (eds) Restarching and Practising in Social Work: Postmodern Feminist Perspectives (London: Routledge).

[5] Stanley, L. and Wise, S. (1983) Breaking Out: Feminist Consciousness and Feminist Research (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).

[6] Rege, S. 1998. ” Dalit Women Talk Differently: A critique of ‘Difference’ and Towards a Dalit Feminist Standpoint.” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 33, No.44, pp 39-48.

[7] Heeks, R. and Shekhar, S. (2018) An Applied Data Justice Framework: Analysing Datafication and Marginalised Communities in Cities of the Global South. Working Paper Series, Centre for Development Informatics, University of Manchester.

[8] Stone, E. and Priestley, M. (1996) Parasites, pawn and partners: disability research and the role of nondisabled researchers. British Journal of Sociology, 47(4), 699-716.

[9] Evans, L. (2010). Professionalism, professionality and the development of education professionals. Br. J. Educ. Stud. 56, 20–38. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8527.2007.00392.x

[10] Webb C. Feminist methodology in nursing research. J Adv Nurs. 1984 May;9(3):249-56.

[11] Berger, R. (2015). Now I see it, now I don’t: researcher’s position and reflexivity in qualitative research. Qual. Res. 15, 219–234. doi:10.1177/1468794112468475; Pitts, M. J., and Miller-Day, M. (2007). Upward turning points and positive rapport development across time in researcher-participant relationships. Qual. Res. 7, 177–201. doi:10.1177/1468794107071409

[12] Dunscombe, J., and Jessop, J. (2002). “Doing rapport, and the ethics of ’faking friendship’,” in Ethics in Qualitative Research, eds T. Miller, M. Birch, M. Mauthner, and J. Jessop (London: SAGE), 108–121.

[13] Oakley, A. (1981). “Interviewing women: a contradiction in terms?” in Doing Feminist Research, ed. H. Roberts (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), 30–61.

[14] Harding, S. (1986). The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/doing-standpoint-theory

Domestic Work in the ‘Gig Economy’

aayush — 2019-12-06T04:52:11Z

The CIS and Domestic Workers’ Rights Union (DWRU) are hosting a discussion on the ‘gig economy’ and domestic work on Saturday, November 16 at Student Christian Movement of India, Mission Road, Bangalore. This event is a part of a project supported by the Feminist Internet Research Network led by Association for Progressive Communication (APC) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada.

Presentation: Download (PDF)

Concept Note: Download (PDF)

Venue: Student Christian Movement of India (29, 2nd Cross, CSI Compound, Mission Road, Sampangi Rama Nagara)

Date and Time: Saturday, November 16, 3:00-5:30 pm

Location: URL (Google Maps)

Feminist Internet Research Network: URL

Over the last few months, the Centre for Internet and Society, India (CIS) and the Domestic Workers’ Rights Union (DWRU) have been doing research on the platformisation of domestic work in India. In the first phase of the research, we gathered data through interviews with several stakeholders. More information about the project can be found here: https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-domestic-work-india-announcement.

We now find ourselves in the second phase of the research in which we have prepared a preliminary report and are seeking feedback and inputs from experts. For this, we invite you to a roundtable discussion on domestic workers in the ‘gig economy’.

The participants at the roundtable will comprise of representatives from key stakeholder groups including platform workers (i.e. domestic workers sourcing jobs through platforms), platform companies, domestic workers organisations, civil society researchers and the state labour department.

The event will begin with a presentation of the project and our initial findings. The rest of the time is set aside for a semi-moderated discussion between all participants. To ensure a focused discussion, we are also limiting participation to 30, and are hoping to have a good mix across stakeholder groups.

If you will be joining us, please RSVP to Aayush Rathi at aayush@cis-india.org.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/domestic-work-in-the-gig-economy-20191116

Platforms, Power and Politics: Digital Labour in India

ambika — 2021-07-20T02:42:47Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) invites you to a webinar wherein it will launch and present four research reports on digital labour in India. The webinar will be hosted on July 28, 2021 at 5 p.m. (IST) / 11.30 a.m. (UTC)

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Few recent developments in labour and employment have attracted as much attention as the expansion of platform economies. Spanning a range of services and industries, digital platforms have become a permanent fixture in upper-class urban consumption in India.

In this webinar, we will launch and present four research reports on digital labour in India, hosted at the Centre for Internet and Society. Together, they uncover aspects of labouring in three dominant industries of platform work: logistics, transportation, and domestic and care work. These works were supported separately by the Azim Premji University and Foundation, and the Feminist Internet Research Network (incubated by the Association for Progressive Communications).

Informed by deep ethnographic work, these reports unpack the contours of power, control and resistance that shape the experience and outcomes of working for digital platforms. The reports arrive at the ways in which platforms, as moving techno-social assemblages [1] distribute risk and reward in ways that implicate the livelihoods, agency, and bargaining power of actors across digital platforms’ value chains.

Each of these reports also contributes towards developing a southern understanding platform work. In contexts where there is an increasing reliance on technology providers for developmental outcomes and provision of public services, and informality is the dominant labour market structure, what does it mean to work on digital platforms? By situating the histories of informal work in India, and the intersectional identities constituting informality, these reports highlight how digital platforms can both reinforce and reorient the transaction of informal service work.

With restrictions on public mobility and the “hygiene theatre”[2]resulting from the outbreak of covid-19, digital labour platforms have sought to entrench their position in urban India as providers of ‘essential services’. As digital platforms gain centre-stage in India’s various marketplaces, it becomes all the more urgent to collectively reflect upon languages of strategic intervention that can enable a worker-first and southern imagination of digital platform work, and grassroots as well as policy thought around it.

We invite researchers, practitioners, activists and students from across disciplines to join us in this venture.

The event will be segmented into 4 presentations (of 10-12 minutes each), with space for discussion and feedback at the end of each presentation. The detailed agenda, and a reading list are provided below.

