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Twelve of India’s most successful technology-based startups were ranked on the overall working conditions for their drivers and delivery persons. The results indicate they do not care much about their workers.

02 Apr 2019

Ola, Uber, Foodpanda are some of the apps that are now part of our daily lives, that is, the lives of the middle classes — but they make life hell for their hordes of employees, finds a new study by the Fairwork Foundation project. This study was first reported about in Quartz on March 26, 2019.

Twelve of India’s most successful technology-based startups were marked on a scale of 1 to 10 based on five core areas — pay, conditions, contracts, management, and representation.

These app-based startups employing several lakhs of workers on contract — mainly as drivers and delivery personnel — form part of the ‘gig economy’.

These businesses provide a digital platform connecting clients services that are produced elsewhere and then physically delivered by workers (Swiggy, Zomato), or are services that are directly provided by the workers (example, Ola and Uber). In both cases, the workers are also assigned their work by and held accountable through apps, while lacking the benefits and protection given to regular non-digital-platform employees — a business model increasingly coming to be known as ‘platform capitalism’.

Also Read: Kerala Hotels, Restaurants to Launch Strike Against Swiggy, Zomato, Uber Eats

The startups included in the study are — Flipkart, Zomato, Bigbasket, Dunzo, Swiggy, UrbanClap, Foodpanda, Uber, Ola, Uber Eats, Rapido and Housejoy.

While Flipkart scored the highest overall on the five parameters, indicating better working conditions, Ola, Uber and Foodpanda scored the lowest — meaning the conditions that the drivers and delivery persons work under are terrible.

However, Ola and Uber did do better than others in the criterion of pay, “which means they were found to have paid at least the local minimum wage, including employment costs incurred by the worker,” as the Quartz article says.

The study was conducted in collaboration with the International Institute of Information Technology, Bengaluru. Fairwork is a project on “work practices and working conditions in digital labour platforms”, run by researchers from some universities in England and South Africa, led by Oxford. The rankings were released on March 25, 2019. For the study, workers as well as representatives of companies were interviewed.

Interestingly, Uber in a similar study in South Africa done by Fairwork scored much better on these parameters, as the article added.

Also Read: Ola and Uber Drivers Continue Facing The Same Old Problem, And Then Some More

In the Indian study, Flipkart, now owned by US-based Walmart, was able to provide evidence of meeting seven of the criteria. According to one of the researchers on the project quoted by Quartz, “One of the reasons why Flipkart scored higher than other platforms is they had a number of policies in place which we haven’t seen with other platforms.”

The report said, “So for example, they have a programme around supporting differently-abled workers.”

But none of these startups — barring delivery-app Dunzo — provided “clear terms and conditions.”

While only Flipkart, Zomato, and Swiggy have a mechanism for workers to register their concerns and complaints with the management, none of the 12 startups received any point for “having recognised, or being ready to recognise”, a labour union among the workers.

Ola and Uber drivers have been protesting — on and off — in different parts of the country, protesting decreasing incentives and insecure working conditions, just like in different parts of the world (including the US and some countries in Europe), where drivers of Uber and other app-based taxi services had staged protests wanting the status of ‘employee’ and benefits and better conditions.