Chandrika, And Many Like Her, Pay A Terrible Cost For Flexi Work On Gig Platforms
The recent death of a beauty worker with Urban Company has raised questions about the practices at aggregator platforms – the promise of flexibility and freedom comes bundled with exploitative and coercive work conditions
To celebrate its 10th birthday, Urban Company (UC), the aggregator platform, shared a video of its founders visiting former ‘partners’, a euphemism for people who work for it as beauticians, plumbers, electricians and so on. On camera, one woman said the platform that delivers home and personal services helped her accumulate enough savings to purchase a house and another said it made it possible for her to build a future.
However, for Seema Singh, the video came as a “slap in the face”. A former beauty worker and member of the Gig and Platform Services Workers’ Union (GIPSWU), a women-led network that advocates for better work conditions, she said the testimonials simply did not match the reality.
“Look at Chandrika, the company tortured her as she fought for her rights,” said Seema.
Chandrika Goud, 32, was a home-based beauty provider who had worked with UC for five years and was a GIPSWU campaigner who spoke up against her employer’s “exploitative practices, including unfair labour conditions and illegal surveillance”. She was associated with GIPSWU and Telangana Gig & Platform Workers Union, both affiliated with the Indian Federation of App-Based Transport Workers (IFAT). She passed away earlier this month after “enduring years of relentless harassment, intimidation, and abuse” due to UC’s punitive actions, alleged the union in a press release.
A single mother and the sole earner in her family from Telangana, Chandrika had been drawn to UC’s promise of flexible work and a stable income. She had also participated in the protests against UC’s work policies in 2021 and made a representation on these to political leaders including Telangana Chief Minister Revanth Reddy. Like many other workers who agitated, her ID was blocked; work stopped and threats from the company mounted, as per the union. Activists and those close to her allege that the constant mental and physical stress was a factor in her taking ill. She was hospitalised and subsequently died, said Shaik Salauddin, founder of TGPWU. BehanBox is yet to see a copy of the medical records.
The TGPWU in a press release urged the company to “stop punitive actions” and provide professional counselling to recognise the mental and emotional toll on workers. GIPSWU has also demanded the government carry out a criminal investigation into UC’s “role” in Chandrika’s “harassment and demise”, and provide fair compensation to her family. The company should be held accountable because “this is how much the company puts a person through”, said Aishwarya, a GIPSWU activist.
BehanBox reached out to Urban Company for a comment on the allegations surrounding Chandrika’s death, its work culture and the redressal mechanisms available to women. This story will be updated when they respond.
The women working in beauty, spa, and home-based services with the platform company have been agitating for three years now for minimum wages, a fair redressal system for their grievances, and the right to be recognised as employees of the platforms. They want an end to a service rating system that they maintain is loaded in favour of customers and leaves workers in a state of constant precarity and fearful of their safety. Their other demands include putting a stop to the surveillance system, and punitive company measures against criticism.
Our interviews with activists, experts, and a former beauty worker established that these demands have only elicited a hostile response from the company so far. What was once a promise of flexibility and freedom now seems like a threat of constant constraint and control, they said.
Reasons For Cancellation Never Heard
Chandrika had filed a police FIR on February 24 this year with a district court in Kukatpally, Hyderabad. A copy, obtained by BehanBox, mentioned that a senior at work reprimanded her “quality checking” using “abusive words” over a call, a feedback channel not allowed under company rules.
Chandrika complained to the head office and after two follow-ups, was asked to visit the officer. She refused “to go to the office alone” due to safety concerns, she said in the FIR. When she took partners along with her on January 19, she was “pushed” and “beaten with hands” by a security guard, and the physical abuse was “encouraged” by the manager and staff, the FIR alleged. The company blocked her account four days later. In subsequent police summons, she was made to stand at the station for hours, alleged Seema, adding that during all this UC’s management personnel sat inside with police officials and refused to meet with her.
“You can’t imagine the scale of violence,” said Seema.
