Workers in India's platform economy have been working in gruelling conditions for several years, in the absence of fundamental labor rights, such as access to welfare, redressal for occupational harms, and the right to collective bargaining. Simultaneously, the platform economy has also created new frontiers in the fight for decent work, through the use of data and algorithmic systems to control and organize labor. These systems allocate tasks, determine the remuneration, monitor its completion and evaluate its quality, thus creating new asymmetries of power between capital and labor. Platform companies have long exploited a regulatory vacuum, but in recent times, efforts to govern this sector have proliferated.
Following the precedent set by Rajasthan, the Karnataka Government published the draft Karnataka Platform based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Bill 2024, inviting public comments on the proposed legislation. IT for Change collaborated with a range of organizations to make a Joint Submission to the Department of Labor, Government of Karnataka. The key points emphasized by our submission are:
- The rights of platform based gig workers should be spelt out as clearly as possible within the legislation itself while the specific details can be left to the rules.
- Non-transparent algorithms which are at the heart of the platform economy should be reined in by laws to ensure that the worker does not suffer from arbitrary decisions taken as a result of these algorithms.
- The tripartite model of protecting the welfare of unorganized sector workers informs not just the functioning of the Board but also the manner in which the law is enforced and implemented, apart from the schemes being funded.
- The law is designed in a way to ensure that the State Government can effectively implement it from the first day on which it is passed and that there are no confusions over its constitutionality
Read the full submission here.