Centre for Internet and Society

Platforms, Power, and Politics: Perspectives from Domestic and Care Work in India

Aayush Rathi, and Ambika Tandon — 2021-07-07T15:19:37Z

CIS has been undertaking a two-year project studying the entry of digital platforms in the domestic and care work in India, supported by the Association for Progressive Communications as part of the Feminist Internet Research Network. Implemented through 2019-21, the objective of the project is to use a feminist lens to critique platform modalities and orient platformisation dynamics in radically different, worker-first ways. Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi led the research team at CIS. The Domestic Workers’ Rights Union is a partner in the implementation of the project, as co-researchers. Geeta Menon, head of DWRU, was an advisor on the project, and the research team consisted of Parijatha G.P., Radha Keerthana, Zeenathunnisa, and Sumathi, who are office holders in the union and are responsible for organising workers and addressing their concerns.

The Executive Summary for the project report is below.

The full report, ‘Platforms, power, and politics: Perspectives from domestic and care work in India’, can be found here.

The press release can be found here.

Introduction

Paid domestic and care work is witnessing the entry of digital intermediaries over the past decade. More recently, there has been tremendous growth of digital platforms. This holds the potential to impact millions of workers in the sector, which is characterised by a long history of informality and exclusion from rights-according legal frameworks. Digital intermediation of domestic and care work has been a space of high-growth, but also high-attrition. In India, order books of digital platforms providing domestic and care work services were reported to have been growing by upto 60 percent month-on-month in 2016. This is expected to shift the organisation of workers and employment relations profoundly.

Broadly, the discourse on digital platforms providing home-based services can be summarised as follows: proponents argue that digitisation will act as a step towards bringing formalisation to the sector, while critics argue that platforms could replicate the exploitation of workers by further disguising the employer-employee relationship. Similar debates around lack of protections and precarity have also taken place in other occupations in gig work such as transportation and food delivery. In fact, the similarity in precarity and the informal nature of this relationship across gig work and domestic work has led to domestic workers being labelled the original gig workers. Domestic work is a particularly vulnerable and unprotected sector, which makes work in the sector qualitatively different from most other sectors in the gig or sharing economy.

Through a feminist approach to digital labour, our project aimed to examine the dynamics of platformisation in, and of domestic or reproductive care work. Our hypothesis was that platforms are reconfiguring labour conditions, which could empower and/or exploit workers in ways qualitatively different from non-standard work off the platform. In order to interrogate this further, we studied several aspects of the work relationship, including wages, conditions of work, social security, skill levels, and worker surveillance off platforms.

Methodology

We borrowed from ethnographic methods and feminist principles to co-design and implement the research tools with grassroots workers and organisers. Between June to November 2019, we conducted 65 in-depth semi-structured interviews primarily in New Delhi and Bengaluru. A majority of these were with domestic workers who were seeking or had found work through platforms. We also did interviews with workers who had found work through traditional placement agencies to compare our findings, and with representatives from platforms, government labour departments, and workers collectives. Of the workers we interviewed, a majority were women, but men were included as well. Interviews in New Delhi were undertaken by CIS, while interviews with workers in Bengaluru were undertaken by grassroots activists in Bengaluru, affiliated with the Domestic Workers Rights Union (DWRU).

In implementing the data collection approach, we employed feminist methodological principles of intersectionality, self-reflexivity, and participation. The methodology draws on standpoint theory, which encourages knowledge production that centres the lived experiences of marginalised groups. We were acutely aware of our own positionality as high income, Savarna researchers studying a sector dominated by Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi women from low income groups. This power differential was softened partially by involving DWRU through the course of the project. Workers across both field sites were also interviewed in spaces familiar to them, most often their homes, in languages that they were comfortable with including Hindi, Kannada, and Tamil.

Feminist principles also instrumental during the data analysis, with focus on intersectionality and self-reflexivity. We highlighted the ways in which inequalities of gender, income, migration status, caste, and religion are replicated and amplified in the platform economy. In particular, we discussed the impact of the digital gender gap in access and skills on workers’ ability to find economic opportunities.

