How Gig Workers Tech uses to beat Tech

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. Managers attached to the part of the part of the part protesting in Guwahati, Assam in July. (Getty Images) Summary of the offense of reforms to the use of technology, gig workers mobilize themselves against exploitation, writes Vandana Vasudevan in her book ‘OTP Please!’ The Finnish platform, which provides food and retail delivery services in more than twenty countries, released a report called ‘Algoritmic Transparency Report’ in 2022 to criticize non-transparency criticism, a first of its kind in the industry. One of his assurance is that the platform does not use ranking or rating to determine which courier partner is offered a delivery task, except the proximity and the type of vehicle the partner uses. Platform Labor is a research project funded by the European Research Council aimed at determining how digital platforms transform the organization of labor, especially in cities characterized by eroding welfare systems. Niels van Doorn, the chief investigator of the project who also teaches at the University of Amsterdam, has many more questions he thinks Wolt should answer. During the ‘reshaping work’ conference in 2022 in Amsterdam, he demanded to know why Wolt decided to choose a dynamic pricing system. How much does the base fee per delivery cost in each market, and how many cents per kilometer does partners get as part of the ‘distance fee’ in different markets? How often do fee calculations are updated, and on what new data inputs or statistics is it based? How is distance is calculated as the crow flies, but the actual distance varies due to city conditions? Why are they not paid for time waiting in the restaurant, or traveling to the restaurant for the miles, why just after the customer’s house? There are not many answers to this barrage of questions that workers in India just start asking. But there is hope that some leaders have emerged under action that mobilizes and knocks on the doors of the government and the public, and requests them to hear their side of digital trade. The Wool Amberpet is one of the oldest suburbs of Hyderabad, next to the University of Osmania. The location gets its name from the Sufi Saint Hazrat Amber Shah baby, whose Dargah is located there. A local belief is that it was a barren country that was miraculously transformed into green fruit-growing fields after the Holy place made this place its final resting place. Amberpet is a dusty, gray area these days, with subway construction contributing to the pollution and a general air of neglect characteristic of the inner areas of Indian cities. I drove fifty kilometers to Amberpet to meet Shaikh Salauddin, the National Secretary of the Indian Association of App-based transport workers and founder president of the Telangana action and platform workers Union. In the recent past in India, leaders among the gig workers put together them, who emphasized their issues to policymakers and used them for reforms. Salauddin is the highest among such leaders, who long before someone else noted that something was not quite right with a model where the worker was flattened between the client and the firm. It was my second meeting with Salauddin. The previous year, Kamala Marius, a geography professor of the University of Bordeaux and I talked to him during lunch in the Taj Deccan for a study on gender differences in the use of rides in Hyderabad. She heard that he was the man for everything to do with the performance. Salauddin is a gentle man who resembles his pleasant behavior such as a banking officer rather than an influential trade union leader. But since our previous meeting, Salauddin’s stature has outlined a lot. Suddenly he seems to be everywhere – on the front flap of the times of India and virtually any article on the action economy in India. He gets lavish monikers like ‘the most powerful Uber driver in India’. Nevertheless, his office is a sparsely furnished room above a sheep shop. A banner who has announced a bursary scheme for children of drivers working for driving division companies is the only decoration against the walls. He tells me that life was indeed busy. A while ago he was flown to IIT Mumbai by a professor who examined this topic. A driving school made a documentary about gig workers and wanted to display him. He had just met with Ashok, Head Minister of Rajasthan, who had a battery officials to sit in the room and hear Salauddin, although it was 22:00, this meeting was an offshoot of a meeting with Rahul Gandhi, where Salauddin was to the suburb of Sanga Reddy. Look at the full image ‘OTP please: online buyers, sellers and actions in South Asia’, by Vandana Vasudevan, Penguin Random House, 384 pages, £ 499. Salauddin’s anxiety is that too many workers’ lives hang from some platforms that pull the wool over everyone’s eyes, including the government. “I say the government doesn’t make us dependent on private players like Ola/Uber/Rapido. What