Date: 30/10/2023
The Fairwork India team, at IIITB’s Center for IT and Public Policy (CITAPP), and the Fairwork Project, announce the release of the Fairwork India Ratings 2023: Labour Standards in the Platform Economy. The report examines the digitally mediated work conditions of India’s rapidly growing app-based workforce using a global benchmark for working conditions in the platform economy. In the fifth year of this study in India, twelve platforms offering location-based services in sectors such as domestic and personal care, logistics, food delivery, and transportation, have been scored, on a maximum of ten points, on five principles: Fair Pay, Fair Conditions, Fair Contracts, Fair Management, and Fair Representation. This year’s report is structured around the themes of alienation and discrimination that often come up in experiences shared by platform workers in an economy that is presented as free of barriers produced by social identities such as age, caste, gender, and religion.
Fairwork is committed to highlighting best and worst practices in the platform economy. The Fairwork principles were developed at workshops at the ILO and UNCTAD, bringing together platforms, workers, trade unions, regulators, and academics to set global principles of fair work in the platform economy. Fairwork, at its essence, is a way of imagining a different, and fairer, platform economy than the one we have today. By evaluating platforms against measures of fairness, Fairwork hopes to not just show what the platform economy is, but also what it can be.
English report available here. The Hindi, Kannada and Malayalam translations of the report will be available soon.