Findings

Our typology of platforms mediating domestic work finds three types of platforms – (i) marketplace, or platforms that list workers’ data on their profile, provide certain filters for automated selection of a pool of workers, and charge a fee from customers for access to workers’ contact details, (ii) digital placement agency, or platforms that provide an end-to-end placement service to customers, identify appropriate workers on the basis of selection criteria, and negotiate conditions of work on behalf of workers, and (iii) on-demand platforms, or companies that provide services or ‘gigs’ such as cleaning on an hourly basis, performed by a roster of workers who are characterised as ‘independent contractors’.

When it comes to the role played by platforms in determining employment relations, there is a wide variation within and across platform categories. There are both weak and strong models of intervention. On one end of the spectrum are marketplaces, with minimal intervention in the recruitment process, and on the other on-demand platforms, that exact control over each aspect of work. Digital platforms reconfigure the conception of intermediaries in the domestic work sector, functioning as next-generation placement agencies. All three platform types contain aspects that provide workers agency, as well as those that reinforce their positions of low-power. Platform design impacts the role platforms play in setting conditions of work, but does not determine it entirely.

(Re)shaping the terms of work
Across the three types of platforms, wages are slightly higher than or matching those of workers off platforms. Some marketplace platforms have incorporated features to nudge customers towards setting higher wages, such as enforcing minimum wage standards, or informing customers of expected wages in their locality. Conversely, on-demand platforms charge a high rate of commission from workers, despite refusing to recognise them as employees. This indicates that this is a misclassification of an employment relationship, given that workers are unable to set their own conditions or wages for work. Despite the high rates of commission and appropriation of labour by platforms, on-demand workers earn higher wages than workers on other platforms. The relatively high wage is a result of marketing on-demand cleaning as professionalised and more skilled than day-to-day cleaning. Tasks in the sector continue to be distributed along the lines of gender and caste, as has historically been the case. Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi women are more likely to take up work such as cleaning and washing dishes, while men and women across castes are equally distributed in cooking work. Women dominate tasks such as elderly and childcare, as in the traditional economy. Workers in professionalised tasks such as deep cleaning that requires technical equipment and chemicals are almost entirely men.

Digital divides and workers’ agency
We find that workers are primarily onboarded onto platforms by learning about it from other workers, through onboarding camps held by platforms, or offline advertising by platforms. Such in-person onboarding techniques allows workers with no digital access or literacy to register themselves on marketplace platforms and digital placement agencies.

However, we find that low levels of education and digital literacy continue to impact platformed labour by creating a strong informational asymmetry between workers and platforms. For instance, we find that women workers from low income communities have very little information about how platforms work, causing deep distrust. Workers with digital devices and literacy (and therefore a relatively better understanding of the functionality of the platform), physical mobility and the resources to bear indirect costs that were outsourced to them were at a significant advantage in finding better-paying jobs. Workers who were seeking flexibility and were not necessarily dependent on the platform for their primary income were also better placed than those entirely dependent on platforms. Women workers tended to be disadvantaged on all these counts, limiting their agency and capacity to reap the benefits of the platform economy.

Across the three types of platforms, systems of placement and ratings add to the information asymmetry, as workers are not aware of the impact of ratings on their ability to find work or charge better wages. Ratings and filtering systems also hard-code the impact of workers’ social characteristics on their work. Workers are unable to exercise control over their data, further undermining their agency vis-a-vis platforms and employers. We identify a clear need for collective bargaining structures to protect workers’ rights, although platformed domestic workers remained distant from both domestic work unions and emergent unions of platform workers in other sectors.

Intersectionalities of formalisation
We find that inequalities of caste, class, and gender that have historically shaped the sector continue to be replicated or even amplified in the platform economy. What remains clear is that platforms in the domestic work sector adopt the logics of this sector, more than the converse. Platformisation is conflated with formalisation, and it is within this vector, from complete informality to piecemeal formalisation, that platforms operate. Labour benefits do not take the form of labour protections or welfare entitlements that are the central function of formalisation processes. Instead, the so-called benefits are intended to transform domestic workers to participate within the logics and vagaries of the market.

