On June 29, the Labour Department of the Government of Karnataka released the Karnataka Platform-based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Bill, 2024, inviting public suggestions. If passed, this would make Karnataka the second Indian state, after Rajasthan, with legislation for gig workers. However, the latest draft bill, released by the Karnataka government, has the potential to extend to gig workers key rights that the Rajasthan Platform-Based Gig Workers (Registration and Welfare) Act, 2023 failed to address.
One criticism of the Rajasthan law has been that it does not acknowledge the expanding view of various legal and economic scholars like Evgeny Morozov, Moritz Altenried, and Julia Tomassetti. They argue that platform-based gig work, especially in ride-hailing platforms, is employment and the platforms are not intermediaries or markets but employers. This view is gaining traction in international legal cases with courts in the Netherlands acknowledging that the drivers and platforms have a “modern employer-employee relationship” while courts in the UK and Spain consider associates “workers” but have not stated that the employer is the platform. The Rajasthan law does neither; it does not consider the platform worker an employee nor the platform the employer but declares a separate category called “gig work”, which it does not define. The Karnataka bill, on the other hand, while continuing to refer to platform companies as “intermediaries”, thereby obfuscating the employment relationship in the gig economy, does provide a clearer definition of gig workers and creates mechanisms for a formal contract between platform companies and workers. However, exact details of what this contract will look like and what aspects of state and central labour laws will apply to it remain unanswered. This potentially provides an enabling framework to bring platform-based gig work into the regulatory ambit of labour.
One of the concrete issues plaguing gig workers is that their employers, the platform companies, often and arbitrarily terminate their access to the platform in effect terminating their jobs. Since these companies refuse to acknowledge they are employers, this is framed as blocking access to a service. The Karnataka bill draft refutes this framing by mandating that companies provide notice of termination, with a valid reason, 14 days in advance. While it states that grounds for termination will be provided to workers at the time of contract signing, since the details of the contract will be worked out when the rules are created, at this stage, it is difficult to ascertain to what extent the legislation will be able to prevent unfair terminations. However, in effect, the draft is affirming that what the platforms provide is not a mere service that can be arbitrarily withdrawn. Additionally, and unlike the Rajasthan legislation, where algorithmic transparency can be sought only by the state and the welfare board, the Karnataka bill empowers gig workers to request access to information about work, ratings and personal data.
Currently, gig workers have a completely opaque relationship with the platforms, which monitor the actions of the workers, punishing those who do not “perform”, but most platforms do not even divulge what these metrics are. This provision thus reduces the potential for algorithmic wage discrimination, workplace harassment, etc.
The bill also expands the role of the welfare board beyond merely overseeing the disbursement of social security, to include open consultation with gig worker associations and empowers the board to make social security schemes for women and people with disabilities. Thus, the draft accepts the socialised nature of platform-based gig work instead of an atomised transaction between a service provider and an “associate”, hopefully enabling further future deliberations on the impact of platformisation on society. It also creates a grievance redressal mechanism for gig workers; however, grievances can only be raised about provisions of the draft bill and thereby stop short of providing gig workers the ability to file grievances about the amount of compensation provided or other forms of exploitation at the hands of companies and customers that are not explicitly covered by the bill.
The bill does, however, mandate that gig workers must be compensated on at least a weekly basis. Notably, the draft bill also states that gig workers have the right to raise disputes through the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, and therefore in an indirect but significant manner empowers gig workers to make use of existing Indian labour laws and potentially bring them out of the regulatory lacuna that they are currently in.
These developments indicate that even if indirectly, the draft bill brings collective bargaining for gig workers back on the agenda and reflects the impact of the growing strength of gig worker unions in India. For platform-based gig workers, this is a promising development, though the recognition of gig work as employment remains to be won.
Zaidi is an MA student at the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, Canada researching gig worker unions in India. Guha is an assistant professor at the Ashank Desai Centre for Policy Studies at IIT Bombay working on AI, labour, and policy.
