Opinion
Spare a thought for our food delivery personnel
Summary
An NCAER survey confirms the raw deal they’re saddled with. Glaringly, their real wages shrank over a three-year span after 2019. Intervene or not, only a jobs boom can sort this out.In the gig economy spawned by the internet, which allowed small tasks to be farmed out smoothly, the plight of India’s food delivery agents has been a long-running concern. A study released this week by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), based on a survey done last year of 924 workers dropping off packets across 28 cities for a delivery platform, sheds some light on their biodata profiles and work lives. Almost entirely male, most of those who hot-wheel their way to homes with food boxes are a young lot, with almost two-thirds of the sample aged under 30. But their levels of education are not as modest as their roles would suggest. Over 45% of them are either college graduates or have technical training, even though the majority are less educated. That data point may not be terribly precise in its representation of this sector’s reality, but the stark under-employment it reveals does reflect poorly on the state of India’s labour market. It lends credence to stories of desperation driving youngsters to such laborious gig work. These are not jobs that are prized by the country’s educated youth bulge, and this is not just because of the grunt work involved, but also for the poor terms on offer.
Other NCAER findings confirm what the media has heard from delivery agents. While they do have formal work contracts, as they are engaged by a corporate entity, their work conditions are not always better than those of informal-sector workers (as many of them once were). While higher earnings, work freedom and flexible work-hours were the top lures for most of these workers, those on long-shift duty report harder slogs than previous jobs, with accident coverage their only health-benefit gain. Critically, delivery gigs require them to deploy their own working capital, as they need to use their own app-loaded handset, motor vehicle and fuel to carry out assignments. It isn’t clear if the survey delved into such details, but riders are not known to get paid anything for the livery and signage they sport for brand publicity. As for upward mobility, the sample offers a mixed picture, with a dead-end visible to most respondents probed on food delivery as a career path. Low-paying jobs are often stop-gaps for youngsters; so too in this sector. But unlike in the West, where flipping burgers at an eatery is a fabled rite of passage on the way up, gig workers in this field face a particular problem that stems from labour abundance: wage shrinkage. The ‘money illusion’ keeps it disguised, but NCAER estimates show that their earnings over a three-year span from 2019 failed to keep pace with inflation. In real terms, their earnings shrank. What may be scandalous in an office context, however, happens to be one of the gig sector’s advantages: By farming out work variably, it resolves a labour market stiffness that arises from ‘sticky wages.’
An economic ‘solution’ that works by turning labour costs flexible, however, need not be fair. Although wage dependence keeps deliveries going, this should not obscure the raw deal workers have been saddled with. Rajasthan has sought to intervene with a special levy on gig platforms to fund welfare measures for them, but its statist approach means it will be only as efficient as the state-run tools devised for it. Other ideas have arisen too. Yet, unless an overall boom in job generation turns labour into less of a buyer’s market in India, work seekers with mouths to feed will find the field loaded against them. It’s a macro worry.
