Ola, Porter, Uber Rank Lowest In Fairwork's Ratings For Gig Workers

Ride-hailing majors Uber and Ola, along with logistics startup Porter, continued to lag at the bottom of this year's Fairwork India Ratings, an index developed to measure how fairly companies treat their gig workers.

Tata-owned BigBasket, Zomato, Swiggy and Urban Company topped this year's Fairwork India index, as the results at the top and the bottom were an exact copy of last year's.

This year, the study scored 11 platforms, including Amazon Flex, BigBasket, BluSmart, Flipkart, Ola, Porter, Swiggy, Uber, Urban Company, Zepto and Zomato. It ranks the digital labour platforms on the basis of five principles—pay, working conditions, contract fairness, management and representation.

This year, as well, no platform scored more than six out of the maximum of 10 points, and none scored all the first points across the five principles, according to the Fairwork India 2024 Report, published on Tuesday.

The Fairwork India report is compiled by the Centre for IT and Public Policy and the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore, in association with Oxford University.

On the principle of pay, only Bigbasket and Urban Company were awarded the first point for instituting a minimum wage policy that guaranteed all their workers earn at least the hourly local minimum wage, after factoring in work-related costs.

Also to be noted, no platform got the point for representation. "Despite many instances of workers’ protests and strikes across the country, and legislative changes addressing the platform economy over the years, platforms in India refuse to formally recognise or negotiate with workers’ collectives," the study noted.