In the gig economy, law and labour are at odds

On New Year's Eve, a planned strike by platform and gig workers across the country reopened an ongoing debate about the conditions of platform work in India.

- Gautam Bhatia

At the heart of this debate is a very simple issue: What is the correct way of understanding the relationship between online platforms (such as Uber, Ola, Blinkit, Zomato, and so on) and their workers?The reason why this is important is because labour laws — not just in India, but across the world — are based on a simple premise: The employer and the worker are not equally powerful parties when it comes to setting the terms and conditions of a work relationship. In capitalist societies, there is an inequality between those who own the means of production, and those who can only sell their labour-power in order to survive. If, therefore, the relationship between these parties was to be governed only by a contract, workers would be left with a very raw deal. For this reason, the State intervenes in this relationship through labour laws. Labour laws may mitigate the imbalance of power between the employer and the worker either by empowering the latter to engage in collective bargaining, and/or guarantee to the latter a set of legally enforceable rights (such as the right to a fair wage, a right against arbitrary dismissal, rights to overtime and bonus pay.) This has been a hard-won experience over centuries.