By
B. Sivaraman
On
6 December 2018, Swiggy workers in Chennai went on a strike and their
colleagues in Pune had done the same in November 2017.
Uber
workers in Cochin went on a strike on 5 December. It was not entirely a
localised affair. Uber workers across Indian cities have been on a long-drawn
protest: starting with a strike by 60,000 Uber workers in Mumbai and 10,000 in
Jaipur in March 2018, which spread to Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Gurgaon
on subsequent dates. It peaked again in Mumbai in mid-November where Ola
workers too joined them.
Tracking
of the social media postings reveals that the Forum of Amazon Mechanical Turks
is planning to intensify their protests against the tech giant and these gig
workers are even planning some litigation.
These
three categories constitute the lower, middle and higher end of the vast
spectrum of expanding gig economy in India.
Swiggy
is an online food delivery chain operating in more than 50 cities of India; it
connects 40,000-plus restaurants and claims its 60,000 workers deliver food to
homes from favourite restaurants close by at lightning speed. But their legal
status is that they are not workers of Swiggy. They might be doing a job
similar to Mumbai’s ‘dabbawallahs’ (box boys) delivering food to office-goers
from their homes. But the crucial difference is that they do not work like
domestic workers for individual households but execute the work for a $1.5
billion corporate chain. They might be causal workers but Swiggy denies that
they have any employer-employee relationship with them. Their wages might
resemble piece-rated wages. But Swiggy claims they are not wages at all as
these ‘delivery partners’ are independent business entities operating on
commission-per-delivery basis despite these workers wearing the Swiggy uniform.
They
might appear to be like those informal workers in the construction labour
market, who assemble at a particular spot every day where the builders go and
recruit them for seasonal work. While construction labourers are informal
workers not knowing who their next employer would be or where they would work
next, the Swiggy workers work for a single employer though they also can earn
only when online orders pour in. If there are no orders, then there is no
delivery and they go home without earning a single rupee. They might resemble
casual workers commonly found in many industries but neither regular workers
accompany them nor do they get any statutory benefits that even casual workers
are entitled to as per law. They are bound by certain contractual obligations
with the company but not as a contract between an employer and an employee as
per Swiggy’s claims.
Though
dubiously glorified as ‘delivery partners’ and ‘delivery executives’, they are
basically wage workers. They are supposed to bring their own two-wheelers but
the company offers them neither ESI nor any compensation if they land up in
some road accident. Like Swiggy, scores of online food delivery firms like
Zomato and Foodpanda with total delivery workforce running into lakhs are a
reality today in urban India.
At
the middle level of the gig economy is the uberised economy, where work is a
hybrid of employment and entrepreneurship. The Uber taxi drivers, for instance,
operate their own taxis albeit under a taxi aggregator. Through GPS, the
company not only directs the cabbie to the customer through online
communication via apps at both ends and for this it takes 20% of the bill
leaving only 80% to the driver. There are certain types of services where the
drivers get less, pay more for fuel from their pockets, and despite Google Map
showing a longer distance, Uber pays for a lesser distance, causing the drivers
a loss thus.
Until
2017, the country witnessed protests by conventional taxi drivers against taxi
aggregator companies like Uber and Ola for destroying their livelihoods by
offering to drive customers at rates lesser than what has been fixed by the
municipal authorities for conventional taxis. After 2017, ironically, it is the
turn of the drivers of Uber and Ola to fight against their own companies for improved
shares. Besides the global monopoly Uber, and big Indian corporates like Ola,
numerous local call taxi services are also mushrooming involving lakhs of
operators.
At
the higher end of tech work in the gig economy, Amazon Mechanical Turks
(MTurks) is one of the numerous crowdsourcing online platforms, peddled as fora
that bring together businesses and part-time job workers, where they perform
some routine micro tasks: like mining, collating and feeding data for machine
learning algorithms. Out of around 500,000 turkers working for Amazon, the
American monopoly, 40% or around 200,000 are working in India. This piece-work
platform is a digital sweatshop. Contrary to Amazon’s claims that they could
earn $40-50 per day, the majority of the turkers earn barely $4-5. They have
virtually been reduced to mere ID numbers for Amazon. Work is allocated to
these ‘numbers’ and money is transferred online to the bank accounts linked to
these IDs. There is no other interface between Amazon, the employer, and these
workers.
There
are just three examples of innumerable forms of gig work emerging in India. If
we consider the labour process independent of myriad forms it assumes in the
gig economy, it is capitalist labour process only. It we go into diverse
concealed and fetish-like forms of owner-worker relations, they are, in the
ultimate analysis, capital-labour relationship only. If the workers get
collectivised on a social media platform and fight for their interests
primarily through an online campaign, it is still part of the new labour
movement only. Some of them have succeeded in registering formal trade unions.
But many call themselves a ‘forum’, an online ‘community’ or a ‘platform’.
Still, they represent the collective will of the workers, force the employers into
collective bargaining through their concerted action, and in this sense, for
all practical purposes, they are a new generation trade union only.
Gig
economy and gig workers disrupt the conventional economy and traditional
employment. As gig workers are the expanding contingent of the new 21st century
proletariat, they are likely to usher in the new century forms of alt unionism
as well. (IPA Service)
The post Challenges Before Gig Economy Workers appeared first on Newspack by India Press Agency.