Chandrika’s death is not an isolated instance. In 2021, a woman in Bengaluru died by suicide after Urban Company blocked her ID seemingly for refusing a booking.
“Her death was the biggest flashpoint, the reason the protests started,” said Nihira, who has worked with the All India Gig Workers’ Union, a collective of almost 3,000 people representing the interests of service and logistic workers across app-based platforms. The unrest in October 2021 saw hundreds of women protesting in front of Urban Company’s offices against the blocking of work IDs as a punitive measure, irregular pay, arbitrary pay cuts, and unsafe work conditions–all of them realities confronting India’s almost 8-million gig workers.
Per Urban Company policy, a partner’s ID is permanently blocked if they refuse more than five jobs a month, to discourage last-minute and imprudent cancellations. But without open communication lines – an algorithm assigns tasks to the workers on the platform – ID deactivation has become a tool to penalise and control workers who cancel a booking.
Workers say they rarely cancel bookings without a strong reason. Personal emergencies are one reason. Last year, Mahesh, a partner on the platform, had to cancel four bookings in a day to care for his father who had been hospitalised after a heart attack. He submitted documents to establish this, but his account remains blocked even after a year.
Another aggrieved worker, Ambika, posted a video online of a customer who physically assaulted her and barred her from leaving the premises when she insisted on being paid for extra work. Urban Company blocked her ID later without investigating the incident.
Cancellation is also a pre-emptive measure that women employ to avoid bookings with customers who have a reputation for harassing partners, said Nihira. And several union demands for a review system which allows workers to rate clients off a platform for bad behaviour have gone unheeded.
Always On The Job
Without human redressal – as opposed to algorithmic – the system serves only client interests, penalises partners, and restricts their autonomy, said activists. A contentious policy revision in 2023 changed the minimum rating criterion, threatening account suspension for partners who failed to maintain a minimum grade of 4.7 stars compared to the 4.5 before. Some women continue to find their accounts shadow banned – they can access their account but are not shown any jobs on the app – and suspended after participating in protests, which further strains a partner base which consists of several single mothers. “A UC or platform worker is always on the job, and when they’re not, they are penalised for not being on the job,” said Nihira, adding that the right to refuse a job is the only agency the partners have.
Getting IDs unblocked is a Sisyphean task, said women workers: calls to help lines go unanswered, pleas for in-person meetings are ignored, some were even chased out of the company building by security guards. The only option is to pay the hefty onboarding fee again to rejoin the app.
A yet-to-be-published study by the Centre for Internet and Society concludes that for over 80% of its women workers, Urban Company is the primary source of income, according to Chiara Furtado, a researcher at the centre who studies digital economies and labour. As we said earlier, many workers, like Chandrika, are single mothers, live in rented homes and often have to take a loan to pay the onboarding cost. Many are also experienced women who left stable salon jobs for Urban Company.
“They lured us into joining by saying there is freedom—we can work when we want to, say no when we want, even look after our children and work. But now we can’t say no and are expected to be available at least 12-14 hours. Where did the freedom go?” said Seema.
It is difficult to estimate the psychological toll of these practices, Nihira added. “The problem is that in three years, nothing has changed. A person is still dying without any support from the company they spent so long working at,” she pointed out.
Cost of Resistance
Chandrika’s story shows “just how many coercive ways in which platforms have the right to suppress collective voices”, said Chiara. The October 2021 protests were one of the first documented instances in India of women gig workers leading a protest of this kind. The period since is strewn with examples of repercussions for resisting these work practices. Workers said the environment grew ‘hostile’, their weekly check-ins with category managers stopped, and all channels for communication ended.
The company sought an injunction in December 2021, requiring workers to restrain from “holding any demonstration, dharna, rally, gherao, peace march, shouting slogans, entering or assembling at or near office premise” because these adversely impacted its earnings. This was the first instance of a platform taking legal action against protesting workers. In June this year, co-founder Abhiraj Bhal said the company is “always open to talking to partners one-on-one and explaining our rationale” but “will not talk to people outside the UC community”. The founders have not met any union or former partners in the last three years of agitation, or even active workers, said Nihira who worked with housekeeping partners in Bengaluru.