Agenda

5.00 p.m.: Introduction

5.05 p.m. Session 1: Perspectives from platformisation of domestic and care work in India - Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi, Centre for Internet and Society

5.25 p.m.: Session 2: Promise and prescriptions in the platformisation of food delivery work in Mumbai - Simiran Lalvani, University of Oxford

5.45 p.m.: Break

5.50 p.m.: Session 3: ‘Taxi’ nahi chalata hoon main (I don’t drive a Taxi): Flexibility and risk in the Ridehailing platform economy in Mumbai - Anushree Gupta, IIT Hyderabad

6.10 p.m.: Session 4: The unbearable lightness of being: Performing precarious cab-driving in Delhi - Sarah Zia, Independent researcher

6.30 p.m.: Discussion and Closing

Moderator: Noopur Raval, AI Now

Reading List

Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi (2021). Platforms, Power and Politics: Perspectives from Domestic and Care Work in India.
Through exhaustive platform-mapping and feminist ethnographic work, the authors uncovers the implications of digital platforms’ operations on domestic and care workers’ civil liberties, social protection, and gainful work outcomes. Access the full report here.
Simiran Lalvani (2019). Workers’ fictive kinship relations in Mumbai app-based food delivery.
This essay unpacks the kinship term bhai (brother) in order to understand the implications of such kinship sedimentations on food delivery work in Mumbai. Complicating the notion of an atomised worker, it details how having a fictive kinship ties with a bhai eases entry to platform work, upon joining ties guide negotiation with the discipline imposed by the employer and reflects on the experience of women workers. Read the essay here.
Sarah Zia (2019). Not knowing as pedagogy: Ride-hailing drivers in Delhi.
Ride-hailing platforms have “disrupted” public transport in India since their arrival but what hasn’t received enough attention is how these platforms create a deliberate regime of information invisibility and control to keep the drivers constantly on their toes which works to the companies’ advantage. This essay explores how the lack of transparency around algorithmic structures not only prohibits drivers from knowing completely and surely about their work (“why did I get this ride?”, “why did my ratings drop?”) but also how they build tactics of coping and earning from a place of unknowing. Read the essay here.
Anushree Gupta (2019). Ladies ‘Log’: Women’s Safety and Risk Transfer in Ridehailing.
Gig work produces new risks and safety concerns that require new mediations and negotiations. This post outlines the gendered cityscapes that drivers in the ride hailing sector navigate on an everyday basis. Building on insights from fieldwork in the ridehailing economy in Mumbai, the essay argues that drivers rely not only on their spatial knowledge of the city, but also on social knowledge that genders social exchange, predicates identities and draws boundaries. Analysing women’s presence as workers and passengers/customers, the author highlights the figure of the woman and the gendered forms of labour that underpin gig workers’ everyday realities. Read the essay here.
Noopur Raval (2019). Power Chronography of Food-Delivery Work.
This essay presents the observations around the design of temporality within app-based food-delivery platforms in India. It draws on semi-structured interviews by field-researcher Rajendra and his time spent “hanging out” with food-delivery workers who are also often referred to as “hunger saviors” and “partners” in the platform ecosystem in India. Read the essay here.
Simiran Lalvani (2021). Sexual contracts of app-based food delivery: An examination of social reproduction through feeding and being fed in Mumbai, India.
What happens to socially reproductive norms of feeding when apps seem to democratise work? How does this work mediate the tension between workers’, consumers’ choices and the prescription of dominant norms about feeding and being fed? This paper examines the socio-cultural burdens and risks that arise for workers and customers through 3 interrelated aspects – (i) household requirements of food delivery work, (ii) the definition, social meanings and anxieties associated with eating out and (iii) how platforms make anxiety inducing outside food popular, if not palatable. Read the chapter here.

[1] Edwards, D.W. and B. Gelms. (2018). ‘The rhetorics of platforms: Definitions, approaches, futures’, Present Tense: Special Issue on the Rhetoric of Platforms, 6(3).

[2] Thompson, D. (July 27, 2020). Hygiene Theater Is a Huge Waste of Time. The Atlantic. Available at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/scourge-hygiene-theater/614599/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/platforms-power-and-politics-digital-labour-in-india

COVID-19 Charter Of Recommendations on Gig Work

Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon — 2020-05-13T08:53:02Z

Tandem Research and the Centre for Internet and Society organised a webinar on 9 April 2020, with unions representing gig workers and researchers studying labour rights and gig work, to uncover the experiences of gig workers during the lockdown. Based on the discussion, the participants of the webinar have drafted a set of recommendations for government agencies and platform companies to safeguard workers’ well being. Here are excerpts from this charter of recommendation shared with multiple central and state government agencies and platforms companies.

Summary of discussions from the COVID-19 and Gig Economy webinar, authored by Zothan Mawii, Tandem Research

Contributors

Aayush Rathi, Ambika Tandon and Tasneem Mewa, The Centre for Internet and Society, India
Aditi Surie, Indian Institute for Human Settlements
Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami, IT for Change
Astha Kapoor, Aapti Institute
Dharmendra Vaishnav, Indian Delivery Lions (IDL)
Janaki Srinivasan, International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore
Kaveri Medappa, University of Sussex
Pradyumna Taduri, Fairwork Foundation
Rakhi Sehgal, Gurgaon Shramik Kendra
Sangeet Jain, Researcher
Shaik Salauddin, Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT)
Shohini Sengupta, Assistant Professor of Research, Jindal School of Banking and Finance
Simiran Lalvani, Independent researcher
Tanveer Pasha, Ola, Taxi 4 Sure and Uber Drivers and Owners’ Association (OTU)
P. Vignesh Ilavarasan, Researcher and professor, IIT Delhi
Vinay Sarathy, United Food Delivery Partners’ Union (UFDPU)
Vinay K. Sreenivasa, Advocate, Alternative Law Forum
Zothan Mawii, Iona Eckstein and Urvashi Aneja, Tandem Research

Context

The nationwide lockdown in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on ‘gig workers’ working for on-demand service platforms such as those providing ride-hailing, home-based work and food delivery services and also e-commerce companies. Those driving for on-demand transportation companies have lost their source of livelihood as services remain suspended.

Workers for on-demand delivery and home-based services, on the other hand, have been deemed “essential” and continue to work although demand has fallen drastically. Earnings for delivery workers have fallen to as low as INR 100-300 per day for a whole day’s work. Workers face a high risk of contracting COVID-19 due to their exposure to multiple customers. Apprehensions are rising after a delivery worker for Zomato tested positive for COVID-19 in New Delhi. Demand has fallen further but delivery workers must continue to put themselves and their families’ health and safety at risk with limited or no provisions for personal protective equipment or other safety measures offered by companies.

The relief works announced by the central and state governments do not specifically provide for ‘gig workers’. At the same time, the measures announced by on-demand service companies are inadequate, ambiguous and inconsistent. The eligibility, manner and quantum of relief and the process of availing relief is unclear to workers.

We urge you to bolster the socio-economic and healthcare protections for ‘gig workers’ in India in light of the outbreak of COVID-19. Any efforts aimed at directing relief to ‘gig workers’ will have to be combined, involving the central and state governments and on-demand service companies.

We suggest that the measures adopted incorporate the recommendations outlined below. The recommendations have been drafted after discussion between civil society actors including labour unions from delivery and transportation sectors, researchers, and activists. A summary of the discussions leading to this charter of recommendations can be found here.

Charter of Recommendation on Gig Work

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/covid-19-charter-of-recommendations

Simiran Lalvani - Workers’ Fictive Kinship Relations in Mumbai App-based Food Delivery

Simiran Lalvani — 2020-05-19T06:25:54Z

Working in the gig-economy has been associated with economic vulnerabilities. However, there are also moral and affective vulnerabilities as workers find their worth measured everyday by their performance of—and at—work and in every interaction and movement. This essay by Simiran Lalvani is the first among a series of writings by researchers associated with the 'Mapping Digital Labour in India' project at the CIS, supported by the Azim Premji University, that were published on the Platypus blog of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC). The essay is edited by Noopur Raval, who co-led the project concerned.