Policy Recommendations

Recognise and implement labour protections for domestic workers
Domestic workers have historically occupied the most vulnerable positions in the workforce, with limited legal protections. Exposed to the regulatory grey areas that platforms operate in, this doubly exposes domestic workers to precarious conditions of work. Despite an avowed move towards formalisation of domestic work, platform-mediated labour continues to retain characteristics of informal labour, even heightening some.

If pushed to do so, platform companies can be instrumental in resolving some of the implementation challenges that governments have faced in enforcing legislative protections sought to be made available to domestic workers. Platforms have databases of workers, which can be used to mandatorily register them for social security schemes offered by the government. This data can also be used for better policy making, in the absence of reliable statistics particularly on migrant workers in the informal economy.

Reduce the protective gap between employment and self-employment
The (mis)classification of “gig” work within labour law frameworks is still a matter that continues to be hotly debated within policy practitioners, legal scholarship, and civil society actors. Three positions, in particular, have been taken—treating gig workers as employees, independent contractors, or occupying a third intermediate category. More recently, there have been some legal victories guaranteeing employment protections and increasing platform companies’ accountability. However, these successes have been more visible in Global North jurisdictions.

Regardless of the resolution of these ongoing debates over employment status, labour frameworks should provide some universal protections to all categories of labour. Such protections must include universal coverage of social security, in addition to rights such as freedom of association, collective bargaining, equal remuneration and anti-discrimination. Policies geared towards achieving this objective would be significant in reducing the protective gaps between different categories of labour, and would particularly help historical and emerging occupational categories of workers such as “gig” workers and domestic workers.

Recognise the specific challenge(s) and potential of platformisation of domestic work
Platforms hold the potential of acting as effective facilitators in informal labour markets. Even when they do not replace existing recruitment pathways, they provide alternate ones. Workers were more likely to register on a platform if they were entering the domestic work labour market recently (often distress and migration driven), or had not enjoyed success with informal, word-of-mouth networks. However, platforms also heighten labour market insecurities, and create new ones. These potential risks need to be specifically recognised through appropriate frameworks, such as social security, discrimination law and data protection.

Tailor policy-making to platform models
We identify three types of platforms, each of which intervene to varying degrees in the work relationship. We recommend that digital placement agencies and marketplace platforms be registered with governments and enforce basic protections for workers such as provision of minimum wage, preventing abuse (including non-payment of wages) and trafficking. On-demand companies on the other hand, must be treated as employers, and workers be accorded employment protections including social security.

In addition to rights-based policy actions, legal-regulatory mechanisms geared towards mitigating the precariousness of platform-based work are required. This can take the shape of clarifying and expanding existing legal-regulatory formulations, or preparing new ones. Such policy making should factor in the power and information asymmetry between domestic workers (and gig workers, generally) and platforms.

Further, in the absence of health or retirement benefits, risks and indirect costs of operations are shifted from employers to workers. For instance, workers provide capital in the form of tools or equipment, support the fluctuation of business and income, and can be ‘deactivated’ from an application as a result of poor ratings or periods of inactivity. Any regulation aiming to extend employee status should mandate platforms to support such indirect costs.

Related Publications

1. Research notes with reflections from union members.
2. The event report from a stakeholder consultation with workers, unions, companies and government representatives.
3. A reflection note on the participatory approach taken by the project.
4. A paper with a comparative analysis of the policy landscape on domestic work in the platform economy.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/platforms-power-and-politics-perspectives-from-domestic-and-care-work-in-india

To be Counted When They Count You: Words of Caution for the Gender Data Revolution

noopur — 2022-02-01T01:06:08Z

In 2015, after the announcement of the SDGs or Sustainable Development Goals, a new global developmental framework through the year 2030, the United Nations described data as the “lifeblood of decision-making and the raw material for accountability” for the purpose of realizing these developmental goals. This curious yet key link between these new developmental goals and the use of quantitative data for agenda setting invited a flurry of big data-led initiatives such as but not limited to Data2X, that sought to further strengthen and solidify the relationship between ‘Big Development’ and ‘Big Data.’

