The dark side of convenience: Consumer ease comes at a human price

A working couple returns home late from a long commute and realises their refrigerator is empty. A teenager, pulling an all-nighter for a school project, gets a sudden craving for a late-night snack. An elderly individual, homebound due to illness, needs an urgent prescription from a pharmacy. A family hosting unexpected guests suddenly finds themselves short on refreshments. An aged mother, unable to visit her unwell daughter in the same city, sends a container of home-cooked food through a courier app.

These are not uncommon scenarios in today’s fast-paced world but were simply unimaginable a few years back. For a growing number of people, a vast network of gig and platform workers is available to fulfil these needs at a moment’s notice. 

The quick commerce industry has fundamentally changed how consumers shop, offering features like real-time tracking and flexible delivery time slots. This affordability, along with a ten-minute home delivery guarantee that is now a common assurance offered by a majority of platforms, raises a significant question: is the current gig economy model, celebrated for its flexibility and autonomy, truly sustainable, or does it prioritise corporate profit and consumer convenience over the dignity, well-being, and fundamental human rights of the workers who power it?

Advocates of the gig economy suggest it offers a modern approach to work, providing benefits that align with key factors of employee satisfaction. Research on worker welfare highlights that having control over one’s schedule, a sense of autonomy, and a clear link between effort and reward are major drivers of job happiness. The gig model, in its ideal form, offers exactly this. Workers can often choose their own hours, allowing them to balance their professional and personal lives. This perspective holds that any issues with worker conditions are part of the industry’s growing pains and can be addressed over time without changing the fundamental model of work.

However, this vision of a flexible future faces considerable challenges when measured against the experiences of platform workers. 

A recent audit by the Rajdhani App Workers’ Union, alongside insights from academic studies, presents a compelling counter-argument that the current system is not adequately designed to protect its workforce. Its findings highlighted serious issues with basic facilities, dignity, and dialogue. For example, in the National Capital Region, only 67 per cent of warehouses had usable toilets, a quarter lacked safe drinking water, and 30 per cent had no designated rest areas for workers. A lack of dialogue further complicates this, as platform companies allegedly change pay rates and insurance schemes with a simple notification on an app, unlike the usual tripartite meetings that would precede such decisions in a factory setting.

According to a NITI Aayog report, India’s gig workforce is estimated at 12 million in FY 2024-2025 and is projected to grow to 23.5 million by 2029-30. The gig economy is expected to contribute 1.25per cent to the GDP by 2030 with a work volume of $250 billion. The cause for concern is that 90 per cent of gig workers lack savings and are highly vulnerable to economic shocks.

A crucial challenge is the legal classification of gig workers as “independent contractors”, which often means they miss out on basic protections like a minimum wage, paid leave, and social security benefits.

Data from the Fairwork project indicates that only 21.8 per cent of platform workers earned the local minimum wage after accounting for their costs. The pressure to reach that wage is significant: the percentage of workers who had to put in more than 48 hours a week to earn minimum wage went up from about 60 per cent to about 84 per cent in four years, a finding that challenges the notion of “part-time” gig work.

Furthermore, the net earnings of platform workers are often less than the least paid formal workers, with no additional benefits like gratuity or bonus.

The power dynamic in the platform economy is often highly imbalanced, with algorithms seeming to control both customers and gig workers. For workers, these algorithms act as a digital manager, influencing everything from task assignment and payment to performance ratings. This constant monitoring and algorithmic control reduces the flexibility often attributed to “gig work”. 

Such relentless digital oversight, which dictates every move from acceptance to completion, removes the very autonomy that the gig economy promises. 

The issue is also reportedly more pronounced for women, who, despite entering these domains in sizeable numbers, are often overlooked in conversations about social protection. The lack of a proper mechanism for reporting harassment makes them particularly vulnerable, which, in turn, reduces workers to cogs in a machine, with no recourse or redressal.

A truly just society can’t exist when our convenience is built on a hidden human cost. This reality demands a deeper ethical consideration from us all.

(The author is an independent writer)