Whose Gig is it anyway?

Is the gig economy all that different from the informal economy? The question matters because labels smuggle in theories. ‘Gig economy’ arrives with a particular story: flexibility, choice, entrepreneurial agency. But in India, even when the work is intermittent, it often sits inside a broader struggle to stitch together income, day by day, dehadi by dehadi. The choice, if any, is limited.

The strike by platform workers on Dec 31st underlined some structural fault lines. The platforms claimed victory, pointing to record volumes. They also shifted quickly into moral language, framing strike action as the work of ‘miscreants’ who needed to be kept in check, and attributing workers’ actions to external influences. They made their case with numbers as well. Earnings per hour were offered and participation shown to be largely intermittent. The conclusion followed: this is true gig work for many, a stop-gap income stream, and therefore demands that import a classic employment template are misplaced.

This is a useful correction. Insisting on the protections of full-time work for part-time labour is not reasonable. But heterogeneity of participation does not resolve the question of how power is distributed in the system.

Worker demands are often heard as anti-market, and it is worth asking why. The platform model itself is built on aggregation and leverage. It gathers demand, supply, and information, then uses that aggregation to set terms across the ecosystem.

When workers do the same, it is suddenly described as disruption, as if they are not legitimate market players. Collective action by labour looks like illegitimate interference only if one treats asymmetry as the natural condition of markets, and the right to aggregate as something that belongs more naturally to capital.

What makes platform work revealing is that the business model rests on labour. Not labour as a cost line, but labour as the pivotal resource. The product being sold is not software. The product is human movement through physical reality. The platform is a labour co-ordination business with a technological surround.

A delivery platform is a fax machine in slow motion: information turned into instruction, carried by a human body from one point to another. Technology moves bits effortlessly but struggles with atoms. It needs human ability to move atoms through space.

Delivering in India under time pressure is not easy. The city is an exception factory. Addresses are approximate. Roads evaporate. The last mile is a shape-shifting obstacle course.

This scrambles the hierarchy of skilled and unskilled. What looks unskilled is often hardest to replace cheaply and reliably at scale, not because it requires glamorous intelligence, but because it requires intelligence embedded in messy environments. Technology can coordinate the work, measure it and discipline it. It cannot, at comparable cost and reliability, do the work. The work may be low-credential, but it is high-friction and deeply valuable.

If labour is so central, why does it become the one variable that must not move? We come across a familiar argument: if labour costs rise, the business becomes unviable. Margins are invoked as if they were natural law, especially in sectors where many platforms still chase scale and future profitability.

The interesting question is why viability is deployed so selectively. Other market variables are treated as givens.

Investor appetite for 100x returns is treated as background weather. Discounting becomes an investment in growth. Marketing burn becomes brand-building. Price wars are competition doing its cleansing work. Only labour compensation is framed as the fragile variable that might break the system. We accept the fact that every stakeholder is in it for disproportionate results. And every stakeholder except the worker exercises leverage as a matter of course. Investors syndicate and set terms collectively. Employees create talent shortages by switching companies. Consumers comparison shop and extract discounts through competitive pressure. Except the worker.

This is the narrative hierarchy at work. Capital is framed as creative and risk-bearing; therefore, its claims on surplus are treated as legitimate ambition. Labour is framed as input, therefore its claims are costs that must be contained. The market is not being described neutrally. The market is being narrated.

Worker demands are heard as grievance rather than negotiation, a nuisance to be contained. Even if we were to accept that the compensation is reasonable, it still does not settle the question of terms. A system can deliver acceptable average earnings for intermittent participants and still have opaque pay formulas, unilateral rule changes, and an ever-present fear of deactivation.

On the other side, it is important for workers to speak inside the same ideological model that business uses. Not because appealing to rights is wrong, but because moral appeal without a mechanism is easy to applaud and easy to ignore. It locates the argument outside the market, whereas what the workers are attempting is market-rational. This is not a do-gooding argument. It goes to the heart of a stable, scalable business model.

The real question is not whether labour is anti-market. It is why a labour-dependent business pushes a large share of risk onto workers and society while retaining most of the control, and why the right to use aggregation and leverage is treated as natural for capital and suspect for labour.

The fight is not between labour and markets. It is between two stories of the market: one where power is legitimate for some, and one where power becomes illegitimate the moment workers discover they can wield it too.

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