No company received more than 7/10 in the ‘Fairwork India Ratings 2021: Labour Standards in the Platform Economy’ report, which assessed 11 companies on five principles of fair gig work: fair pay, fair conditions, fair contracts, fair management, and fair representation. This is the third time that Fairwork Foundation has released these rankings, for which it interviewed 222 platform workers.
Food delivery players Swiggy and Zomato, which have been under extreme scrutiny for their treatment of delivery partners this year, scored 4 and 3 points respectively, up from 1 last year. Flipkart and Urban Company received the highest scores in the survey — seven and five, respectively — but none of the 11 platforms scored all basic points across the five principles.
Walmart-owned Amazon, delivery platform Dunzo, and IPO-bound PharmEasy all scored 1 out of 10.
The results were arrived at by combining desk research, worker interviews, and evidence provided by the platforms. The initiative was spearheaded by the Centre for IT and Public Policy (CITAPP) and the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) in association with Oxford University.
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While there was an was an improvement in the accessibility and readability of contracts, the study reported a decline in the take-home earnings of workers across platforms as increases in work-related costs (such as fuel costs and platform commissions) and the inability of platforms to effectively mitigate occupational risks that workers routinely face in their work, including road accidents, theft, violence and adverse weather conditions.
