Delivery Charge ICAS

For the last episode of this season of the Delivery Charge podcast, host and producer Aju John is interviewed by some of its friends and supporters: the cultural anthropologist Jagat Sohail, and the doctoral researchers Joanna Bronowicka, Marini Thorne, Nicolas Palacios, and Sneha P. These interviews cover many of the themes that emerged in the previous nine episodes. Those episodes featured my interviews with platform worker activists in Berlin and India between August 2021 and November 2023. In Berlin, delivery worker activists led efforts to establish works councils at the delivery companies Gorillas, Lieferando, and Flink, and resisted the company managements’ efforts to install a friendly works council at Getir. In India, activists of the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union and the Rajasthan App-based Transport Workers Union, organised to seek legal reform by influencing key elections and the worker activists affiliated with the All India Gig Workers Union sought the activation of the existing labour bureaucracy to benefit platform workers. These interviews gave us a perspective on their organised pursuit of power in platform work.
 
With the emergence of platforms, there is even more standardisation, granular control and planning in logistical operations. App-based delivery workers have even less discretion on how to complete their tasks. At the same time, platforms and platform work are also being determined by the particular geographies of the places they serve, including as we have explored in this podcast: demographic compositions, labour market segregations, and labour regulations.
 
In making this podcast, we learnt how Berlin’s delivery worker collectives used Germany’s works councils law to seek tangible material outcomes such as termination protection and the ability to organise co-workers during paid working hours. In India, platform workers unions and unofficial associations leveraged competitive democratic politics to aspire towards the legal regulation of platforms and social protection for platform workers. In both contexts, we saw that as workers movements embraced the law, the law embraced them back and left its deep imprint. 

Generally speaking, in industrial or workplace disputes, the strike is a weapon of last resort and is used by workers to persuade the employer to accept their demands. On July 21, 2022, when a group of delivery workers stopped work in Bangalore, like some other gig work protests and strikes that we have observed in previous episodes of this podcast, the strike was not the weapon of last resort but simply a signal to commence negotiations. These workers delivering through Swiggy’s Instamart app wanted to be able to finish their work within the agreed upon shift timings but found themselves having to work up to fourteen hours every day. They had opinions on the conditions of their work, and felt that if they wanted to be heard, they had to go on strike. So far, in their struggle against their arbitrary suspensions from these apps, and for fair pay, reasonable working hours, holidays, and social security, India’s platform workers have not been able to use India’s mid-twentieth-century labour laws. For the All India Gig Workers Union, the CITU-affiliated federation that supported the July 2022 strikes, the strategy now is to have full-time workers recognised as employees of a platform. These strikes took place during the same month that The Guardian began publishing a series of reports into the files leaked from Uber by a whistleblower documenting the company’s unethical practices, including as they lobbied for favourable labour regulations. Bit by bit, sector by sector and state by state, AIGWU’s activists are helping platform workers pry open the gates to this legal infrastructure. It is precisely what platforms have been resisting around the world.

In 2021, a year during which large parts of India had been under lockdown, Albinder Dhindsa wanted his company Blinkit to provide “instant commerce indistinguishable from magic”. A few months later, the delivery workers that were integral to the magic in Delhi-NCR were protesting their new rates and refusing to work. In 2021, Urban Company, which wanted to provide standardised home-based services through trained service professionals, was valued at an astounding 2 billion US dollars in 2021. On October 8 of that year, roughly 100 women, most of them beauty workers, protested the abrupt blocking of their IDs and compulsory retraining programmes. In December, more than fifty of them stayed overnight in front of the company’s office, in freezing temperatures.
 
Both these protests were supported by trade union activists from the All India Gig Workers Union, a national federation of gig worker unions affiliated with the Centre of Indian Trade Unions,  a national trade union of more than 62 lakh workers. The CITU believes in socialising the means of production and is the trade union arm of a leftist political party. The AIGWU’s work with Blinkit and Urban Company workers is a window to understand what it means to be part of the mainstream of the Indian labour movement today, more than thirty years after the liberalisation of the economy in 1991. During these years, much doubt has been cast on union strategies of mobilisation that rely only on formal state protections and employer accountability. Pushing back, the AIGWU contests the characterisation of Blinkit and Urban Company workers as part of the informal sector and advocates with them to use the labour law and to petition the state labour administration to enforce the labour law. While it is tempting to perceive it as a twentieth century union raging against the dying of the light, the potential growth of the platform economy is also an opportunity to expand the country's trade union movement.

The work of driving cars for Uber is not like the work of delivering food on Swiggy or the work of delivering groceries on Dunzo. A provider of beauty services on Urban Company does not do the same work as someone servicing or repairing air conditioners on the same app. They work at different locations, the tools of their work are different, and their work processes are managed differently. In July of 2023 however, the Rajasthan legislative assembly passed a law that would entitle all those workers to welfare benefits and social security.
 
Until quite recently, platforms operated without regulation. In 2022 and 2023, gig and platform worker leaders like Shaik Salauddin and Ashish Singh were speaking directly to the politicians engaged in India’s competitive democratic politics, using the opportunities presented by elections to demand reforms of the law governing gig and platform work in India. This episode looks at this pursuit of legal reforms. 
 
For their demands to be credible, different types of platform workers need to come together as a category of workers that can be decisive in elections. They need to move beyond the identity markers of caste and religion, and the status of some of them as migrants from other parts of the country. Platform work leaders are building a wider tent for gig and platform workers, at least partly to be able to credibly make demands for legal reform. On the other hand, even the law’s recognition of different types of gig and platform workers as a single category can itself provide the impetus for workers organising and mobilising together. The law and platform worker movements are locked in a tight embrace, each leaving its imprint on the other.

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.

Previous episodes of this podcast have covered the worker-led campaigns to establish works councils or Betriebsrats at Gorillas, Getir, Flink, and Lieferando. For the "rider" activists, the Betriebsverfassungsgesetz was a device that could stabilise their lives. With the establishment of a Betriebsrat (works council), they hoped to get paid for their activism and for helping other workers and also be protected against retaliatory firings. 
 
This episode contrasts that pursuit of stability with the notion of "flexibility" which, platform companies have argued, is beneficial for platform workers. The companies argue that they provide workers with the ability to work where they want and how they want. Indeed, for migrants into Germany, like Lieferando courier Mohammed Arif Khan, delivery work for platforms like Liferando is a convenient point of entry into the German job market. 
 
On the other, what is being seen by the platform companies as flexibility has been seen by platform workers as a lack of predictability. When platform companies talk about flexibility, they highlight a worker’s control over working time but not how reducing labour costs during periods of low demand has been a route to profitability. In spite of him holding a "permanent" job contract, Lieferando terminated Mohammed Arif Khan's employment. 
 
As we dive into the experience of worker complaints about shift planning, we also learn that perhaps working time is not actually flexible. To what extent for example, is the fact that one is a parent with childcare responsibilities, considered by a global algorithm in determining how working time is distributed among workers?
 
Rob and Mo campaigned in 2022 to establish Betriebsrats at Flink and Lieferando respectively but achieved different results. Flink continues to resist the establishment of a Works Council through quite "extraordinary" interpretations of the German labour law on employment protection for workers who participate in the process of establishing a Works Council. Mo and his colleagues, on the other hand, quite successfully established a Works Council through elections. This body was able to help Mohammed Arif Khan retain his employment at Lieferando and open negotiations with the company about the knotty issues of shift planning.