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The State Is Withdrawing from Protecting Unorganised Workers

R. Geetha and Priti Narayan

The new Labour Codes on industrial relations, wages, occupational health and safety, and social security actively invisibilise workers in the unorganised sector even as they claim to “universalise” social security and minimum wages. These workers constitute an estimated 93 per cent of the workforce and produce about 65 per cent of the country’s GDP.

And, as is characteristic of the current regime, tall claims are being made to make the Central government seem benevolent, when, in fact, the new codes accord huge benefits to big business at the expense of the most marginalised working classes in the country.

The attempt to “codify” 29 labour laws into four Labour Codes has devastated the diversity of this large set of workers and the specific laws that ensured their protections and welfare. The move to “codify” labour laws is an attempt to centralise control over labour. It has necessitated the violation of several constitutional principles, democratic procedures, and leading principles and standards for labour set by the International Labour Organization (ILO).

No discussion, no consultation

At this juncture we must recall how three of the four new codes were passed: without any debate in the Lok Sabha in September 2020, when the opposition boycotted Parliament in protest against three controversial farm laws.

Also, the codes were passed without a tripartite consultation among workers, employers, and government representatives at the Indian Labour Conference (ILC). The ILC was held once a year at the national level consistently for decades but that stopped after 2014, when the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) came to power.

The new codes themselves succeed in popularising and legitimising oppressive working conditions such as a 12-hour workday, as opposed to the global standard of the 8-hour workday, which was achieved after intense struggle against exploitation and long working hours.

In India, Babasaheb Ambedkar pushed for an 8-hour workday at the ILC in 1942 to ensure humane working conditions for the working class. While actual conditions at the workplace frequently violate this principle, to legally allow 12-hour workdays through legislation is a dangerous prospect that exposes all workers to exploitative working conditions. It serves to justify current working conditions rather than seeking to improve them.

Also, the new codes constrain the right to strike. This is an attack on the basic powers of collective bargaining of workers. Besides, contract or fixed-term employment has been legitimised, even in perennial jobs such as manufacturing.

Against worker rights

These are but a few of the transgressive measures the government has taken in the name of ensuring “ease of doing business” that trade unions and workers’ organisations across the country have been pushing back against for the past five years.

While the new codes impact all workers, the structurally marginalised unorganised sector faces particularly heightened dangers that are perhaps not being discussed adequately in the media right now.

In what has been characterised as a way to ensure minimum wages, the new Wage Code empowers the Central government to fix a floor wage while accounting for the minimum living standards of a worker across different parts of the country. Any minimum wages set will not be lower than the floor wage set by the Central government.

This is the first time that a “floor wage” has acquired legal backing in the history of Indian labour law. What Article 43 of the Constitution stipulates is that the state secure for all workers “a living wage, conditions of work ensuring a decent standard of life and full enjoyment of leisure and social and cultural opportunities”.

Floor wage and living wage

The difference between a floor wage and a living wage is that the floor wage aims to set the lowest possible baseline wage a worker can receive, while a living wage accounts for the various basic needs for workers, including a degree of social security.

The last attempt to set a floor level minimum wage was in 2017, to bridge wage gaps between workers in different enterprises across different parts of the country. This was set at a mere Rs.178 a day and has remained unrevised since, without accounting for inflation and mounting costs of living. This is much lower than the minimum wages set for various sectors of workers across many parts of the country.

It remains unclear when and how the Central government will fix a floor wage for the whole country, or how it plans to determine “minimum living standards”.

The idea of a floor wage poses the serious danger of driving down the minimum wage towards this floor, including in States that offer higher minimum wages, rather than aiming to provide a living wage to meet worker needs.

The Wage Code can irrevocably change our collective imagination about what a worker deserves, creating a race to the bottom rather than an aspiration of better wages and living standards for all workers.

Of the many laws repealed and subsumed under the Wage Code, the Equal Remuneration Act, 1976, dealt with equal pay for equal work for men and women. In reality, wide gender pay gaps continue to exist across sectors, and the fact that the Wage Code makes no mention of how it will ensure gender equality in pay is a matter of concern.

Blow to worker safety

The impetus of the codes to “codify” and “consolidate” existing laws, and thus flatten the realities of diverse workers, is most pronounced in the new Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions (OSHWC) Code.

In India, sector-specific labour laws emerged in recognition of the particular working conditions and hazards associated with each job. For instance, the Building and Other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1996, known as the BOCW Act, was the hard-won outcome of struggles mounted by construction workers and trade unions since the 1970s. It took cognisance of the safety of 3.5 crore registered construction workers across the country through a set of 180 rules.

