What kind of regulations are needed for gig workers? – Times Now

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New Delhi:Riding two-wheelers dressed in t-shirts of solid colours, app-based delivery personnel are the most visible testimony to the growth of food and goods delivery business in India.

While ride apps, goods delivery and food delivery apps app have surely provided employment and flexibility in work timings to a large chunk of unskilled workforce in India; there have been concerns over lack of social security raised by gig workers working for these apps.

Shaik Salauddin, National General Secretary of Indian Federation Of App Based Transport Workers (IFAT), says that commissions to app-based delivery personnel have declined from around Rs50 per delivery to Rs20 per delivery, with an equally gruesome picture for cab drivers.

But one of the biggest challenges according to him is the revised daily targets for gig workers, which he claims makes it practically impossible for riders to claim daily bonuses of Rs. 500 or above. Stating that the pinch of absence of social security is hitting even harder with reducing commissions, he is of the view that rising daily delivery targets often deny a delivery bonus to the gig workers, leave alone an opportunity or time to work with another delivery app side-by-side.

Gig workers are outside the ambit of Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970 and The Employment Compensation Act, 1923. Technically, a gig worker engaged with a company can also work with another company as none of the contract binds him/her.

Former Additional Solicitor General (ASG) of India, senior lawyer Sidharth Luthra clarifies that what gig workers enter into is traditionally called a job work contract, though it's an e-contract.

This implies that whatever norms apply to other job workers should be applicable to them, with a clarification that those working with multiple service providers will need to be specifically protected in law.

Last year, the Centre had released a code on social security for workers of the unorganised sector along with a National Social Security Board. Even various states have started forming similar boards, but gig workers claim that they haven't been included as part of possible beneficiaries, which is denying them an opportunity to access the government's social welfare schemes.

Rituparna Chakraborty, Co-founder and Executive Vice-President at Teamlease Services, clarifies that gig workers don't share an employer-employee relationship and hence they are not and should not be a part of employment labour regulations.

She feels that the social security code will provide benefits like medical coverage for gig workers in case of exigencies, through the social security fund proposed to be set up by the Union Government with contributions from platform operators.

However, the social security code or its associated benefits won't designate gig workers as employees or give them job security, as Chakraborty terms job security and a gig as two different planes taking off from two different runaways. She opines that while the regulations will take care of the long term perspective, the key now is to push the Centre to regulate and notify the rules of labour codes for on ground implementation.

Apart from lack of implementation, gig workers have been complaining about unclear laws and varying statements by apps on insurance policies for them.

Protesting exclusion from the recently launched E-Shram card for unorganized sector workers, IFAT has sought individual insurance instead of bulk insurance for all gig workers, claiming that compensation for deceased or critically injured workers is often determined by social media outrage instead of a fair and uniform policy.

Manish Sabharwal, Vice-Chairman of Teamlease Services, offers a word of caution for the world's biggest gig economy in India, where 50% of labour force is self-employed, as he terms many of the self-employed unviable entrepreneurs as self-exploiting.

He feels that the productivity of gig workers connected to tech platforms and their capacity utilization is higher, and they also learn important digital and soft skills. He cautions that it would be premature to start rebadging self-employed people as wage workers and bring down the regulatory cholesterol of our labour laws onto them.

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What kind of regulations are needed for gig workers? - Times Now