if they pack and go? 1,25,000 drivers will be on the street. The government must therefore have its own taxis with digital meters under the Smart City mission. There should be a little backup for drivers. At least fifty people do PhDs on the action economy. I bring one or two hours with someone from Xlri, IIT or a foreign university every day. Where does all this knowledge go from PhDs in the transport sector? Why can’t they innovate and bring something new? There has been Ola’s Bhish Agarwal and Uber for so many years! ‘…’ The government must determine how many cars and two wheelers can drive. If there is not enough work, why then ads to call drivers and put them in their cars? Ola, Swiggy and Zomato all look at IPOs. For an IPO, the business has to show how many workers are employed and how many things are generated. There are not as many issues as they project. Daant Hathi ke Dikhane Ke Alag, Chabane Ke Alag (an elephant has different sets of teeth to chew and display – this saying attempts to emphasize the gorge between perception and reality). “I ask him what these workers would have done if they were not part of the action. “They would have been farmers or the trade they know – like carpentry. They got more money and APNE Marzi Mafiq works (according to their comfort)! If you want to earn well in this action, you cannot work if you want; You must be on the grind. These guys can’t leave because they are used to city life. They only go back if there is a crisis here. As in the closure, they returned to the village, worked on their field, fixed their homes and returned when things were in order. ‘To stand the soil The most fascinating form of mobilization is the way workers use technology to beat technology. Social media, especially WhatsApp, is deployed to a strong effect to rage against platforms, responding to perceived injustices, galvanizing peer groups and rant at the system. I was included in the WhatsApp group of one division of Northern India’s workers. It gave me a voyeur view of the agency technology, which gave workers, which enabled them to group themselves and break out of the isolation inherently at their work. “Private cars become Uber -Taxis that eat in our income,” says a warning ahead. CABS in India needs a commercial license according to law, and private cars are tackled, as taxis are a sneaking competitors to gig workers, as it struggles with reduced income. ‘We pay taxes for the management of commercial vehicles, and others turn their private cars into taxis and escape from the tax, of course with the consent of the platform! We must protest such cheap tactics by Uber to grow his business. ” Let’s spread the information about unfair and one -sided blocking of IDs. The government, the company and the media must take on this challenge to find a solution for this, ‘writes a worker after sharing the circumstances in which his ID is blocked. A while later, a Google form is shared where workers have to write why their ID is blocked, ‘. . . So that the decision makers in government know what we are dealing with … “Kutumb is a private social network for communities built for Indians to share their views in their own language and contact their community. Among the many workers’ communities used by the app, such as farmers and poultry farmers, are gig workers. Leaders call on workers to download the app to strengthen their numbers to ‘claim our social and economic rights’ … The way workers use technology to start against the technical platforms is similar to a Cherokee story about an indigenous Indian called Sequoyah and his creation of a Cherokee Survival Plan. Sequoyah was a Cherokee Silversmith, merchant and husband of many talents who lived in the early nineteenth century. In 1813–14, while serving as a fighter of the Cherokee regiment against a Renegade group, Sequoyah was the benefit the white colonists enjoyed because they had an established written language. Unlike the white soldiers, he and his fellow Cherokee Warriors could not write letters home, read their military orders or record any thoughts that came to them while serving on the waterfront. They had to rely solely on memory in the absence of a screenplay. Sequoyah was determined to create some form of written language for the Cherokees. Despite being illiterate in English, he devoted years to the development of a writing system for the Cherokee language inspired by English, Greek and Hebrew letters. The Cherokees therefore adapted and used writing technology to serve their own cultural and linguistic preservation, thus ensuring the survival of their heritage for future generations. Sometimes it is possible to use the tool used by an authority to stand on your land and not be crushed. Extract from OTP please! With permission of Penguin Random House. Catch all the business news, market news, news reports and latest news updates on Live Mint. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates. More Topics #Features Read Next Story