These are now entirely missing in the Central rules issued for the OSHWC Code. This is a dangerous sign given the hazardous nature of labour and the high number of fatal accidents in the construction sector. The replacement of an inspection mechanism with web-based facilitation cannot be an effective means of ensuring the safety of the workplace or minimum wage implementation.

Another casualty of the OSHWC Code is the Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1979, known as the ISMW Act, which stipulates displacement allowance and journey allowance, alongside fair regular wages, residential accommodation, and suitable conditions of work. In the new code, the procedure for registration of workers and the jurisdictions and role of the State governments are unclear.

Impact on migrant workers

Given that guest workers have no unions for collective bargaining, labour organisations across the country have been calling for increased protection of these workers, which is yet to be established. These include compulsory registration in home villages and workplaces for benefits, registration in welfare boards, inclusion in the public distribution system, mobile medical vans with occupational health units, childcare, schools, and shelter facilities.

The disappearance of thousands of migrant workers from electoral rolls in Bihar is a sign of their erasure and disenfranchisement, which the new codes only heighten.

The OSHWC Code also seems to apply only to “establishments” where 10 or more workers are employed. This means that agricultural and fish workers, domestic and home-based workers, and large groups of informal workers have been left out of occupational health and safety considerations. When provisions for workplace safety do not extend to these feminised workforces, legitimising night work for women opens up the possibilities of dangerous working conditions, especially in the absence of rigorous inspection processes.

In addition to safety concerns, unorganised workers contract diseases from prolonged manual work and exposure across several sectors. For instance, silicosis is highly prevalent in the construction sector, while agricultural workers are experiencing a high incidence of cancer owing to the use of pesticides, and salt workers face chronic eye, skin, and kidney problems. The OSHWC Code does not address these realities of informal workers and their working conditions.

Occupational health

This negligence stands in violation of ILO Convention 161, which calls for a national policy on occupational health services for all workers and mandates identification, treatment, and rehabilitation in the event of an occupational disease.

The procedures for identification, treatment, rehabilitation, and compensation of workers in the event that they contract an occupational disease are conspicuously absent.

Given that the Employees’ State Insurance is not available to them, informal workers will be left entirely to fend for themselves with no state recognition or measures to address their occupational health and safety concerns.

The history of the welfare state in India indicates that differential welfare entitlements have been accorded to workers on the basis of their employment status. The new Social Security (SS) Code continues in that vein, with organised workers given some social security benefits, while informal workers are to receive vaguely defined “welfare schemes”.

The abolition of various cesses as part of GST reforms has huge implications for the informal sector: now, there are no guaranteed funds, raised either from employers or offered by the Central government, for the social security of workers in sectors such as beedi manufacturing and mining.

The repeal of sector-specific laws has already had a devastating impact: dedicated hospitals for beedi workers have been shut down and so have medical camps and the provision of educational assistance for the children of such workers. Since the cancellation of the salt cess, funding for the provision of drinking water, toilets, childcare facilities, medical camps, and housing is no longer available for the sector.

The only sectors of informal workers that the code seems to recognise are construction and gig workers, who are each to be served by two separate welfare boards, while all other workers will be served by one welfare board. This is in sharp contrast to sector-specific welfare boards and laws that exist in multiple States, including Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Maharashtra.

Welfare protection

For instance, the Tamil Nadu Manual Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Work) Act, 1982, protects unorganised workers across several sectors. Currently, there are 20 functional welfare boards enabled by the legislation under the State’s Labour Department that offer registered workers several benefits and protection, including old age pension, educational assistance for children, and marriage and maternity assistance.

Other than these, there are 18 other welfare boards administered by various departments for workers in the fisheries and agricultural sectors, transgender people, and others. Some two crore workers are registered across these various welfare boards. The biggest risk of the SS Code is that there is no saving clause to ensure that State laws and welfare boards will be protected, unlike earlier Central laws like the BOCW Act or the Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act, 2008.

Even in the construction sector, the implementation of the now-centralised e-Shram registration system creates a possibility for the Centre to take over accrued funds—estimated to be of the order of Rs.1 lakh crore—raised for workers’ welfare. This is clearly an attempt to centralise social security measures and control their funding. Further, the SS Code stipulates the collection of levies only from constructions costing over Rs.50 lakh, reducing the total amount of money collected for worker welfare.

After decades of labour movement struggles to enforce increased protections for the unorganised sector through specific laws, the latest Labour Codes mark a new inflection point.

Isolating workers

The recently released Shram Shakti Niti 2025, the government’s labour and employment policy, invokes the Manusmriti to describe labour as a “sacred and moral duty”, even as the new codes destroy hard-won protections for workers. They have been formulated in a way that does not allow unions and worker organisations to play any meaningful role, as is clear in their exclusion from online registration procedures for workers and in the undercutting of all powers of collective bargaining.

Not only do these measures isolate workers, they also hinge unrealistically on misunderstood levels of digital and institutional literacy and bode ill for the future of labour welfare. But there is hope, especially in the federal spirit displayed by State governments such as Kerala, which have refused to implement the codes and surrender their own painstakingly built labour welfare architecture.

Other governments must follow suit and demand that existing State-level laws be upheld and welfare boards saved. As workers across the country are demanding, the ILC must be convened to meaningfully discuss the new Labour Codes.

Against the centralising tendencies of the new codes, the national Joint Action Committee for Unorganised Workers emphasises that besides a dedicated national law for unorganised workers, specific laws must regulate the labour and working conditions of agricultural workers, workers in commons, domestic workers, and home-based workers.

This is the only way to preserve their collective bargaining powers, meet their sector-specific ends, and create mechanisms to ensure their protections and rights.

[R. Geetha is adviser to the Unorganised Workers Federation. Priti Narayan is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. Courtesy: Frontline, a fortnightly English language magazine published by The Hindu Group of publications headquartered in Chennai, India.]

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‘The Doorbell Is Not the Problem’: Why Government Regulation Is Necessary for the Gig Work Sector

Gaurav Mittal

As 2025 came to an end, delivery workers across India called for strikes on December 25 and December 31, demanding higher incentives, better working conditions, and more predictable incomes.

While platforms such as Zomato, Swiggy, and Blinkit claimed that it had been business as usual, with record New Year’s Eve orders and negligible disruption, news publications reported that companies had quietly raised incentives for workers in some cities amid mounting pressure.

The strikes may not have paralysed urban consumption, but they did succeed in pushing gig work back into the public debate, once again exposing the fragile foundations on which millions of livelihoods now rest.

As the discussion raged, Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal published a series of social media posts to explain his company’s point of view. His central argument was provocative: for centuries, he claimed, the labour of the poor remained invisible to the rich, allowing consumption without moral discomfort.

“Factory workers toiled behind walls, farmers in distant fields, domestic help in backrooms,” he declared. “The wealthy consumed the fruits of that labor without ever seeing the faces or the fatigue behind it.”

The gig economy, he argued, shattered that invisibility by placing delivery workers at the doorsteps of the consuming class. The unease consumers feel, Goyal contended, is not about workers being exploited but about guilt. “We tip awkwardly, or avoid eye contact, because the inequality is no longer abstract,” he claimed. “It’s personal.”

Attempts to regulate or curb gig work, in his telling, are less about dignity for workers and more about restoring their invisibility – returning inequality to abstraction rather than confronting it.

There is something refreshing, even admirable, about the founder of one of India’s largest consumer-tech companies engaging publicly with questions of labour, class, and inequality.

Goyal is right on at least two counts. First, that gig platforms have generated livelihoods for millions in an economy where job creation has lagged behind workforce growth. India’s unemployment rate has remained stubbornly high in recent years, with youth unemployment particularly acute, making platform work an important – if imperfect – source of income.

Second, he is right that banning gig work is neither feasible nor desirable. For many households, delivery work pays school fees, rent, and daily expenses. Removing it without viable alternatives would be devastating.

But Goyal’s argument also collapses under its own contradictions. While he warns against “over-regulation”, he celebrates the role of law enforcement in disciplining striking workers and “miscreants”. However, regulation is not an abstract moral imposition; it is the mechanism through which societies attempt to balance power asymmetries.

The insurance coverage for gig workers that delivery platforms now cite as evidence of their corporate responsibility did not emerge organically from benevolence – it evolved over years of public scrutiny, leading to regulatory pressure in the form of the Code on Social Security framed by the government. As economic forms change, regulatory frameworks must evolve with them. To argue otherwise is to freeze responsibility at the convenience of corporate interests.

It is also important to acknowledge a structural reality that Goyal’s posts elide: delivery companies exist first and foremost to serve their shareholders. Investor pressure to cut costs, improve margins and demonstrate profitability is not incidental – it shapes platform design, incentive structures and algorithmic management. Any social good produced by gig work is a byproduct of this business model, not its animating principle.

This is precisely why government regulation is necessary: not to kill innovation, but to ensure that efficiency does not come at the cost of dignity.