The workers alleged that to regain access to their accounts, they were made to sign either on blank sheets or documents stating that they would not continue the protests. Many like Seema and Chandrika who protested in 2021 said they saw job opportunities dwindle and received “verbal threats”. On October 31 this year, GIPSWU staged a digital protest marking a “Black Diwali”, where platform workers switched off phones and refused to work on a government holiday to appeal for better pay and work conditions. UC partners who refused jobs on Diwali said they were “penalised” later–no bookings were assigned to them over subsequent days.
UC’s partner welfare policy states “workers are not penalised, monetarily or otherwise”, for “failing to perform a service due to justifiable medical reasons, and voicing concerns or contesting delisting from the platform”.
“There’s also no way to report the calls – when we go to [labour] court or police, they ask for documentation, but we have nothing,” said Seema. Workers have no documents establishing them as workers at UC – aspirants have to fill out a form on their website/app, create a ‘professional profile’, and once verified, they start receiving assignments after undergoing training.
The company’s retaliatory measures prompted many women to join unions and collectives like Soochna Evam Rozgar Adhikar Abhiyan and Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union, which helped draft Rajasthan and Karnataka’s gig worker legislations. Protest mobilisation now only happens through small in-person meetings or over WhatsApp groups. But Nihira alleged that the management “planted” women, who either worked as partners or represented the organisation, and cajole others into signing documents promising to cease protests in return for having their blocked IDs unlocked.
A lot of women would still work through this turbulence, Nihira said, because they are invested in this company. “They are ready to deal with challenges, but ask to be brought into that process rather than just that process happening to them,” she said.
Collective bargaining goes unrecognised by the platforms and the State due to diluted labour laws, said Chiara. In 2021, platform and gig workers were brought under the scope of labour laws for the first time with the Code on Social Security, 2020 (COSS). But the vague definition of who is a ‘gig’ or ‘platform’ worker placed them outside the employer-employee relationship, thus limiting their access to India’s existing labour laws, as BehanBox reported earlier. This “systemic and unbridled absolute power” of the platforms is enabled by the State because “there is nothing to keep them in check or hold them accountable”, she added.
‘Medical Insurance is a Farce’
Seema spoke of a check-list of worries that strain several women’s experiences: irregular pay that falls below minimum wage requirements and arbitrary deductions; rising costs of travel; the burden of being responsible for your own safety; the stress of seeking redressal in case of emergencies; a stream of casteist, sexist, and Islamophobic remarks by clients; and constant surveillance. In the beginning there was work, there was cash, but “we realised we are losing more money than we are earning—and it is going to the company”, said Seema. “Our work made the company’ name and brand, but what about us? No one knows about us”.
A majority of platform workers come from marginalised backgrounds, and having to deal with the tyranny of opaque and incomprehensible algorithms is a traumatising experience for them, said activists. “We are beginning to take note of physical and sexual harassment, but there is also psychological harassment workers go through,” said Suman Das, a member of the All India IT and ITeS Employees’ Union, who has worked with several platform workers in Bengaluru. But no law or company policy recognises this marginalisation, he said.
The proposed Karnataka Platform-Based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Bill, 2024, pushed for safeguards against algorithm-based decision making. It requires companies to prevent discrimination on caste or gender grounds, and disclose information on rating systems and parameters for allocating work—if the information is sought by the worker. The platforms objected to the provisions for being intrusive and adversely affecting their competitive interests. Legal redressal routes to the labour court require documentation—but workers have no way to prove violence in the workplace if there is no workplace to begin with.
“If you talk to 100 [platform workers], 50 will talk about wanting to kill themselves… But who do we share our problems with?” said Seema who is anguished about the fact that Chandrika actively participated in consultations with the government and other bodies but herself had no one to turn to in a crisis.