One of those SDG goals (Goal 5) prioritizes gender equality and empowerment of women and girls not only as a standalone goal but also as a crucial factor to realizing the other goals. In response, several academic and non-profit initiatives have begun to interpret and conduct data-led gendered development or the “gender data revolution”. As with other data discourses, the gender-data discourse is also one of ‘speed’, charging ahead using a variety of quantitative and visualization approaches to reveal and eventually solve gendered problems of development.

These interventions also invite some classical critical questions: who is setting the agenda for the gender data revolution and who are its imagined subjects? How are questions of participation and asymmetries of power in developmental research being addressed? How does the gender data revolution address the situatedness as well as incompleteness of data records in the Global South (where most sites of intervention are)? Speaking specifically to the theme of this special issue (‘cross-cultural feminist technologies’), this paper demonstrates how the welfarist discourse of data-led gender development is, in fact, assembled through the overwhelming enumeration of female-identifying bodies in the Global South.

The paper offers critical historical insights from the fields of international development, anthropology, and postcolonial history to caution against both, the possible harms of gender disaggregated datafication as well as the consequences of non-participatory datafication of women, the subjects of the gender data revolution.

Read the full paper here.

This study was undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development network supported by the International Development Research Centre, Canada, and is shared under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

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/to-be-counted-when-they-count-you-words-of-caution-for-the-gender-data-revolution

Learning through Archives: A Colloquium on Digital Scholarship

praskrishna — 2016-11-05T11:27:10Z

FLAME University had invited Centre for Internet & Society to join a colloquium to delve into the opportunities and challenges of digital studies in India, with particular emphasis on pedagogy and the archive.

P.P. Sneha represented the Centre for Internet & Society in the event held at Pune on October 16, 2016. Asian Art Archive, Ashok Ranade Music Archive, National Film Archives of India, and National Museum also participated in the dialogue.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/learning-through-archives-a-colloquium-on-digital-scholarship

Between Platform and Pandemic: Migrants in India's Gig Economy

Kaarika Das and Srravya C — 2021-12-06T16:04:07Z

In response to the rising number of COVID-19 cases in India, the central government announced a nationwide lockdown in March 2020.

Initially this was organised for three weeks, but it stretched on for over three months. With a mere four hours’ notice before banning all non-‘essential’ economic activities overnight, the Indian government imposed what has been described as one of the most stringent lockdowns worldwide. It shut down the railways, inter-state bus services, and all industrial, commercial, cultural and religious activities, bringing the economy to a standstill. In the weeks that followed this announcement, hundreds of poor migrant workers walked thousands of kilometers from major cities back to their villages, as the lockdown gutted their livelihood without providing any safety nets. Images of migrant workers traveling by foot for days forced the Indian public to acknowledge the existence and struggles of migrant workers. The pandemic has exposed the frailty of their livelihoods and brought their vulnerability into sharp focus.

The ‘gig’ economy in particular shapes the lives and livelihoods of a large migrant workforce. Gig workers working for on-demand platform services have been adversely impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Cab-hailing services came to a standstill in several Indian cities as the central government imposed a nationwide lockdown for over two months, restricting people’s movements. Food delivery and home-based services were deemed ‘essential’ services and continued to operate during the lockdown. However, migrant workers received little support from the platform companies as well as the government. Despite the overwhelming presence of migrants in the workforce, discussions of the so-called ‘platform economy’ have rarely focused on their vulnerabilities.

Neither here nor there

In 2000, Omer (all names are pseudonyms) migrated to Hyderabad from a village in the neighbouring Nagarkurnool district. He worked as a cab driver for a travel agency in the city. After working in the city for five years, he brought his wife and children to live with him. When Uber and Ola launched in Hyderabad in 2014, he became a ‘driver partner’ providing on-demand cab services. The nationwide lockdown since March 2020 gutted his livelihood, as movement was severely restricted. The burden of rent and living expenses in the absence of his regular income forced Omer to return to his village in Nagarkurnool district. He weighed his earning potential as a cab driver against the risk of being infected and chose to leave the city.

However, the choice to leave the city did not exist for all. Mani, a cab driver now based in Chennai, had moved to the city 10 years ago from a neighbouring town, Ranipet, to find employment as a driver. Before joining Ola, he worked as a night shift driver for an IT company in the city. In the wake of the pandemic and lockdown, he avoided returning to his hometown fearing the wrath of lenders he owed money to. He had taken out a loan while he could still work over 10 hours a day. Lenders in towns such as Ranipet are known to visit the homes of borrowers and harass them in the presence of family and neighbours. Fearing public humiliation, Mani decided to stay in Chennai. Similarly, Jagan, another driver in Hyderabad, also chose not to return to his village which was just 80kms from the city. He explained that only those who owned land could afford to return to the village. Without any land or house, he had nothing to go back to.

Jagan and Mani were unable to earn their livelihood during the lockdown. Fuel prices were a major concern for workers in cab-hailing services as well as food delivery. Within three months of the lockdown, the price of petrol was increased by about Rs. 14 (approx. $0.19). Far from accounting for this rise in fuel prices, on-demand platforms reduced the per kilometer rates for workers. For instance, Swiggy, a popular on-demand food delivery company, brought down the per-kilometer rate for its delivery executives from Rs. 35 (approx. $0.48) per delivery to Rs.15 (approx. $0.21). Since the lockdown in March, platform workers have staged repeated strikes, protesting against the plummeting rates, suspension of incentives and demanding extension of moratorium on loan repayments.

Those who were unable to return to their hometown or village had to find alternate sources of income to continue to sustain their families’ basic needs. Both Jagan and Mani began working as contract labour in nearby construction sites.

For Omer, who returned to his village, things were not great either. A couple of months after his return, he was still on the lookout for a job while occasionally driving a tractor or lorry. Having lived in the city for close to two decades, returning to his village had not been easy. Besides the struggle to find gainful employment, adjusting to rural life had been a challenge:

I am 40 years old – the chances of me getting a job is negative… my situation has become like ‘Dhobi ka kutta na ghar ka na ghat ka’ [I belong neither here nor there] – Omer

Migrant Workers in a Gig Economy

Even though the above narratives of migrant workers are specific to the challenges presented by COVID-19, the labour and livelihood outcomes are a result of structural conditions long preceding the pandemic’s outbreak.

Reports suggest that a significant proportion of platform workers in Indian cities are migrants who moved there in search of employment. While the exact magnitude of migrants engaged in digital platforms is hard to discern, our interviews with trade union leaders and migrant platform workers indicated that intra-state migrants from neighboring peri-urban and rural districts constitute a large part of the platform workforce. Dharmendra, who heads Indian Delivery Lions—a union of food delivery partners in Jaipur – pointed out that as rural India remains starved of adequate livelihood opportunities, people are pushed to the city in search of greener pastures. Even for those engaged in farm activities, seasonal unemployment is a recurrent phenomenon. This is amplified by the deteriorating climatic conditions, which further pushes seasonal agrarian workers into the urban informal sector. Thus, rural agrarian workers facing seasonal unemployment engage in digital labour markets as a short-term adaptive strategy.

In terms of demographic profiles, recent migrants to the city, especially those hailing from a different state, and younger migrants typically opt to work in the food delivery sectorSuch financial constraints also impact migrant workers engaged with ride-hailing apps, as they are less likely to own a car. Owning a bike (for food delivery) is far less expensive than owning a car (for transportation services), which incurs more expenses and leads to a higher debt burden and longer repayment commitments. Instead, they usually drive leased cars from the on-demand service companies, or are employed at a fixed wage by car-owners who have attached themselves to Ola or Uber. In both these arrangements, migrant gig workers are under pressure to pay a fixed daily fee (for the lease) or meet the car-owners’ targets. Hence, they do not enjoy much, if any, agency over their time or work.

