E6: Workers and Voters

Two events happened in southern India during the first week of May this year (2023). The first was the tragic death of a delivery worker in Hyderabad. Raju, who delivered for Swiggy, was killed in an accident while on his way to complete an order. His friends and colleagues tried to request the management of the food delivery platform company for some assistance for his family, but to no avail. The second was a video released by the Congress party during its campaign to get voted into power in the state of Karnataka. Rahul Gandhi, the party's most prominent leader, was sharing food with a handful of the city’s app-based delivery workers who are speaking to him about their declining incomes and the long hours they need to work to make ends meet. During the campaign, the Congress party made a manifesto promise that it would set up a gig workers' welfare board with an initial corpus of Rs. 3,000 crore and also ensure minimum hourly wages for gig workers and other workers in the unorganised sector.

The death of a primary breadwinner could push a family into poverty. Their descent can, in theory, be arrested through solutions such as accident compensation and compulsory insurance schemes, that have become part of the fabric of work in many countries, especially countries where industrialisation happened early. The significant majority of workers in India however, over 90% of it by most accounts, do not benefit from compulsory social security schemes such as the employee state insurance and the provident fund. They are also not protected by the laws that regulate employment, such as the Factories Act.

Thanks to the mischaracterisation of workers like Raju by platforms such as Swiggy, even working for a company valued at several billion US dollars is not a sufficient condition for a worker to climb out of informality. Platforms like Swiggy imply that they merely facilitate the transactions between customers and service providers like Raju to whom they owe no obligations arising from a contract of employment.

After votes were counted on May 13, the Indian National Congress won the Karnataka elections in a landslide. Only a few weeks later, the legislative assembly in the state of Rajasthan, also scheduled to head into elections in November this year, passed the gig and platform worker social security law. At least in some states of India, gig and platform workers have become electorally significant to the extent that they can reasonably aspire for legal regulation and social security benefits that alter the current imbalance of power between them and platform companies.

This episode of the Delivery Charge podcast is the first on the struggles of platform workers in India. The new and historic law in Rajasthan is our point of entry but it covers how the struggles for the law have been inspired by those of the hamals of Pune and the welfare board model of social security; the impact of the Bharat Jodo Yatra during which some gig worker leaders met Rahul Gandhi; the history of informal worker movements that, for several decades now, have used their power as citizens and voters to demand welfare benefits from the state; and why one particular gig and platform worker union opposes the broad coverage of the law.

 

Thanks to Workers United for permitting us the use of material from this interview with Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey.