Delhi Getting back to Delhi, I was looking forward to catching up with the work ACORN has been doing with various groups of informal workers through our affiliate Janaphal.
On my last visit, the progress in uniting our own hawkers’ unions and associations with other hawkers’ groups in different cities across the country had been the big news. The alliance, almost overnight, has become the third-largest organization of hawkers nationally in India. I’m looking forward to next week to visiting our new office and one of our largest affiliates now in Kolkata.
Perhaps the biggest news this time was catching up with the progress of our Gig Workers Association, or GigWA, as we call it here. We hardly began the organizing a bit over a year ago. We organize across all of the platforms, assembling one organization that includes for-hire drivers, food deliverers, and other gig-type work. It goes without saying that the exploitation we see as a standard part of the business model for DoorDash, Uber, and others has caught on like wildfire in India where informal employment, next to farming, are the two main categories of overall occupation.
The biggest news was the January strike in Bihar, usually ranked as the poorest Indian state. The one-day strike in the state capital of Patna virtually closed down the city when 10,000 gig workers participated. Whole businesses that depend on deliveries were shut down. Some companies made concessions on best practices and greater transparency, but none were willing to recognize the union or agree to make their algorithms clear to the workers. Most also continued to take as much as one-third of the delivery cost for the app overlords, rather than the workers. We proved our point and emerging power, but there’s a long road ahead.
Where we made significant progress even before proving the strength of our base in Bihar, was legislatively in the various bureaus that regulate workers as well as in the Parliament. The biggest win was getting a one-million rupee per worker payment for health and social security for gig workers embedded in the budget being implemented starting with the new fiscal year, April 1st. It’s not an entitlement, partially because without mandatory registration, no one in government or even the companies know how many gig workers are employed in India. The allocation is for 10-million, which is a good start. Another smaller, more symbolic victory was a personal one from one owner of a gig app. He’s putting money up for scholarships at different levels for workers who book 500 or 1000 tickets, which is some win for some workers, and some win for him in bringing them back to the gigs repeatedly.
Part of our organizing and advocacy success here is based on the Indian government’s increasing concern with what they are euphemistically calling the “demographic dividend.” In real terms, that fancy phrase is a modern update on the “army of the unemployed” or underemployed, which defines most informal work and which dominates the India workforce. The government recognizes that this is serious and that they have no program to address it, yet they are not willing to join us in the list of measures that could reduce the precocity inherent in informal employment. More organizing in these sectors, whether hawkers or gig workers, will force this to the top of the list issue, even as the government touts its so-called economic miracle out of the other corner of their mouth.