Gig Subcontinent #4: Gratitude and Anger

The next emotional theme in Vandana Vasudevan’s OTP Please was on

gratitude.

 

How many gig workers are there in India? It’s impossible to know the numbers, simply because people will enrol but for how long are they actually working? COVID-19 forced millions who lost their jobs to sign up as drivers and delivery boys. But it’s not all bad. No more lining up outside employment agencies. No discrimination based on caste or region or religion. No interviews or job applications.

“You upload a driver’s license on to the app on your smartphone and you’re on.”

 

For others, gig work is actually halka kaam (light work) compared to other alternatives like backbreaking labour. Finding a rider doesn’t involve driving around hoping to find someone. Others appreciate the opportunity for stop-gap employment until they find something better.

 

PickMe in Sri Lanka even offered insurance coverage for drivers. During COVID-19, such instances weren’t all that uncommon. Companies tried to be compassionate and gave many perks.

 

Many women appreciate the job opportunities created. As parlour girls who come home. As maids on hourly basis. Choice to skip work, when the situation demanded. Flexibility in working hours. All these benefits appealed to many rural low-income women who could earn supplemental income. There are even jobs like reading out texts on the phone, as training material for voice recognition and AI systems! The alternatives are often physical work, along with the dangers in South Asia to women commuting alone.

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But of course, while there are definite positives to gig work in a country with so much unemployment, it’s not all good for sure. Which leads to the next emotion: anger.

 

Once online delivery companies became successfully, they no longer had to dangle any carrots to attract gig workers. Next, they began to reduce the salaries of the delivery boys. Cab companies switched from payment per trip to payment on a per kilometer basis. The number of applicants exploded; and in such a market, incomes began to reduce.

 

Once COVID ended, the demand for several services fell off. Like parlour girls who came to the house. People again went to restaurants, decreasing the ordering volumes.

 

All this meant that while a worker could choose which hours he worked, the number of hours to be put in to make a decent wage started to increase. Gig workers needed the job on a permanent basis; but a “permanent gig worker” is an oxymoron.

 

Strangely, all of the above was more pronounced in India compared to other parts of South Asia. This forced gig workers to try and strike private deals – find the customer via the app, then strike a private deal for a lower price (but no commission to the company) and get the order cancelled! Companies became aware of this; and they began to track and penalize (the GPS on the phone could tell whether the gig worker was often going to customers who had cancelled their orders, a telltale sign).

 

Another source of anger is the lack of izzat (respect) for gig workers. Not just from the company, but also from customers whom they serve or deliver. Both sets look at them as nameless, faceless folks, barely warranting even a basic Hello or Thanks. If gig workers would put the company’s banner on their vehicles, they would be prioritized when orders were assigned. They were advertising for the company and the reward was just a probabilistic increase of getting more orders. No guarantees, no cash for advertising.

 

The more orders they fulfil, the more they make. Which puts a lot of pressure to rush and hurry. Cash-on-delivery in such a scenario is a nuisance; the gig worker is getting delayed in such transactions. But the algorithms don’t factor this.

 

Workers who are slow or otherwise deemed “troublesome” (e.g. calling the company helpline with grievances) can be penalized by the algorithm which allocates fewer orders to them. The most extreme form of this is blocking the gig worker altogether.

 

Sometimes the map on the delivery app doesn’t load quickly. Or the app hangs. Such things aren’t factored into their “performance”.

 

In a nutshell then:

“Uber’s unapologetic, hyper-aggressive approach set the template for how platforms should win markets.”

 

But when there are few other jobs out there, well, the gig worker is majboor (“helpless in a choiceless situation”).