Many platform companies have widely advertised their health policy: Zomato in 2022 piloted a health scheme worth Rs 3 lakh as a ‘loyalty benefit’ for those who have been with the company for more than two years. Amazon India promises 24/7 counselling services in addition to medical coverage. Urban Company had announced health insurance policies extended to “life insurance, disability cover, accidental hospitalisation, accidental OPD treatment, among others”.
These are nothing but a “farce”, said Suman. The cashless insurance schemes means partners have to pay out of their pockets during hospital visits and the subsequent reimbursement is tangled in “red-tapism”. “It becomes really difficult to access insurance benefits when there is a crisis,” she said.
Without institutional support, there are few spaces for women who are doubly vulnerable due to gender and caste markers. “Women don’t think they can talk to their parents, children, or spouses. The few friends that they make through Urban Company are also in the same position,” Nihira explained. Many remain silent, worrying their family members might stop them from going out or working altogether. In some cases the family doesn’t want to advance the issue. There are also few work opportunities for women partners who leave these platforms, said Seema.
The current framing allows aggregator companies to position workers as ‘entrepreneurs’ and ‘partners’ who simply use the technology platform. These euphemisms keep them from acknowledging this labour force as workers with rights, leaving the workers feeling isolated and powerless, said Nihira.
Weaponising Flexibility
BehanBox had previously reported how Urban Company was among the first to sell to women the ostensible promises of gig economy. There was work, there was cash, and there was flexibility to shuffle between jobs and unpaid care work. The promise lost its shine over the last three years with policies like ‘auto acceptance’ feature (which eliminates partners’ agency in accepting bookings) and arbitrary subscription plans.
“People have given years to the company. We treat it like a job but the company takes advantage of our precarity, they don’t care if we live or die… If something happens to the worker, the company will simply remove their data,” Seema said. A June 2024 report that surveyed housekeeping workers with UC found “extractive and oppressive work arrangements”, marred by indignity, precarity, and alienation.
Gig work has existed much before platform companies entered the picture. And the narrative of flexibility has always been gendered. Take the appeal of home-based garment work, an initiative that began around the 1960s among women living in low-resource settings. They were encouraged to take up stitching work as a route to empowerment while juggling household responsibilities. Garment manufacturers used the ‘competitive advantage’ of using low-wage workers to generate profits. Evidence shows these models did not significantly improve their freedom within or outside the house, and instead, revealed how “already socially classed labouring bodies” are incorporated in sweatshops where commodification and exploitation work in tandem. The phenomenon continues to impose a double burden on women. Then, like today, workers’ rights activists criticised labour laws for encouraging contractual labour over generating employment opportunities.
“That trend has continued on to platform work, and has become a way to doubly exploit women workers,” as they disproportionately bear the care burden within and outside homes in the absence of care infrastructures, said Chiara: “Flexibility is always a trade off for income security for women workers. And platforms have weaponised that.”
On digital labour platforms, ‘flexibility’ governed through algorithms has had a ripple effect globally – there is a gradual spread of casual and precarious work, and diminished agency.
While mounting resistance movements by gig workers have pushed states like Karnataka and Rajasthan to take incremental steps towards social security measures, laws continue to bypass the core demand: for workers to be recognised as ‘employees’ and platforms to be governed as ‘employers’.
Chiara argued that the State is not invested enough in the rights and well-being of platform workers. For instance, the Karnataka gig worker Bill focuses only on social protection measures such as health policy and a 14-day termination notice but not employment protection at large, and excludes the requirement of paying minimum wages. A worker can refuse a number of gigs per week with ‘reasonable cause’, but the power to decide ‘reason’ again rests with the platform company.
Moreover, the unique classification of platform workers has left women workers with no access to maternity protections or for being recognised by the PoSH Act.
Many activists like Suman have urged policy makers to distinguish in law the scope of gig and platform work to challenge the influence of Big Tech over labour policy. Trade bodies including Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) lobbied the government against the Karnataka gig work legislation on behalf of a ