The future of work: What gig workers really need

Gig workers earn income outside the traditional employer-employee relationship. Gig workers enter into formal agreements with on-demand businesses to provide services for the company or its clients. Major characteristics of the gig job is flexibility and independence it has to offer. Whereas the gig economy includes all the gig discovery platforms that hire independent workers across sectors like e-commerce, technology, food and beverages, and home services, among others.

Accordingly, the gig economy implies the employment of temporary or part-time professionals instead of conventional employees by the organisation. India has always had a large reserve of informal gig workers.

According to a report, India is likely to have 350 million gig jobs by 2025, presenting a huge opportunity for job seekers to capitalise and adapt to the changing work dynamics.

As per an Aon survey - ‘Decoding the Gig Economy’, 49 per cent of the 145 companies have already employed gig workers and 65 per cent plan to increase this number over the next two to five years. Hence, there is a vast potential for job seekers in blue, white, and grey collar jobs.

Even after this vast growth by leaps and bounds they are facing some major challenges which have to be addressed. Few of the major challenges are:

Payout issues

Most of the workers who are employed in the gig economy are daily earners or who are in need and irregular payment from the companies end is the major challenge for them.

Irregular or late payout systems are the challenge that is faced by workers. Gig discovery platforms should implement a daily payout method for their taskers from which they can withdraw their payment on the daily basis in their bank account.

Upskilling challenges

Upskilling is seen to be a major challenge in between the gig workers as with the market demand is seeing the continuous change and taskers need to upgrade according to it whereas workers are facing the challenge of sparing time apart from their work and focus on upskilling.

Insurance

A recent survey among gig workers highlighted that almost 40 per cent of the workers have no insurance, 36 per cent have purchased the insurance by themselves and only 24 per cent workers have employer-provided insurance cover. This shows that the majority of the workers are not insured and this is considered to be the key challenge in the industry.

Many gig discovery platforms have started addressing these challenges and made the way to find against it. Taskmo, a gig discovery platform has around 75,000+ gig workers community engaged with them and they are continuously working to make their life better by providing instant payout model, digital training, and insurance benefits.

Their gig workers are continuously digitally trained to upskill themselves according to the market requirement. For taskers health, Taskmo has partnered with insurtech startup Riskcovry to provide their gig workforce with per-day insurance facilities.

They have partnered to offer accidental insurance on a switch on/off usage-based coverage, which will be done using digital infrastructure to embed insurance. This insurance facility covers gig workers during the duration of their work hours.

Companies and gig discovery platforms can work together towards securing the future of gig workers which will be the major players in the future economy of the country in the next five years.

(The author is the co-founder of Taskmo, a tech-driven staffing platform)