The Gig Economy is coming to a job near you. (Yes, you should be worried.)
By AIITEU Member, Bangalore
While discussing the IT industry with tech workers, we have come to realise that it is fraught with labour insecurities, which include mass firings, lack of HR protocols and unregulated work timings. Burnout in the tech industry is already seen as the norm, with the expectations that such work will have unstructured timings and hard deadlines. With many already seeing the sector as a large creator of precarious work.
It is important to understand that despite the type of work you may perform and the class identity you might think you are situated in, the actual realities of work are far more disheartening than it might appear.
A trend observed in IT sectors around the world is the large-scale hiring of contract workers which often include a plethora of jobs involving individuals with a wide variety of skills and education. Another huge trend is the creation of tools such as Amazon Turk which creates a consistent stream of piecework for the IT sector, as Gray and Suri have observed there exists a dark underbelly in silicon valley of such workers who provide basic tasks to previously done by permanent employees. Such forms of digital piecework are growing in India, with India being the largest supplier of workers on digital platforms.
Another large-scale economy growing in the country is the gig-economy, which has shown to be resistant to the pandemic over the last year. It is estimated that it can support over 90 million jobs in India. During this time Zomato’s (a food delivery company) IPO opens next week, something startling considering that most companies during this period of time have been struggling to survive.
The gig economy does not view their workers as employees of their organisations and therefore avoid any clear protections for their workers. It is estimated that workers in the sector work a minimum of 12 hours a day depending on whether they are a ride hailing app, or food delivery partner or other such work. Workers are not given any aid for petrol, for phone or for basic health insurance.
Though, many believe that the gig-economy focuses on capturing workers in the blue collar or grey collar jobs it needn’t be the case.
The only legislation to outrightly define gig-work is in the Code on Social Securities, as per the definitions of the legislation gig work is defined as “a person who performs work or participates in a work arrangement and earns from such activities outside of traditional employer-employee relationships”. With such definitions it is open to large scale interpretations, allowing for more sectors to be absorbed under the definition and further limiting possibilities of labour protections. In addition to this, as mentioned earlier there already exists a pattern in the IT sector to hire workers on a contract basis, or forms of piecework.
Though one might believe that such work could not be incorporated into the IT sector, we already see examples of the gig economy bleeding into the work rhetoric in the sector today. As previously written in Tech People Issue 4, a worker in the BPO sector highlighted that when his office raised issues regarding fair work practices with the company during the pandemic they were told “If you work at Swiggy or Zomato, you have to purchase your own phone and bike or scooty. These delivery guys are solely responsible for the maintenance of their bikes. That’s the same situation here, otherwise you may put in your resignation”.
