The US state of California has voted to maintain rideshare and delivery business workers as independent contractors in the current election cycle. The Financial Times, in its editorial titled ‘A California setback for gig economy workers’, was speedy to denounce the referendum, calling on other US lawmakers to not stick to suit. This is a strange reading of the passage of Proposition 22 (Prop-22), which is a resounding endorsement of the part of the platform economy in unlocking livelihood possibilities and catalysing financial development.Prop-22 repealed the unpopular Assembly Bill 5 (AB-5) legislation, which mandated platforms treat their workers as workers. AB-5 discovered analogous applications in France and Spain as well, and inadvertently led to job losses in the broader gig economy. Over one hundred exemptions have been amended to AB-5 more than the previous year, illustrating the struggles of applying a ‘100-year-old solution to a modern problem’.
Prop-22 will make the Protect App-Based Drivers and Services Act the law of the land. Rideshare and delivery workers will continue to be versatile, gig-primarily based workers whilst also gaining financial safety. Worker protection will take the type of assured earnings, healthcare subsidies, car expense compensation, occupational accident insurance coverage, and protection against discrimination or harassment, owed by the platform enterprise. This is but the initially step that California and the rest of the US can take in the path of universalised social safety.
Closer property, with the passage of the Code on Social Security (CoSS) 2020, policymakers have managed to catapult the imagination of monetary and social safety linked with employment to modern realities. Unlike California, India goes a step additional in reimagining social protection in the 21st century. California could properly adopt some lessons from CoSS 2020 to widen the scope of reforms becoming proposed through Prop-22.
India draws a distinction in between gig and platform workers via CoSS 2020, the absence of which has led to job losses in California, Spain and elsewhere. The challenge of labour taxonomy gains vital significance today with digital platforms altering the really nature of work. By affording independence, flexibility and decision, gigs and platforms have developed a new type of work outdoors the standard employer-employee arrangement. Rightly then, India defines a gig worker as a single who performs outdoors the standard employer-employee setup, and a platform worker as a gig worker who makes use of the medium of digital platforms to earn a livelihood.
Further, CoSS 2020 decrees that gig and platform workers in India are a step-up from unorganised, informal workers generally referred to as independent contractors elsewhere. They take pleasure in independence, agency and assured payments by the clientele upon completion of service and are granted rewards of association such as accident coverage, group well being policies and retain versatile, multi-platform working arrangements.
India is the initially nation to mandate social protection for all workers such as the new-age gig and platform workers via CoSS 2020. Combined with defining such workers as distinct from standard workers and unorganised sector workers, CoSS 2020 is necessitating the adoption of cutting-edge options to provide social safety for all. CoSS 2020, impacting the lives and livelihoods of more than 500 million workers, contemplates the creation of a centralised fund financed by a number of sources and supported by tech-enabled processes. Workers register with the fund and avail rewards straight, whilst the job-creator, i.e. the digital platform, remains a mediator.
CoSS 2020 lays the foundation for delinking social safety from employment and universalising it. The prevailing normal of ‘employment’ delivers wages as properly as social safety in the type of retirement rewards, and well being, accident, life insurance coverage and so on. This type of social safety coupled with employment tends to make job creation high-priced, and renders persons vulnerable in the course of instances of huge job losses such as this pandemic. Therefore, it is discouraging to see international economies uncritically applying archaic notions of labour governance to new-age disruptions.
Overall, the FT’s position to endorse an AB-5 model in light of progressive examples like CoSS 2020 is hence ill-perceived. Indeed, each CoSS 2020 and Prop-22 are catalysing a paradigm shift in labour relations in the era of platforms. Delinking social protection from employment is an inflection point in the evolution of platform-work and its capacity to unlock livelihood possibilities in the billions.
Raman is associate director and head of Research, Ramachandran is study associate, Ola Mobility Institute