Migrant workers who are already in cities tend to transition to on-demand gig work. For migrant workers like Mani and Omer, on-demand work with its lucrative incentives and promise of flexibility presented an appealing alternative to their under-paying jobs that hardly met their needs. Migrant workers are economically more vulnerable; most of their earnings go into paying rent and repaying debt while barely managing their living expenses or sending remittances back home. Vinay Sarathy, the President of Food Delivery Partners Struggle Committee, pointed out that “many migrant bachelors live together cramped up in a single room, to save on rent and send more remittance to cope with financial hardship back home.” Such struggles, unique to migrants, often remain invisible.

“Landlords are not accommodative, security is an issue. Everything is so much more expensive. Schooling, for instance, is costly. In the village, Rs. 3000 ($41 approx) is sufficient for school fees, but in the city, it is not less than Rs. 8000 ($109 approx). Rent is a major concern too. 80% of income goes on rent and school fees. Only the remaining can be for daily expenditure”. – Omer, a gig worker in the transportation sector

The lack of social institutions to support migrant gig workers in the city and the government’s failure to provide long-due welfare measures frequently leave them on the city’s fringes.

Against such a backdrop, the platforms’ lucrative income stream fulfilled migrant workers’ basic desire to secure a stable livelihood. So much so that even migrant workers like Mani and Jagan, who were previously engaged in salaried driving jobs, switched to platforms, tempted by the prospect of improved earnings. The chance to be a ‘partner’ with the ‘flexibility’ to decide one’s work timings made platforms an appealing alternative to low-waged precarious work in the unorganised sector, where migrant workers are generally employed.

While the initial motivation to join platforms resulted from the expectation of better income, improved working conditions, and the perceived social standing of being attached to a company, these aspirations remain unfulfilled. Inadvertently, migrant workers’ movement towards on-demand work ensured a steady supply of gig workers for on-demand service companies, which consolidated their presence in the service sector. After successfully capturing the market, companies started slashing incentives for all workers. Such impunity and indifference wielded by platforms, in large part, can be attributed to the guaranteed supply of migrant workers. The acute vulnerability of being unemployed compels distressed rural migrants from nearby districts and suburbs to take up any job, regardless of how exploitative it may be. This latent supply of migrant workers gives platform companies the leverage to arbitrarily depress incentives, extract larger commissions, and even dismiss workers. Migrant workers thus become the de-facto “reserve army of labour” for on-demand companies.

Comply or quit?

In the aftermath of the Covid-19 lockdown, migrant gig worker’s livelihoods have been reduced to a hand-to-mouth existence, foregrounding the fatal overlap between the two axes of vulnerability: migration and gig work.

Historically, migrant workers have been concentrated in occupations characterised by precarity and informal work arrangements without fixed-pay or binding contracts. Workers who transitioned to on-demand platforms were motivated by the promise of better conditions of work and pay. The initial appeal led them to view platforms as a dignified alternative to their profession. Many were also lured by the notion of independence and flexibility afforded by the platform. To be one’s boss and not be answerable to anyone was unheard of and a welcome change to the subservience that most workers had grudgingly internalized as a professional prerequisite. However, contrary to the big claims and initial promises, platforms began to replicate work arrangements in the informal sector. The result is that workers are rarely provided fair wages, social security, or paid leave. There is no meaningful choice for them to exercise, as they are effectively left with two alternatives—comply or quit.

Trapped between exploitative working conditions and being unemployed, workers lack any real negotiating power. Even as gig workers across the country continue to protest for better work conditions, platforms remain indifferent, assured of the guaranteed labour supply. As summarized by Dharmendra, “the agenda of the platforms presently is to recruit new workers – they have already begun advertising for jobs even amidst the pandemic, as incidents of protests keep rising! We’re expecting that they’ll fire old workers (engaged in protests) and recruit those who are presently unemployed”.