Goyal frames the debate as one of guilt versus visibility, but a more useful lens is recognition. As the framer of India’s Constitution, BR Ambedkar, argued in his writings, dignity does not come from charity, sympathy or moral discomfort felt by the privileged. It comes from institutional recognition – from rights, protections and the assurance that an individual’s labour and life are valued by law and society.

Simply being seen does not guarantee dignity. Without rights, visibility can coexist with deep humiliation.

Feminist scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty advances this understanding by showing how the labour of the poor is often recognised only for its utility, not for the person performing it. Delivery workers are visible as moving bodies that fulfil tasks – bringing food, groceries, convenience – but not as workers with claims to rest, safety, or social security.

Seeing a delivery worker at the door does not automatically translate into recognising them as a rights-bearing subject. Visibility without recognition risks becoming a spectacle, where inequality is acknowledged but left structurally untouched.

Much of the defence of gig work rests on the language of freedom and choice: workers “choose” to log in, “prefer” platform work, and can “exit” at will. But as philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues, contemporary capitalism fetishises choice while stripping it of substance. Delivery workers are free to choose – but only within structures they did not choose.

When survival depends on logging in for 12 hours in heat, rain, or traffic, freedom becomes a burden rather than a right. Failure is individualised, while systemic constraints remain untouched. Choice, in this sense, becomes a mechanism of control.

None of this is to suggest that private companies must solve society’s deepest inequalities. But it does mean that profitability cannot become a justification for labour exploitation.

Ethnographic work such as Kaveri Medappa’s Chasing Targets, Making Life shows how delivery workers in Bengaluru navigate punishing targets, chronic health issues and relentless competition in the absence of alternatives. Other studies across Indian cities have documented similar patterns: algorithmic opacity, income volatility and the steady transfer of risk from platforms to workers.

A collaborative research project in which I am involved, Just Transitions on Indian Streets, reinforces these findings. In workshops with street-based workers in Delhi, Bengaluru, and Kolkata between September and November, delivery workers consistently highlighted climate exposure, infrastructure deficits, algorithmic pressure, income insecurity, harassment, gendered vulnerabilities and their near-total absence from policy frameworks, despite being central to everyday urban consumption.

If platforms like Zomato genuinely see delivery “partners” as their backbone, the path forward is neither denial nor defensiveness. Small but meaningful steps are possible: transparent algorithms, weather-sensitive timelines, compensation for climate-related risks and accessible grievance redressal.

Most importantly, they need structured dialogue with workers and their unions. Social media interventions cannot serve that purpose.

Finally, none of this absolves the government of its responsibility. Without thoughtful regulation, India risks drifting towards monopolistic or duopolistic platform control, where “market forces” give way to crony capitalism.

The recent disruptions in the aviation sector inconvenienced a relatively privileged few. A similar failure in the gig economy would endanger millions of livelihoods.

Zomato’s Goyal concluded his note by declaring, “The doorbell is not the problem. The question is what we do after opening the door.” He is right. The decisions made by both quick commerce companies and the government will determine whether visibility leads to justice, or merely to better-lit inequality.

[Gaurav Mittal is a researcher at the Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford. Courtesy: Scroll.in, an Indian digital news publication, whose English edition is edited by Naresh Fernandes.]

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What the State and Start-Up Ecosystem’s Celebration of India’s Gig Economy Tells Us About the Precarious Future of Work

Kavitha Iyer

We’ve recently seen several pieces of excellent writing on India’s gig workers, all of which should unsettle even the cheerleaders of platform capitalism.

Vivek Kaul dismantles the claim that platforms are engines of job creation, by returning to what free-market capitalism actually entails. Andy Mukherjee argues that while gig work may look capitalistic to consumers, its labour conditions are pre-capitalistic, with riders supplying their own vehicles and fuel.

“Even a sharecropper who bought his bullocks and paid for seeds could aspire to an assured tenancy,” Mukherjee writes. Also read professor Ravikant Kisana’s The Fragile Tantrums of India’s ‘Tech Bros’; Himanshu’s assessment of gig workers as the new casual labour, and Soumyarendra Barik’s finely reported account of three days he spent working as a delivery partner, with granular insight into the platforms’ exploitative practices.

With consumers appearing to sympathise with the workers, despite Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal’s indignant posts on X, including presenting the 31 December 2025 strike as a non-issue, the government rapped Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy on the knuckles over the ’10-minute’ service, citing fears of rash driving by riders and low pay for not completing orders within the stipulated 10 minutes.

Expectedly, this has produced a familiar ritual. A symbolic concession dressed up as reform now has “quick” commerce companies promising to drop the 10-minute delivery guarantee. If you ordered anything on any of these platforms over the last few days though, you know that your emergency requirement for spray-on car wax or eyelash glue was fulfilled in 16 or 25 or 45 minutes.

