Quality Gigs, a Solution to Urban Unemployment

Context: With no urban equivalent to the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGA) as yet, there must be a focus on supporting new forms of employment.

Challenges of urban workers:

• No urban equivalent to the NREGA: While the NREGA, witnessed a 243% increase in-person workdays during the pandemic.
• Challenges faced by Gig workers:
  • Low well-being: The Fair work Foundation‘s annual report puts India’s 4 largest platform giants, (Uber, Ola, Swiggy and Zomato) in the bottom of their rankings.
    • It evaluates the well-being of gig workers on five metrics of Fair Pay, Fair Conditions, Fair Contracts, Fair Management and Fair Representation.
  • Limited discourse made by the platforms: few studies to evaluate the scale and impact of these platforms, leads to a lack of authoritative estimates of the number of workers involved.
  • Varied nature of gig work: further complicated by a one-size-fits-all regulatory strategy hurting the market for highly skilled (and highly paid) freelancers.

Way forward:

• Conditional government partnerships with platforms: In the form of some scheme.

• • Example: Swiggy’s Street Food Vendors programme under PM Street Vendor’s Atma Nirbhar Nidhi scheme- 36,000 street food vendors used the platform under the scheme this month.
    • Swiggy ensured that each vendor is registered and certified by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India. Hence, incentivizing greater levels of compliance.
  • Similar collaborations on urban employment: require labour platforms to comply with disclosure norms and worker compensation standards to access government support.
    • This will ensure a lower fiscal cost to the government.
    • This will lead to an accommodative environment for platforms to cooperate with the states to promote the quality and quantity of employment.

Conclusion: With Industry 4.0 platforms absorbing increasing numbers of the urban workforce, the government mantra must be evaluation, collaboration, and regulation along with symbiotic relationship with new partners.