Originally published by the Platypus blog of CASTAC on July 4, 2019.

Summary of the essay in Hindi: Audio (mp3) and Transcript (docx)

Anthropologists have studied the role of kinship relations at the workplace in terms of how employers (De Neve, 2008) and workers use them (Parry, 2001). By contrast, digital labour scholars focus more on economic wellbeing and questions of fair work. But we know from the work of Mauss, Hart (Hart, 2000; Mauss, 2002) and others that all economic exchanges are also social relations. Additionally, economic and moral logics are different manifestations of the same ‘kernel of human relationships’ (Kofti, 2016). In the context of app-based food delivery work in Mumbai, workers’ actions and decisions were guided by them putting themselves in another’s shoes. Such moral acts of understanding and having understood were, as I will demonstrate, instances of Max Weber’s conception of verstehen or interpretative understanding which was important to understanding individuals’ participation in social relationships. This led me to explore gig-workers’ kinship relations at work, and their role in the existence and reproduction of these workers and this ‘new’ work.

This essay unpacks the values and expectations from the kinship term bhai (brother) in order to understand the morality invoked through its usage by app-based food delivery workers in Mumbai. In doing so, it considers the implications of such kinship sedimentations on the experience of workers in the gig economy, their negotiation with the discipline imposed by the employer and the experience of women workers who operate out of these kinship ties. I was compelled to notice the figure of the bhai – a male friend or acquaintance who would not only recruit but also provide various kinds of support on the job, helping app-based platforms maintain their workforce. I also interviewed female delivery workers in Mumbai and noticed that this brotherhood did not extend to them in the same way.

Bhai is a Hindi word for ‘brother’ but in Bambaiyya Hindi (a non-canonical form of Hindi spoken in Mumbai) it signifies an influential or respected male figure who offers support and is trustworthy due to relatedness. Bhai and variations like bhaiyya lubricate daily transactions between auto-rickshaw drivers, grocers, watchmen or any unrelated man and woman with a sociality of kinship.

The role and functions of understanding by bhais in gig work

Acts of brotherly help and disciplining reveal that material actions are intertwined with an ethic of care, thereby illustrating the role of kinship as central to the economic work in the gig economy. Historically, the informal work of food delivery in Mumbai has been organised along the lines of caste, region (Quien, 1997) and familial networks. Within gig work, belonging to the city is a requirement as bhais recruit, advice and protect new joinees from their neighbourhood or communities as older brothers. Team leaders who occupy a position between the worker and the middle management at these companies are bhais that discipline, control and maintain the workforce for the company.

Prior to joining, newbies would ask friends about their experience and even make deliveries with their friends to understand the work. Bhais offer support by riding pillion, arriving at ‘unsafe’ delivery locations at night or assisting a worker if the customer was drunk or unwilling to pay for their order.

Like other gig work communities that network to produce tacit knowledge about work (Gray, Suri, Ali, & Kulkarni, 2016) the relationships of brotherhood in food delivery help workers gain knowledge about the rules of the company, while also helping them find a way around the rules. A bhai might offer to make an ID on behalf of those who were unable to do so due to lack of documents or offer an existing ID to those who may have been disabled or blocked by the company.

Bhais, on the basis of relatedness due to experience of gig work, understand the needs of other gig workers. I suggest that this is verstehen and not simply a reflexive understanding since they, much like sociologists, also understood the nature of the situation (Tucker, 1965) that creates this relationship of relatedness and the importance of such a relationship in sustaining their future in this work as well as the future of this work.

Leaning on brotherhood to ‘safely’ deliver food as gig workers

Companies push a narrative of how working-class, male food delivery workers are safe to interact with because this work leads to working class men now arriving at the doorstep of the protected middle-class domestic sphere. Discourses of safety and trustworthiness are crucial to companies due to the middle-class, Indian anxiety around the separation of working-class men, considered dangerous and potential perpetrators of crime, from middle-class women, the victims of such crimes (Phadke, 2007).

In India, leaving one’s footwear outside before entering ‘sacred’ spaces like homes and temples is considered respectful. A notice outside an Uber Dost office in suburban Mumbai reads jootey-chhapal baahar nikaley or please leave your footwear outside – revealing an extension of the sacredness associated with familial spaces to the work place. (Image credit: author)

Since working class men are considered dangerous occupants of public space, how do workers feel safe and carefree in the everyday? The bhai who understands offers material support, protects and guides workers but is also understood as enabling a carefreeness in workers that makes this work and working-class men’s navigation of the public possible. Consider the case of Adarsh, an 18-year-old app-based worker who makes deliveries using a bicycle. Workers started helping him by offering to drop him to the delivery location on their motorcycles if they were headed in the same direction. As he described to me, he felt at ease knowing someone had his back: Abhi ye log support ke liye rehte hai toh apne ko tension nahi rehta hai chalo bhai support ke liye apne peeche khada hai. (One does not feel tense if one knows that there is a brother backing one up).

Exclusions from brotherhood in the gig economy

App-based food delivery has opened up the historically male-dominated line of work to women in India but that has not insulated it from patriarchal norms.

Food delivery work in Mumbai has historically been male dominated work – be it the ubiquitous dabbawallas (carriers of home-cooked meals) or those working as delivery ‘boys’ in udupis, restaurants, fast food companies and with hawkers. (Image credit: author)

One married woman worker expressed her discomfort with male riders referring to women workers as bacchi (Bambaiyya slang for younger brother) since it collapsed a sense of formality and familiarity that could be acceptable to young, unmarried girls. Women workers were aware that women have a high attrition in food delivery. They cannot afford to reject kinship constructions because such relations make work possible and tolerable in the everyday so they modulate the correct amount of kinship ties with a ‘respectable distance.’

The brotherhood of workers is not uniform or homogeneous since men’s ability to participate in this fictive kinship can be constrained either due to their identities or inability to support strikes.

Brotherhood absorbs risks for workers and allows workers to be bindaas, presenting an opportunity for tactical resistance. Leveraging brotherhood as a platform (Gillespie Tarleton, 2010), workers would strike and companies having understood the role of brotherhood too, would offer the position of 'team leader' to leaders of such strikes. Most bhais chose moral and affective bonds of brotherhood over such a 'promotion.'

Working in the gig-economy has been associated with economic vulnerabilities, however there are also moral and affective vulnerabilities as workers find their worth measured everyday by their performance of—and at—work and in every interaction and movement. Such a display of verstehen by the delivery workers is a response to engaging with a world of work that continuously measures one’s credibility and ties it to material rewards. It can be read as an attempt to secure an income and guard one’s sense of self.