It’s theatre, not transformation, but some segments of the urban upper middle class families who supported the workers’ strike on new year’s eve will likely be satisfied. On social media, they’ve already rejected well-researched and carefully argued critiques, including all those I mentioned earlier, of the gig economy as “Marxist”, that sloppy use as a pejorative of a world-view they have not studied.

It is among them that the idea, peddled by the startup class and political leadership, of gig economy’s “job creation” wonder has the most purchase. The phrase “job creation” itself is a talisman invoked to shut down criticism, as if the mere existence of work absolves its dreadful quality and the utter contempt for workplace laws and norms that we expect must protect the more privileged among us.

The migrants coming into the metro cities from rural India, a relentless flow driven by agrarian collapse, climate shocks, debt and the slow withdrawal of the state from livelihood-creation, experience this model very differently from claims that technology is inherently empowering.

A platform-based delivery partner’s autonomy and skill are not enhanced by technology. The optimised route, the forecast of demand, the estimated time of arrival calculation are all embedded in the platform, owned by the company, and used to manage the worker.

The Uber driver never familiarises herself with the city; the map leads and the worker follows. Where the machinists in the post-industrialised world became ‘operators’ while knowledge and skill rested in managerial cabins, the delivery worker becomes an animated scooter zig-zagging on cellphone screens, executing instructions.

Erosion of Skilled Labour

This is not at all abstruse. The men and women being penalised Rs 30 every time they cannot agree to deliver an order were once, not so long ago, skilled craftspersons—I’ve met a former gold kaarigar, a weaver and a marble stonemason driving cabs—or farmers or aspiring policemen.

Whether driving a cab or riding to make a delivery, gig workers’ tasks are a series of micro-tasks. Accept order, pick up, drop off, confirm. Every task is timed, rated and scored. They do not “do a job” so much as complete a sequence controlled elsewhere. Their value is limited to their moving bodies that must be “quick”, compliant and absorb all the risks (traffic, weather, injury) of the business model.

They must also be completely replaceable.

In every other kind of employment, this perpetual replaceability of workers is seen as systemically unjust. Gig work in India is designed to be successful through exploitative labour practices in metropolitan settings where surplus labour is guaranteed and where consumers are conditioned to expect the convenience of urgent home deliveries at no real cost. Here, this worker precarity is seen as acceptable business churn.

Despite a years-long trend of formalisation, employment in India continues to be dominated by “poor-quality employment in the informal sector and informal employment”, according to the International Labour Organization’s India Labour Report 2024. Very large numbers of Indians are self-employed or in casual jobs, mainly an outcome of over-dependence on agriculture. Nearly 90% of labour is informally employed.

In 2020-21, the gig economy employed 7.7 million workers according to the NITI Aayog. That was 2.6% of the non- agricultural workforce, and 1.5% of the total workforce in India. This number is expected to grow to 23.5 million workers by 2029-30. Within this, the Indian Q-Commerce sector, not the entire platform economy, saw gross order values of Rs 65,000 crore in 2024-25, pegged to grow to Rs 2 lakh crore in 2027-28.

Losing Hard-Won Labour Rights

Yet, the delivery worker is not covered under most labour laws because the platforms fail to recognise an employer-employee relationship with the workers who are seen as independent and “partners”. These workers are, however, managed much more closely and watchfully than a factory worker, without any of the protections that industrial workers fought for, and won.

Unfortunately for consumers who enjoy this inexpensive convenience, this double-engine of productivity growth alongside erosion of workers’ power will not be limited to gig work.

The mechanisation of processes did it on the factory floor—extract labour, erase the worker. The algorithms now do the same on the streets.

Algorithmic management is already spreading, from logistics and warehouses to offices, newsrooms and creative work. There is growing evidence that many more kinds of work will offer less protection while extracting more productivity

Instead of assuaging our guilt with 30-minute deliveries in place of 10-minute ones, we should be looking more closely at the small class of people truly profiting from gig work. Because the algorithms they use won’t stay confined to scooters and delivery bags.

The gig worker is not an outlier; he is the prototype. And the gig economy is not hyper-capitalism; it is regression disguised as innovation.

(Kavitha Iyer is a senior editor with Article 14 and the author of ‘Landscapes of Loss’, a book on India’s farm crisis. Courtesy: Article 14.com, a joint effort between lawyers, journalists, and academics that provides intensive research and reportage, data and varied perspectives on issues necessary to safeguard democracy and the rule of law.)