Gig workers srike: There are no easy villains or answers

India has seen this conflict before in mills, mines and manufacturing floors, where efficiency was defended until dignity demanded legal recognition. What is different now is scale and visibility, which platforms recast as inconvenience and mischief, even as consumers confront the truth that their expectation of instant gratification is inseparable from labour precarity.

India’s gig economy occupies an unresolved legal space. Workers are acknowledged yet inadequately protected. Social security is promised but rarely enforced. The law recognises their presence while withholding certainty of rights. This ambiguity has benefited platforms and transferred risk almost entirely onto labour.

Gig work is a practical response to an economy that struggles to generate enough formal employment and livelihood means. Workers opted for gig work not because it was ideal but because it was available, organised and immediate at a time when unemployment remains a constant worry. Gig employment is projected to grow from roughly 7.7 million workers today to over 23 million by 2030. That makes it one of India’s largest job-creation engines over the next decade. And yet policy response remains slow, fragmented and reactive.

Defenders of the platform model argue that gig work reflects market-driven supply and demand. That workers choose flexibility. That platforms are not doing society a favour but merely enabling economic participation. This is all partially true.

But it is also incomplete. Market pricing does not absolve moral responsibility. Nor does flexibility justify the transfer of all downside risk to the worker while upside value accrues elsewhere, including to key investors, without the entities making substantial profits. There is an uncomfortable historical parallel here. In the early phases of colonisation, economic extraction preceded any serious conversation about rights. Labour was mobilised efficiently long before freedom, dignity or social structures entered the discussion. Rights, as history shows, rarely arrive at the inception of economic systems. They emerge later, after the imbalance becomes too visible to ignore.

Much of the public discourse conveniently forgets another contradiction. Most gig platforms are still not meaningfully profitable, despite payouts that workers argue are insufficient. Customers, meanwhile, are acutely price sensitive. Many who express outrage on social media are rarely willing to pay more for the services they praise.

Platform users, as much as other investors, participate selectively in this “moral arithmetic”. Platform valuations today trade at multiples that assume future dominance, efficiency and pricing power. Yet when labour asks for predictability or protection, the language suddenly shifts to market discipline and thin margins. This is where the debate often turns shrill and unproductive. There are no easy villains, or simple solutions. Gig platforms did not create India’s informal labour tradition. They have industrialised it, digitised it and scaled it faster than our regulatory reflexes have adapted. Convenience without conscience is only efficiency borrowing from the powerless.

The government’s role cannot be to arbitrage between capital and labour indefinitely. It must balance growth with fairness in labour pricing. That means moving beyond symbolic recognition towards enforceable standards. Not rigid employment reclassification but the minimum protections of a safety net, grievance redressal and algorithmic transparency.

The deeper discomfort this episode exposes is cultural. We want market efficiency without social cost. We want speed without responsibility. We want innovation without friction. That bargain never holds for long. Every economic system eventually confronts its moral accounting. The gig economy is no exception. Labour may be flexible. Dignity should not be.

Sridharan is a corporate advisor and author of Family and Dhanda