References

De Neve, G. (2008). ‘We are all sondukarar (relatives)!’: Kinship and its morality in an urban industry of Tamilnadu, South India. Modern Asian Studies, 42(1), 211–246. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X0700282X

Gillespie Tarleton. (2010). Politics of Platforms. New Media and Society, 12(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738

Gray, M. L., Suri, S., Ali, S. S., & Kulkarni, D. (2016). The Crowd is a Collaborative Network. Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing – CSCW ’16, 134–147. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2819942

Hart, K. (2000). Kinship, Contract and Trust: The Economic Organization of Migrants in an African City Slum. In D. Gambetta (Ed.), Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations (pp. 176–193). University of Oxford.

Kofti, D. (2016). Moral economy of flexible production: Fabricating precarity between the conveyor belt and the household. Anthropological Theory, 16(4), 433–453. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499616679538

Mauss, M. (2002). The gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge.

Parry, J. P. (2001). Ankalu’s Errant Wife: Sex, Marriage and Industry in Contemporary Chhattisgarh. Modern Asian Studies, 35(4), 783–820. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X01004024

Phadke, S. (2007). Dangerous Liaisons: Women and Men: Risk and Reputation in Mumbai. Economic and Political Weekly, 42(17), 1510–1518.

Quien, A. (1997). Mumbai’s Dabbawalla: Omnipresent Worker and Absent City-Dweller. Economic and Political Weekly, 32(13), 637–640.

Tucker, W. T. (1965). Max Weber’s Verstehen. The Sociological Quarterly, 6(2), 157–165. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.1965.tb01649.x

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/simiran-lalvani-workers-fictive-kinship-relations-app-based-food-delivery-mumbai

Zothan Mawii - COVID-19 and Relief Measures for Gig Workers in India

Zothan Mawii (Tandem Research) — 2020-05-19T05:41:57Z

CIS is cohosted a webinar with Tandem Research on the impact of the COVID-19 response on the gig economy on 9 April 2020. It was a closed door discussion between representatives of workers' unions, labour activists, and researchers working on gig economy and workers' rights to highlight the demands of workers' groups in the transport, food delivery and care work sectors. We saw this as an urgent intervention in light of the disruption to the gig economy caused by the nationwide lockdown to limit proliferation of COVID-19. This is a summary of the discussions that took place in the webinar authored by Zothan Mawii, a Research Fellow at Tandem Research.

Re-posted from Tandem Research (April 14, 2020)

List of Participants

Aayush Rathi, Ambika Tandon and Tasneem Mewa, The Centre for Internet and Society, India (Co-organisers)
Zothan Mawii, Iona Eckstein and Urvashi Aneja, Tandem Research (Co-organisers)
Aditi Surie, Indian Institute for Human Settlements
Astha Kapoor, Aapti Institute
Dharmendra Vaishnav, Indian Delivery Lions (IDL)
Janaki Srinivasan, International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore
Kaveri Kaliyanda, The University of Sussex
Pradyumna Taduri, Fairwork Foundation
Rakhi Sehgal, Independent researcher
Shaik Salauddin, Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT)
Simiran Lalvani, Independent researcher
Tanveer Pasha, Ola, Taxi 4 Sure and Uber Drivers and Owners’ Association (OTU)
Vinay Sarathy, United Food Delivery Partners’ Union (UFDPU)

What relief measures do gig workers need during this pandemic?

The coronavirus pandemic has the world in its grips, and exposed the fragility of our economic systems and societal structures. The ensuing lockdown and physical distancing measures put in place by states to control the spread of the virus has impacted citizens differently and largely along class lines. While white collar workers remain relatively insulated as they work from home and have their essentials delivered, it has laid bare the vulnerabilities faced by India’s largely informal workforce. Since announcing the lockdown and the exodus of migrant workers from cities, the central and state governments in India have announced a number of relief measures for workers. However, those working on on-demand platforms have been excluded, while relief measures announced by a few platforms are inadequate to provide meaningful protection, leaving workers to fall at the cracks. Tandem Research and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) hosted a webinar on 9th April with a group of union leaders and researchers to draft a charter of demands for platforms and government to ensure better protection for gig workers.

We heard from 4 union leaders about the situation facing workers on the ground and the shortcomings of the measures platforms claim to be taking to ensure their workers' safety and protection. This piece recaps some of the issues that were uncovered during the meeting.

Tanveer Pasha, President of Ola, Taxi 4 Sure and Uber Drivers and Owners’ Association (OTU) and Shaik Salauddin, President of the Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT) pointed out that while Ola Cabs and Uber claim to have instructed drivers on safety and hygiene measures and provided personal protective equipment (PPE), in reality their efforts have been wanting. The unions themselves have been conducting these awareness drives while IFAT purchased masks for drivers in Telangana. On-demand food delivery services have also not provided workers with any PPE, although they have been deemed essential workers and must continue to interact with customers and restaurants as they go about their tasks.

High on the list of concerns facing gig workers was income security and the security of their jobs once the lockdown is lifted. Transportation companies Uber and Ola cab have suspended services although some drivers in Bengaluru, working with OTU have pivoted to delivering essential goods or transporting healthcare workers. The number of orders on on-demand food delivery services has dropped drastically too. Gig workers are earning little to no money during this time and have little recourse to savings or other safety nets.

Unions are demanding that workers are paid a sum of money to tide them over during this time, which can be paid back to the platforms without interest. Unions argue that the commissions charged by platform companies can be used to cover these costs and even call for a reduction in the commission after the lockdown is lifted so that workers can recover financially.

Ola Cabs and Zomato have started funds to support their workers, taking donations from the public and from management, but workers are yet to see the benefits of the funds. With little transparency or clarity as to how these funds will operate, unions and workers are left wondering if this is solely a publicity move on the part of platforms. No announcements have been made regarding these funds - who is eligible for the fund? What are the criteria workers will have to meet to receive funds? Will workers have to pay the amount back to the platforms? If yes, will it carry interest? Will workers’ ratings or the hours they’ve logged on the app be used to determine their eligibility?

The government announced a moratorium on EMI and loan repayments, and has directed the RBI to set guidelines. Some state governments have also announced waivers on house rent payments. While these measures should have eased the pressure on gig workers, that hasn’t been the case - informal lenders and non banking financial companies (NBFC) have continued to ask workers for payments, flouting the RBI guidelines. In the absence of enforcement from the government, gig workers are unable to reap the benefits of directives designed to relieve the financial pressure they are currently under.