Kaarika Das is Research Scholar at NIEPA and Srravya C is researcher in the Humanizing Automation project at IIIT Bangalore. This work was produced as a part of their research with the Centre for Internet and Society, India.

We would like to thank Ambika Tandon, Aayush Rathi and Kaveri Medappa for their inputs and feedback at various stages of this research. We are grateful for the support from the Internet Society Foundation to the Centre for Internet and Society, India (CIS), which made this research possible. A full report on migration and the gig economy in India is forthcoming on CIS’s website.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/caught-between-the-platform-and-the-pandemic-locating-migrants-in-indias-gig-economy

Locating Migrants in India’s Gig Economy: A Scoping Report

Kaarika Das and Srravya C — 2022-01-04T15:06:08Z

Gig workers working for on-demand platform services have been adversely impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Cab hailing services came to a standstill in several Indian cities as the central government imposed a nationwide lockdown in March 2020 for over two months, restricting people’s movements. Food delivery and home-based services were deemed ‘essential’ services and continued to operate during the lockdown. They received little support from the platform companies as well as the government to cope with the effects of the health and economic crises. A significant proportion of these workers are migrants from rural and semi-urban areas, who moved to the cities in search of employment. Yet, their lived experiences, aspirations and demands as migrant workers in the gig economy remain unexplored in academic and policy discourse. Against this backdrop, this report examines how the migrant status of the ‘gig’ worker may shape their experience in the platform economy.

Based on our conversation with platform workers and representatives of platform worker unions based in Jaipur, Hyderabad, Chennai and Bangalore, we observe that migrant workers constitute an overwhelming majority on on-demand service platforms. Although migrants may not necessarily migrate to join platforms, their transition to app-based work is motivated by hopes of a lucrative income and incentives. While the transition proved lucrative initially, platform companies began to lower per kilometer rates, reduce incentives and increase their commission. We highlight that the business model of platforms as intermediaries warrants and relies on a free-flowing supply of cheap and easily disciplined labour, which is ensured by the large pool of migrant workers, who act/operate as the ‘reserve army of labour’ for platforms.

Typically, migrants are engaged in work characterized by informal work arrangements. While engaging in platform work as ‘independent partners’ entails working for a formal enterprise, their working conditions continue to be characterized by informality, such as lack of job security, social security, provision of minimum wage, etc. The modality of platform work is such that there is no scope of human interaction with workers being managed and disciplined by an opaque algorithm which decides the frequency of their matches, ride fares and even allocation. Far from being treated as independent partners, app-based workers are subjected to arbitrary impositions (such as reduction in rates, increase in commission etc.) which they can either concede to, or ‘voluntarily’ leave. Such a work arrangement that is app-mediated and algorithmically-managed underscores the alienation of the platform worker from their employer as well as peers.

Finally, we highlight the impact of Covid-19 on migrant workers in the gig economy, specifically in the initial months of the pandemic in India. In the absence of meaningful response from platform companies in addressing their concerns, the livelihood of platform-based cab drivers was especially at stake. Those who continued to work incurred significant losses due to drop in incentives as well as increased expenditure owing to rising fuel costs and precautionary hygiene and sanitary measures. As the Covid-19 situation worsened in India, migrant gig workers were faced with the tough choice between remaining a gig worker in the city or returning to their native town or village. Without viable job alternatives, their livelihood continues to hang by a thread.

Click to download the full report here (With inputs from Kaveri Medappa; Edited by Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/locating-migrants-in-indias-gig-economy-a-scoping-report

Atmanirbhar Bharat Meets Digital India

ankan — 2021-06-03T12:32:47Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/files/atmanirbhar-bharat-meets-digital-india.pdf

User Experiences of Digital Financial Risks and Harms

2023-12-22T16:05:26Z

The reach and use of digital financial services has risen in recent years without a commensurate increase in digital literacy and access. Through this project, supported by a grant from Google(.)org, we will examine the landscape of potential risks and harms posed by digital financial services, and the disproportionate risk that information asymmetry and barriers to access pose for users, especially certain marginalised communities.

