Fairwork India 2023 Report: In a recent report by Fairwork India, Tata-owned BigBasket emerged as the top performer, while ride-hailing giants Uber and Ola, alongside logistics startup Porter, were deemed the worst platforms for gig workers in India.
The ‘Fairwork India 2023 report evaluated 12 platforms offering location-based services across various sectors, including domestic and personal care, logistics, food delivery, and transportation.
Ola and Porter received a dismal score of zero out of 10, indicating a lack of minimum standards of fair work in the platform economy. On the contrary, Big Basket, BluSmart, Zomato, Urban Company, and Swiggy garnered the highest points in the report. Big Basket, in particular, stood out with the highest overall score of 6 out of 10 points.
The assessment by Fairwork was based on five key principles: fair pay, fair conditions, fair contracts, fair management, and fair representation. Big Basket, Zomato, Urban Company, and Zepto were the only platforms to score points for fair conditions and fair contracts. Additionally, BigBasket, Flipkart, and Urban Company implemented a minimum wage policy to ensure that workers earned at least the hourly local minimum wage after accounting for work-related costs.
BluSmart, a relatively new entrant in the ride-hailing sector, outperformed more established platforms with a score of 5 out of 10. The Fairwork India report was conducted by the Centre for IT and Public Policy (CITAPP), International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B), in collaboration with Oxford University.
Balaji Parthasarathy and Janaki Srinivasan, the Principal Investigators of the team, emphasized the importance of these findings, hoping that shedding light on workers' experiences would drive necessary structural changes in platforms, consumer behaviour, and government policies to ensure decent work in the platform economy, as reported by Business Line.
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