Delivery workers find themselves in a double bind - they have been deemed essential workers by the government and on-demand services remain up and running. However, with few restaurants remaining open and few orders coming in, they are forced to work long hours for little money, and in risky conditions as roads remain deserted because of the lockdown. Dharmender Vaishnav (Indian Delivery Lions) and Kaveri Kaliyanda (PhD scholar, University of Sussex) raised pertinent questions over the classification of delivery workers as essential workers - Who are the workers essential for? At what personal cost to their health and safety must delivery workers continue to serve the interests of platforms and their middle class customer base? This categorisation also allows on-demand food delivery companies to absolve themselves of the responsibility for ensuring workers receive wages - they can claim services continued to operate and shift the blame onto workers for not logging in. Many of the workers who have gone back to their native towns and villages are anxious that their accounts will be deactivated for not logging in.

These issues facing gig workers will be drafted into a set of demands for platforms and government to provide relief. However, many questions remain unanswered. While these measures may address the hardships gig workers face in the short term, it doesn’t address long standing issues that characterise this line of work. The precarity of gig workers stems from the marginal space they occupy in the labour market. As ‘partners’ or ‘independent contractors’, they are not entitled to social protection measures from the government nor are platforms obliged to provide them. Unlike construction workers or domestic workers-who are also informal workers but enjoy recognition of an organised body and some legislative protections-they remain largely invisible to policymakers and government. Getting gig workers this type of recognition will be crucial to ensure their wellbeing. In Karnataka, there are efforts underway to introduce regulations similar to California’s AB5 bill that recognises gig workers as employers eligible for state and employer sponsored benefits. Gig workers have been included in the draft Code on Social Security. However, regulating platforms to make them more accountable and safeguarding worker welfare is long overdue. It is especially urgent at this time - the economic repression that will follow is likely to push more young jobseekers to the platform economy as a stop gap solution in the absence of suitable employment. The conditions of work platforms engender are far from ideal and should not become the model for jobs in the future.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/zothan-mawii-covid-19-and-relief-measures-for-gig-workers-in-india

A Compilation of Research on the Gig Economy

Aayush Rathi, Ambika Tandon, Sumandro Chattapadhyay — 2020-05-19T08:20:20Z

Over the past year, researchers at CIS have been studying gig economies and gig workers in India. Their work has involved consultative discussions with domestic workers, food delivery workers, taxi drivers, trade union leaders, and government representatives to document the state of gig work in India, and highlight the concerns of gig workers. The imposition of a severe lockdown in India in response to the outbreak of COVID-19 has left gig workers in precarious positions. Without the privilege of social distancing, these workers are having to contend with a drastic reduction in income, while also placing themselves at heightened health risks.

On gig economy during the COVID-19 pandemic

Supported by Feminist Internet Research Network led by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC)

Along with Tandem Research, we spoke to leaders of four unions that represent gig workers across the country about the risks and vulnerabilities that they are having to contend with in the face of the COVID-19 crisis. Zothan Mawii (Tandem Research), Ambika Tandon, and Aayush Rathi share key reflections in this essay published on The Wire. (link).
Based on the discussion, a charter of recommendations was prepared with contributions from participants, and was shared with public and private stakeholders. (link)

On domestic workers in the platform economy

Supported by Feminist Internet Research Network led by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC)

We discussed our ongoing research on the platformisation of domestic work in India with domestic workers, union members, and representatives from the Karnataka Labour Department in November 2019. Tasneem Mewa documented the rich discussion from this consultation. (link)

CIS worked with members of the Domestic Workers Rights Union to conduct field research on the lives and challenges of domestic workers in the platform economy. The following essays published on GenderIT capture their experiences of doing this research:

Parijatha G.P. writes about a “gated society management app,” MyGate, and the experiences of surveillance of migrant workers in Bengaluru. (link)
Radha Keerthna writes about the similarity in the conditions of domestic workers in the traditional and platform economy, particularly the precarity and invisibility of labour. (link)
Sumathi, a union leader, reflects on and her experience as an activist-researcher interacting with domestic gig workers through the course of our study. (link)
Zeenathunissa shares the difficulty of speaking to domestic workers in the gig economy, especially when workers undergo constant surveillance by employers and companies. (link)

On economic, algorithmic, and affective vulnerabilities of gig workers

Supported by Azim Premji University

CIS commissioned a set of four field studies of platform workers delivering food and driving taxis for platform companies in Mumbai and New Delhi. The researchers involved wrote a series of essays that were published by Platypus blog of CASTAC:

Anushree Gupta explores women’s presence as workers as well as passengers/customers in the ride hailing platform economy in Mumbai and related concerns of safety and risk mitigation. (link)
Sarah Zia highlights how algorithmic management of work and revenue targets of gig workers impact their everyday lives and plans for the future. (link)
Kinship networks are a critical source of safety and security for workers in the gig economy. Simiran Lalvani writes about the network among transportation workers in Mumbai, also reflecting on implications for those who are excluded. (link)
Noopur Raval and Rajendra Jadhav describe the unregulated and exploitative temporal structures of gig work, and how work-time of gig workers get configured by customer-facing promises of platform companies. (link)
The four researchers, led by Noopur Raval (co-PI for the project, held a roundtable discussion to reflect on methods, challenges, inter-subjectivities and possible future directions for research on the gig economy and its workers. (link)

The consultants - Noopur Raval, Anushree Gupta, Rajendra Jadhav, Sarah Zia and Simiran Lalvani - involved in this project on mapping digital labour in India’s platform economies (in Mumbai and New Delhi) gathered in Bengaluru on July 19, 2019 to share their preliminary field insights along with reflections on what it meant to do such studies, how they went about studying gig-work, and challenges that arose in their work. Watch the livestream from this discussion here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/a-compilation-of-research-on-the-gig-economy

Labour futures: Intersectional responses to southern digital platform economies

Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon — 2021-01-27T08:43:36Z

It is our great pleasure to announce that we are undertaking a two-year research project to comprehensively analyse dominant and emerging sectors in India’s platform economies. The project is funded by a research grant of USD 200,000 from the Internet Society Foundation.

The works emerging from this project will directly inform the ongoing challenges that various stakeholders are encountering in negotiating policy-making for the platform economy. It will attempt to address these challenges by bringing forth a southern and worker-first understanding of the platform economy. In the immediate term, the project will speak to labour law "reforms" underway in India. In the long term, it will engage with historical and forthcoming policy discourse regionally and in India around regulation of e-commerce, trade, competition, and digital platforms.

Provocations

Few recent developments in recent times have attracted as much public and scholarly and policy attention as the platform economy (and it’s various terminologies such as sharing/gig/on-demand economy). While it is widely acknowledged that the platform economy is rapidly growing, very little is known about its size other than monetary estimates of market size. Reliable quantitative data on even some of the fundamental aspects of the platform economy has been unavailable. Platform companies have been notoriously averse to publishing open datasets, and the dispersed nature of the platforms and their workforces has made data collection particularly challenging. Innovative methodologies of data collection are urgent.

