Gig Subcontinent #6: Oppression

Yes, admits Vandana Vasudevan in OTP Please, the gig economy has its ugly side of oppression too. And it’s a lot more complicated that you might imagine.

 

For starters, those ratings affect gig workers opaquely:

“Every action is judged by people they can’t see, according to rules they don’t know.”

 

There is also a systemic bias against older workers. No, not due to their age. Rather, based on how long they’ve been with the company. Why? Shouldn’t longer term employees be valued more as they know the setup and expectations? Yes, but that gets countervailed by the fact that they become eligible for additional incentives as they stay longer. So the company’s algorithms reduce the amount of work assigned to them as they approach those milestones. As a result, their income reduces (since it was tied to number of orders fulfilled), and they end up leaving before they hit the milestone. Sneaky, right?

“While capitalism hid exploitation behind a labour contract, digital capitalism hides it behind the veneer of self-employment.”

 

Now and then, there are protests organized by gig workers. Sometimes, they pay for their protests. At times, those who attended the protests find their ID’s disabled; or more likely, they get assigned fewer customers the next day.

 

The fact that they are not employees means they are entitled to a lot less of governmental and legal protection. No mai-baap protection for them. Even though the gig workers are indispensable to the operations of the company…

 

Customers are not any better. A transport service gig worker can be arm-twisted into doing other work like assembling the furniture. If he doesn’t, a bad review is threatened. The company rarely verifies the reasons for poor reviews.

“The company cannot bear losses, and the customer is a priority. So somebody’s (gig worker) got to pay.”

 

Those warehouses of companies that ship physical goods? Well, gig workers are involved in various activities – storing, packaging, loading, unloading, picking, sorting. They are measured by items handled per hour. (How else can companies achieve those Within-X-hours/Today/Tomorrow deliveries on the scale they do?) Since these jobs can be done by almost anyone (and there is a long queue of wannabe gig workers), those who work have little or no negotiating room. Even worse, when they approach the 240 day mark, they are often fired on flimsy grounds. Why? Because, by law, after 240 days in a year, a person can demand he be made permanent. And guess what? Quite often, that fired worker will often be re-hired right after (he/she knows the job and process; and needs the income) but with the clock reset to Day 1. Female gig workers from rural areas accept this situation more easily because:

“Some of them endure the tyranny of a faceless corporation to escape the patriarchal caste-ridden society back in their village.”

Besides, the warehouses are at least safe for these girls. The outside world isn’t.

 

Then there are the small-time sellers on the platforms (e.g. Amazon, Instamart, Myntra). They come because the platform handles logistics, storage, shipment and provides a huge market. But they are at the mercy of the terms and conditions set by the platform company, which can be changed any time. Or the platform’s algorithms can arbitrarily be changed to make a seller’s items show up lower in the search results (virtually a death sentence). Amazon is notorious for tracking which products sell best, then making their own brand of it, push theirs up the search results, and thus corner the market while at the same time causing the sellers to suddenly find orders plummet. No recourse exists. One of the attractions of these platforms is the easy return policy. But for a small seller, the time to get the returned good from the company can run into weeks or a month. During which time, they obviously can’t sell it… a loss of opportunity. And lastly, the reviews can be faked. Both positive ones (by the seller themselves) and negative ones (by rivals). At times, the viciousness of these manipulations can sound like a saas-bahu serial shenanigan, writes Vasudevan.

 

On Swiggy and Zomato, restaurants that give big discounts or lowest prices are bumped up the search results. This means sellers have to keep reducing prices, ultimately impacting their profit margins. But the lower prices is what make the platform attractive to the customers…

 

Digital capitalism is just as red in tooth and claw as its previous avatar.