India's Platform Workers deserve a new lease on their social security

Positive intervention at state level is imperative to improve conditions

- BY GAYATRI SINGH, AKHIL SURYA

As new and myriad forms of employment come into play, it is essential that we critically rethink what a "traditional employer-employee relationship" means and analyse these forms by broadly interpreting an "employment relationship" under the existing labour laws.

In India, the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947 defines "workman", in the broadest terms, "as any person" who is employed for "hire or reward" in any industry to do any "manual, unskilled, skilled, technical, operational, clerical or supervisory work." The determining criterion for the existence of an employment relationship and the scope of the definition of "workman" has never been static. With time, as new forms of employment emerged and came to be tested against the then existing labour laws, the criterion for what constituted an employment relationship became broader, more liberal, and more aligned with the socioeconomic realities of the work. Since the 1960s, various classes of workers, such as beedi workers and contracted tailors, who were initially not considered as "workmen", were brought under the rubric of existing labour laws and became entitled to various rights, benefits, and protections.

Alongside the tests of performing the work for someone else and being paid remuneration, the sufficient control and supervision test, the power to punish for breach of codes of conduct test, and the independent trade, occupation or business test), the integration test (that the worker is totally integrated into the work and economic organization of the other, i.e., industry), and the ownership of key assets test (that the ownership of key assets involved in the work belonged to the industryin this case the algorithm) evolved as means for determining whether there existed an employment relationship. These crucial assessments continue to be relevant for any new form of employment.