Another reason for the increasing attention has been the increasing embeddedness of platforms in urban infrastructures, and their central role in urban life. Several camps building approaches to and analyses of the platform economy have already been set-up across and within disciplines. Economists have offered a narrative of platform work that emphasises efficiency and opportunity, with some discussion of disruption of employment relations. Sociological work has focused on two main topics to explain outcomes for platform work—precarity, which focuses on employment classification and insecure labour, and technological control via algorithms. Both of these suggest exploitative experiences of platform labour.

Despite a global proliferation of digital platforms and their integration within numerous urban operations, much of the examination around these tools has tended to focus on their implementation within northern cities. Qualitative work in southern contexts is growing, and has been rich, but has often used similar analytical lenses as work in the North. This is showcased by the outsized attention paid in scholarship to models of labour platformisation referred to with the monikers ‘Uberisation’ and ‘Uber for X’, which limit the imagination of the platform economy to on-demand work. This research team’s work of platformisation in the domestic work sector in India has shown how such work, while crucial, essentialises a male and techno-centric formulation of the experiences of platform labour. There is an urgent need for a southern-led analytic approach to platform economies, which emphasises labour force intersectionalities, informalities in southern contexts, connections to conventional labour markets economics and regulation, and institutional voids in southern economies.

Hypothesis and research questions

The central hypothesis for this research project is that the generation of systematic macro-level data and robust regulatory documentation will lead to effective policy-making and advocacy. This can achieve secure and gainful labour market outcomes for workers in rapidly digitising southern economies. Achieving these outcomes will require multi-pronged strategies that can create pathways for structural changes. Such strategies include top-down approaches which will support regulatory and legislative policies, and judicial action through evidence-building. We will also focus on the embedding of bottom-up approaches in regulatory processes such as through workers’ organisation and resistance.

The broad research questions for this project are:

What are the determinants and characteristics, historical and emergent, of digital platform entities’ recruitment, workforce management and economic value creation strategies?
What institutional roles, vis-à-vis civil society, markets and the state, are digital platform entities in the global south(s) occupying and seeking to occupy?
What are (a) regulatory, (b) corporate policy and (c) individual/collective labour responses that can generate equitable and gainful outcomes for workers in the digital platform economies?

Research team

The research project will be led by Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon, along with Amber Sinha. Shayna Robinson, from the Internet Society Foundation, will be supporting our endeavours.

Work with us

The success of this project will be contingent on inter/trans-disciplinary approaches to generate sustainable and gainful work outcomes for the bodies labouring in the platform economies. In addition to stakeholder groups directly engaged in the platform economies, we plan to work with a diverse set of individuals and groups, including public interest technologists, economists, practitioners, labour and technology historians, and designers.

If you are interested in contributing to this project and collaborating on similar agendas, do reach out to either Aayush Rathi (aayush@cis-india.org) or Ambika Tandon (ambika@cis-india.org).

Do keep an eye out on CIS’s website and social media handles for listings of specific work opportunities on this and other projects. One such opportunity is here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/labour-futures-intersectional-responses-to-southern-digital-platform-economies

Your economy, our livelihoods: A policy brief by the All India Gig Workers’ Union

W.C. Shukla, Rikta Krishnaswamy, Rohin Garg, Gunjan Jena, and S.B. Natarajan — 2024-01-31T00:02:12Z

In this policy brief, the All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU) presents its critique on NITI Aayog’s report on India’s platform economy. Through experiences from over 3 years of organising gig workers across India, they highlight fallacies in the report that disregard workers’ experiences and realities. They present alternative recommendations that are responsive to these realities, and offer pathways towards rights-affirming futures for workers in the platform economy.

Click to download the full report

Alternative recommendations towards rights-affirming futures for workers in the platform economy

Regulating the unchecked rise of platforms and the platform workforce

The rise of platforms will not only affect workers in blue collar or grey collar jobs but also engulf other service sectors that currently provide permanent and dignified employment. The platform and gig work paradigm must not be used as a way to further deregulate the Indian economy by subterfuge.

Robust regulatory mechanisms and worker protections must be extended to the gig economy and other forms of perennial employment threatened by the new Central labour codes. Gig workers must be recognised as employees with a clear test of employment enshrined in law.

A stronger push towards better paradigms of work can only come from alternative models of platform work. It is essential that the government foster the creation of platform cooperatives in certain service sectors. Such platform cooperatives will mitigate market concentration that results from the network effects of large private platforms, offer greater stability than profit-oriented private platforms, and offer genuine pro-people alternatives.

Securing data rights and employment security

Gig workers must be guaranteed individual and collective rights to their data collected and stored by platforms. Workers’ data should belong to the workers. Workers should be able to access verified records of their training (if any) and work contributions. The government should prescribe standards to ensure that these records are machine-readable and universally inter-operable. In addition, workers must have easy access to verified receipts for each successful task performed on the platform.

Centering gender-responsive protections for workers facing intersectional vulnerabilities

Platform work is uncritically accepted as a panacea for women without taking a deeper look at labour practices, and how women workers may be particularly vulnerable to workplace risks and exploitation.

Considering these vulnerabilities, there must be legal and regulatory measures enabling women to participate in the gig economy more fully—for example, creches, sexual harassment prevention measures, equal wages, and proper hours and working conditions. Crucially, there should be safety provisions for all gig workers, especially for women who face greater dangers of harassment. Importantly, accessible and efficient enforcement mechanisms must be introduced to operationalise schemes and rights for women workers.

Securing minimum social protection guarantees for all workers on digital platforms

Effective minimum wages of INR 26,000 per month must be enforced as demanded by the Joint Platform of Central Trade Unions in India. This figure must be used to determine the minimum earnings for an hour’s worth of work on a platform.

Provision for Provident Fund (PF) must be introduced, and a bank account that does not require minimum balances or related charges must also be guaranteed. Social insurance measures must be guaranteed including health insurance, personal accident insurance, pension, maternity benefits, and disability benefits. In addition, the state government must consider waiving off charges relating to fuel surcharges and parking expenses/ penalties for gig workers, while on duty.

Security and safety for women workers must be addressed by issuing government ID cards for gig workers. Gig workers are required to travel to unknown localities, where residents tend to be suspicious of them. The government ID card will help workers establish their identity and increase their credibility among the residents.

Social security legislation and a tripartite board (with representation of workers and worker organisations, government, and platforms) must be constituted to ensure registration of all platform-based gig workers and facilitate their access to social security. The law should cover all those persons who are engaged in professions that are using digital platforms for their last mile delivery.

Building accountability mechanisms for financial inclusion measures on platforms

While including gig workers into the formal banking system is essential, this must not be used as a pretext to ensnare them into debt traps. Should the government wish to use platforms as a lever for financial inclusion, it must mandate platforms to deposit a minimum amount above and beyond workers’ existing incomes towards their consumption. For platforms, existing schemes must be rejigged—Firstly, the burden of credit schemes must not be borne only by public sector banks; the private sector must also be directed to take on some of the lending. Secondly, interest rates may be lowered for such loans, but this reduced rate must be made conditional on ensuring a certain threshold of working conditions to gig workers.

Developing workforce estimation strategies that reflect workers’ realities

Workers in the gig economy must not blindly be lumped with the unorganised sector without an understanding of nuances within the broad definition of the gig economy. Assumptions that workers in the gig economy have alternate sources of income must be refuted. Rather, in the case of gig workers in the Indian context, ground realities show that this work actually constitutes primary sources of income.

Primary data must be collected across the country where platform work is seen as a clear option for individuals to choose as a profession. Thus, one can estimate the percentage of the population that depends on the gig economy in a consistent manner. Digital platforms must provide adequate data to state governments on the number of workers registered on the platform in every region (along with work time data) in order for governments to actively prepare for public infrastructure requirements required for such employment generation.

Contributors

Authors: W.C. Shukla, Rikta Krishnaswamy, Rohin Garg, Gunjan Jena, and S.B. Natarajan

Images: All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU)

Design: Annushka Jaliwala

About the All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU)

The All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU) is a registered trade union for all food delivery, logistics, and service workers that work on any app-based platforms in India.

Contact: contactaigwu@gmail.com

Connect: Twitter; Facebook

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/your-econonomy-our-livelihoods-a-policy-brief-by-the-all-india-gigi-workers-union

Workers’ experiences in app-based taxi and delivery sectors: Key initial findings from multi-city quantitative surveys

2024-02-16T01:27:07Z

In 2021-22, the labour research vertical at CIS conducted quantitative surveys with over 1,000 taxi and delivery workers employed in the app-based and offline sectors. The surveys covered key employment indicators, including earnings and working hours, initial investments and work-related cost burdens, income and social security, platform policies and management, and employment arrangements. The surveys were part of the ‘Labour Futures’ project supported by the Internet Society Foundation.

It has been over a decade since app-based delivery and taxi sectors began operations in India, and have since expanded to several metropolitan and smaller cities. These sectors together account for the largest proportion of the platform workforce in India. Workers’ collective action and demands have revealed extractive labour practices in the platform economy. However, there has been a dearth of reliable quantitative data on essential labour and economic wellbeing indicators for workers. In 2021-22, we conducted surveys with workers in the taxi and delivery sectors aiming to build an evidence base for worker-first policy-making in the platform economy. 1,048 workers were surveyed across four tier 1 and tier 2 cities—Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Lucknow, and Guwahati.

Research questions

What is the nature and scale of platform operations in the delivery and taxi sectors within various tier 1 and tier 2 cities in India?
What are the socio-economic contexts shaping workers’ decisions around transitioning in and out of the platform workforce in the delivery and taxi sectors?
What are the tangible and intangible costs, and conditions of work that workers navigate to sustain their employment on delivery and taxi platforms?
How does the assemblage of informal and formal structures, actors, and systems of work management shape economic outcomes for workers on delivery and taxi platforms?

Key initial findings

Diverse employment arrangements
There is a sizeable presence of heterogeneous work organisation systems on both app-based delivery and taxi sectors, which diverge from an on-demand model. These systems mediate multiple aspects of everyday work allocation and processes, spatio-temporal rhythms of work, platform design and management, modes of labour control, levels of reintermediation, and employment arrangements.

In the delivery sector, typologies are driven by platform models and work processes. Typologies of work organisation and control in the taxi sector, on the other hand, are centred around diverse employment arrangements and vehicle ownership models.

Socio-economic vulnerabilities impacting work outcomes
Workers in both the delivery and taxi sectors face a number of socioeconomic vulnerabilities that influence their entry and continued employment in platform work. Key motivating factors to enter platform work involved the lack of alternative employment opportunities (over 50 percent in both sectors) and the possibility of better pay than other available jobs (over 40 percent in both sectors).

An overwhelming proportion of workers (over 95 percent in both sectors) were engaged in platform work as their main source of income, as opposed to part-time employment. Workers also faced significant economic burdens in various ways such as being sole earners in their household, having multiple financial dependents, providing remittances back home, and so on. Worsening these burdens was the widespread income insecurity that workers faced in both sectors—for around 50 percent of them, earnings from platform work were insufficient for covering basic household expenses.

Insufficient earnings and rising work-related expenses
Workers' experiences highlight how the majority of workers are forced to deal with low-wage outcomes, worsened by a reduction in bonuses, and high operational work-related expenses. Earnings remain low and uncertain for workers despite the fact that they put in long work hours. At the median level, workers on delivery platforms were working 70 hours a week, and those on taxi platforms were working an even higher 84 hours a week.

In addition to platform charges and commissions, numerous work-related expenses such as fuel and vehicle maintenance costs are important factors that determine take home earnings for workers. The median net earnings, after accounting for all these costs, were INR 3,800 for delivery workers, and INR 5,000 for taxi workers. When adjusted for standard weekly work hours (48 hours/week), these earnings do not meet national minimum wage standards.

Absence of occupational health measures and social protection
Workers in both delivery and taxi sectors are already working immensely long hours in order to try and make adequate earnings on the platform, sometimes working almost double the amount when compared to standard weekly work hours. They also faced additional occupational health and safety risks during their work. Workers in both sectors faced grievous risks during work hours including those relating to road safety (around 80 percent), weather conditions (around 40 percent; 52 percent for delivery workers), theft (around 30 percent), and physical assault (around 25 percent).

To make matters worse, workers were not provided adequate social protections to cope with workplace safety risks. Workers in the taxi sector had very low levels of access to crucial protections such as health insurance (6 percent) and accident insurance (28 percent). Access was relatively higher for workers in the delivery sector—32 percent had access to health insurance, and 62 percent had access to accident insurance. However, workers faced several barriers in receiving these benefits and protections, owing to burdensome and unreliable insurance claims processes.

Upcoming outputs
We hope that findings from these surveys are instrumental in speaking to extant and developing labour policy interventions, as well as adjacent policy areas including social protection, urban and infrastructural development, and sectoral regulation.

In the coming weeks, we will be publishing a series of city briefs for each of the four survey cities. These briefs will be presented as data visualisation narratives, showing how workers’ experiences with platforms vary across tier 1 and tier 2 cities.

Shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/workers-experiences-in-app-based-taxi-and-delivery-sectors-key-initial-findings-from-multi-city-quantitative-surveys

Inputs to the public consultation on the draft Code on Social Security (Central) Rules, 2020 - Joint submission by an alliance of trade unions and civil society organisations

Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon — 2020-12-22T09:52:13Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) contributed to a joint submission by IT for Change and various trade union and civil society organisations in response to the public consultation of the Ministry of Labour and Employment on the draft Code on Social Security Rules, 2020. Here are the overview, full text of the submitted inputs, and names of organisations and individuals who endorsed them.

Cross-posted from IT for Change.

Full text of submitted inputs: Download (PDF)

Overview

A legal framework that addresses workers’ rights in the digital economy from all angles is imperative to address labour concerns in the 21st century. We welcome the inclusion of platform workers and gig workers in the Code on Social Security, 2020. However, we have some concerns regarding the draft Code on Social Security (Central) Rules, 2020 (hereinafter the “Draft Rules”), vis-à-vis the implementation of platform workers’ rights. In this document, we first list down our overall concerns before proceeding to a section specific critique in the format required by the consultation.

1. Failure to universalise social security for platform workers: In their current form, the Draft Rules do not provide a social security framework for platform workers founded on the cardinal principles of universal social security. A basic social protection floor for all platform workers, including benefits such as universal maternal care and accident insurance, has not been guaranteed. Instead, the Draft Rules impose an age limit for platform workers to be eligible for social security [Rule 50(2)(d)], and also confer on the government the power to prescribe additional eligibility criteria [Rule 50(2)(f)]. These provisions are likely to narrow the pool of workers who can avail the benefits under this law. Also, facilitation centres and toll-free helplines to onboard platform and gig workers into any future social security schemes have not been provided for in the Draft Rules, even though these were mentioned in the Code on Social Security, 2020.

2. Lack of clarity on aggregator contributions: The Draft Rules also indicate that aggregators will have to contribute towards any social security scheme that may be framed by the government. This is appreciated. However, further clarity on how these contributions will be assessed in the context of the reality of platform work arrangements is needed. Platform workers may work for several aggregators simultaneously, and be engaged as workers for intermittent and irregular periods of time. As it stands, the Draft Rules do not address how the minimum period of 90 days of being engaged as a platform worker is to be calculated — a mandatory eligibility criteria for registration under Rule 50(2)(d). It also does not outline how the number of days worked impacts the nature and extent of social protection that platform workers are eligible for. Additionally, under Guideline 6 of the Motor Vehicles Aggregators Guidelines, 2020 issued in November 2020, certain compliances are imposed on aggregators towards their drivers, such as health insurance and term insurance. It is unclear how obligations under the Motor Vehicles Aggregators Guidelines, 2020 will apply in consonance with aggregators’ contributions under the Draft Rules on the Code on Social Security, 2020.

3. Absence of clear criteria to determine exemption of aggregators from contributions to social security: Section 114(7)(ii) of the Code on Social Security, 2020 permits the central government to use its discretionary powers to exempt aggregators from contributions to platform workers’ social security. It would have been important for the Draft Rules to clearly spell out the conditions under which aggregators could be exempted to ensure that aggregators do not evade their responsibilities towards their platform workers and gig workers. This has not been done, and aggregator exemption is now possible solely at the discretion of the central government.

4. Flaws in the mechanisms outlined for constituting the National Social Security Board for Gig Workers and Platform Workers: There is currently no timeline for its constitution, leaving its existence to be determined as per the whims of the government. Furthermore, there is no transparency in the Draft Rules around the procedure by which the central government will nominate platform workers’ representatives to this Board. In this regard, the lack of a clearly spelt out role for trade unions and workers’ associations is also a major flaw, as workers’ organisations must have effective representation concerning social security schemes intended for their benefit.

5. No guarantees for workers’ data rights: We are also concerned that the Draft Rules attempt to create a centralised database of platform workers and gig workers, to be enabled by the sharing of data by aggregators with the state. This data will include workers’ personal data, and in the absence of personal data protection legislation, this has serious implications for workers’ data rights and privacy. It is imperative that the draft Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 be passed at the earliest to safeguard against state and/or aggregator excesses in this regard. We also recommend the inclusion of clear purpose and use limitation safeguards in these Draft Rules itself, as part of enshrining the right to privacy. Additionally, workers must have the right to edit, correct and dispute the records of aggregators, and a mechanism for such an audit must be established by the government. Workers must also have the right to retain a certified, machine-readable copy of their data.

6. Shortcomings of a centralised database: We also urge the central government to rethink the vision of a centralised database, and instead, explore the possibility of a federated architecture, with room for democratic and decentralised data management by workers themselves with involvement from state and local government agencies (building on labour welfare models). We are firmly of the view that the concentration of power and authority in the Central Government is unlikely to enable access to every last worker in a country of our complexity and size.

7. Inadequacies of the foundational legislation: We would also like to highlight how the foundational flaws of the Code on Social Security, 2020 mar the efficacy and effectiveness of the Draft Rules in being able to provide social security entitlements to platform and gig workers. Firstly, in Chapter 1, Section 2 of the Code, there is no clarification on what to do about platform aggregators repeatedly referring to their “platform workers” as “contractors” or “agents” in their legal contracts/documents. The definitions clause assumes that “agent”, “contractor” and “platform worker” are all separate and unique, unambiguous terms. It would have been important for the Draft Rules to clarify that if “agent” or “contractor” is being used to refer to a person performing platform work in any legal document or contract by an aggregator, the person should nonetheless be treated as a “platform worker”. Also, the Draft Rules should have specified that all workers associated with any of the nine classes of aggregators mentioned in the Seventh Schedule of the Code on Social Security, 2020 [ride sharing, food and grocery delivery, logistics, e-marketplace, professional services provider, healthcare, travel and hospitality, content and media services, and any other goods and services provider platforms] are to be treated as platform workers. Secondly, there should be clarity on the jurisdiction, i.e. under which ministry and legislative act, will “aggregators” function and operate, especially considering that a range of sectoral legislation in addition to labour laws are implicated in aggregator governance. Thirdly, the Code on Social Security, 2020 could have specified how the agency in charge of collection and management of aggregator contributions was to have been constituted. For example, it could have been conceived as a statutory and autonomous body, along the lines of the Employee State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) and Employee Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO). But this opportunity has been missed.

The following trade unions, civil society organisations and members of academia have endorsed this submission and its proposals:

Trade unions

All India Gig Workers Union

All India IT and ITeS Employees’ Union

All India Port & Dock Workers Federation

All India Railwaymens' Federation

Hind Mazdoor Sabha

Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers

National Federation of Indian Railwaymen

National Union of Seafarers of India

Civil society organisations

Aapti Institute

Gender at Work

GenDev Centre for Research and Innovation LLP

IT for Change

Kamgar va Majur Sangh

The Centre for Internet & Society

Tandem Research

TWN Trust

Paigam Network

Praxis - Institute for Participatory Practices

Partners in Change

Working People’s Charter, India

Members of academia

Divya K., Assistant Professor, Indira Gandhi National Tribal University

Dr. Rahul Sakpal, Assistant Professor, Tata Institute of Social Sciences

Vibhuti Patel, Retired Professor of Tata Institute of Social Sciences and SNDT Women's University, Mumbai

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/joint-submission-to-consultation-on-draft-code-on-social-security-central-rules-2020