Project Background

There is a big evidence gap in the understanding of the financial risks and harms experienced by users of digital financial services. Consequently, adequate consumer protection frameworks and processes to address these harms have been lagging. A survey of 32,000 Indian consumers found only 17% who lost money through banking frauds were able to recoup their funds. Filling this gap is crucial to inform responsive policy making, platform design and data governance.

While a lot more attention is paid to financial frauds and scams, through this study, we aim to situate these alongside experiences of harms that are understudied and sometimes overlooked. Users may also experience financial harm, when negatively impacted by:

Financial misinformation
Loss of control over their assets
Loss of potential income
Difficulty accessing social protection
Financial abuse perpetrated alongside other forms of domestic and family abuse
Unsustainable levels of debt, i.e. over-indebtedness, and
Exclusion from financial services

The Centre for Internet and Society is undertaking a mixed methods study to better understand user awareness, perceptions and experiences of digital financial risks and harms.

For this study, we will survey nearly 4000 users, with differing levels of access to digital devices, digital services and the internet, and undertake semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with specific target groups and stakeholders. We aim to highlight the experiences of persons with disabilities, gender and sexual minorities, the elderly, women, and regional language first users; to better understand how discrimination and exclusion may increase their burden of risk when using digital financial services.

Key research questions guiding our project are:

How are digital financial risks understood and experienced by users of digital financial services? Which socioeconomic factors amplify risks for different user groups?
What concerns have emerged relating to data privacy, misinformation, identity theft and other forms of social engineering and mobile app based fraud?
How accessible are providers’ and government’s platform based reporting and grievance redressal systems?
What role can fintech platforms, social media platforms, banking institutions, and regulatory bodies play in reducing digital financial risks across the ecosystem?

Project Aims

Through this study, we aim to:

Assess the financial risks and harms users are exposed to when using social media, digital banking, and fintech platforms. While looking at general users, we will also specifically explore this experience for the elderly, gender and sexual minorities, regional language users and persons with visual disabilities.
Develop a framework to categorise the nature of vulnerabilities, risks and harms faced by the concerned user groups
Create a credible evidence base for key stakeholders with regards to experiences of digital financial risks and harm.
Provide recommendations for better policy and platform design to address harms, specifically those arising from lack of accessibility and information asymmetry.
Identify best practices to respond to digital risks and foster safety and equity in digital financial services

Come Talk to Us:

If you have experiences or insights to share, or if you're interested in learning more about our study, please reach out.

We also invite researchers, financial service providers, developers and designers of fintech platforms, and civil society organisations working on digital safety, to speak to us and help inform the study. You may contact garima@cis-india.org

Research Team: Amrita Sengupta, Chiara Furtado, Garima Agrawal, Nishkala Sekhar, Puthiya Purayil Sneha, and Yesha Tshering Paul

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/user-experiences-of-digital-financial-risks-and-harms

Metaphors of Work, from ‘Below’

Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon — 2023-07-03T12:29:29Z

Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon authored a chapter that describes platforms as more than technological interfaces. The chapter invokes some of the metaphors that gig workers use to make sense of platforms. This chapter was part of an edited volume published by Springer. This chapter forms part of the ‘Labour Futures’ research project, hosted at the Centre for Internet and Society, India, and supported by the Internet Society Foundation.

Various disciplines have produced literature on digital platforms—broadly categorised as technological interfaces enabling the exchange of goods and services — with little consensus on what platforms are and how they impact economic and labour systems. Features that are commonly associated with platforms include their role in increasing efficiency in supply chains, their deployment of cutting-edge technology, and their ability to ‘disrupt’ existing modes of provision of services and goods (Jarrahi & Sutherland, 2019). The use of metaphors and carefully curated taxonomy has been crucial in cementing this idea of the digital platform as a technological layer objectively matching supply and demand (Gillespie, 2017). This chapter seeks to document and understand how workers experience different types of digital platforms, and how workers’ imaginaries of platforms differ from popular and academic conceptions.

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/springer-platformization-and-informality-chapter-metaphors-of-work-from-below