China’s lesson on the rights of gig workers

On September 20, 2021, the Indian Federation of App-Based Transport Workers, on behalf of gig workers, filed a PIL in the Supreme Court demanding that the central government provide assistance to workers affected by the pandemic. The petition seeks to declare ‘gig workers’ and ‘platform workers’ as ‘unorganized workers’, hence they come under the purview of the Unorganized Workers Social Security Act, 2008. In short, the petition seeks social security benefits from food distribution. Platforms like Zomato and Swiggy and taxi aggregator apps like Ola and Uber.

In the same week, China went ahead in this matter. Due to public pressure, two of its food delivery platforms, Meituan and Elle.Me, have committed to ending the practice of forcing workers to register as ‘independent businesses’, which has long led to these platforms. Has helped to avoid responsibilities as an employer. Both platforms run monopolies in the sector, capturing over 90% of the market share, and employing millions of gig workers. In a notice to labor aggregator partners, Meituan said it has prohibited delivery workers from signing up “through deceptive or coercive”.

From ‘Invisible’ to ‘Frontline’

A major factor that has helped turn the pandemic around is the erstwhile ‘invisibility’ of delivery workers. By 2020, a trend spanning China, India, the US and Europe saw ‘invisible workers’ being pushed to ‘frontline workers’. In China, this was particularly the case in Wuhan, the epicenter of the pandemic, where there was a clear transition of social discourse favoring delivery workers. People’s Daily, the largest state-affiliated daily in China, responded to public sentiment by ranking distribution work among the top 10 businesses.

The media helped in this change. In the fall of 2020, renwu, a monthly Chinese magazine took a detailed look at the plight of delivery workers at two food delivery platforms. Titled ‘Delivery Riders, Trapped in the System’, the article was shared over 200 million times on the Chinese Internet, showing how deeply Chinese social media users are involved with the issue. One indicator of how seriously an issue is taken by the public is its virality on the Chinese web. For example, in 2015, a TED-style talk on China’s pollution crisis garnered 100 million views on major video streaming sites within 48 hours of its release, resulting in a policy change.

NS renwu Peace highlighted how delivery workers were trapped in a “sophisticated labor control system” they had inadvertently downloaded to their phones. Simply put, the algorithms set up by the platform are designed to create animosity between app users and workers, where the platform naturally shifts the pressure on workers to receive orders and maintain a smooth flow of deliveries. .

But it is important to note that the pushback against influential platforms started long before COVID-19. Over the years, attacks in various parts of China have reflected this growing backlash. As food delivery platforms expanded during the pandemic period, revenues and scale grew massively, attacks in many Chinese cities increased and continued despite various impediments to collective action. In early 2021, delivery workers protested poor working conditions, in continuous strikes lasting more than two months. In cities such as Shenzhen, Tongjiang and Linyi, delivery workers protested against the company’s new policies that cut their pay per delivery. A protest in Taizhou saw a delivery worker set himself on fire while demanding unpaid wages.

In 2018, Ya-Wen Lei, an associate professor of sociology at Harvard University, documented attacks in Chongqing, a municipality in southwest China. He found that the workers had mobilized through social media and offline meetings. They united in protest against “decreasing piece rates” and “unilateral changes to contract terms or platform rules”. At the time of its fieldwork, the Chinese state had not intervened in the market to control the platforms’ monopolistic powers or launch antitrust investigations. It provided the platform with unrestricted powers to exercise technical control.

But the pandemic was curious in this regard. It began with the Chinese state indicating that the platform should help address the pandemic’s devastating effects on the workforce. And it ended with the state insisting on “increased control” over major tech companies, including Meituan, for allegedly abusing its dominant market position, through new anti-monopoly guidelines.

In China, where the government is now focused on “general prosperity” that seeks to reduce the wealth gap that threatens the country’s economic development, the government’s scrutiny of food delivery platforms has increased. The authoritarian context, a weak civil society and the absence of independent labor unions leave gig workers in China little choice but to strike or protest, despite the risks of effecting change. In April, Caixin reported that a government official disguised himself as a Meituan driver and worked 12-hour shifts, making barely RMB 41 ($6.32) for a day’s work. He was featured on a television program in Beijing and said the experience made him feel humiliated. In July, seven government agencies jointly passed guidelines directing online food delivery platforms not to set evaluation criteria based on customizable algorithms, respect the rights of delivery workers and ensure that they Earn at least minimum wage with social insurance. Many of these government initiatives are publicly driven. It was in the interest of the government to intervene when it realized that there was growing discontent not only among the delivery workers but also among the public about their plight.

Indian context

The situation in India is quite different. Any improvement in this area is led entirely by the delivery workers and not by the public. For 27 days in 2020, around 3,000 Swiggy delivery workers went on strike in Hyderabad to protest the reduction in remuneration from ₹35 to ₹15 per order. The strike ended only after the joint commissioner of the labor department called a hearing along with the operation manager of the forum and the labor union. For the first time in India such talks were taking place, that too on the road. This year, in the lead-up to Zomato’s July IPO, several anonymous Twitter accounts set up by delivery staff drew the attention of customers to what they believed to be “exploitative practices” employed by the platform. Public interest litigation in the Supreme Court is another major step in this regard.

The biggest lesson from China is the rise in public opinion that has partly led to changes in government regulation and company policy. In the US, a gig workers collective has urged customers to delete the Instacart app as a show of solidarity until demands for better working conditions are met. Indians can try to give a better idea of ​​the way the platform works by looking for delivery workers and asking about their working conditions and pressures they face. Then we’ll be aware of the price that a person, who we only see as a miniature bike on our apps, pays for our convenience.

Soumya Ashok, a Chennai-based freelance journalist, was part of the 2020-21 China-India Visiting Scholars Fellowship at Ashoka University.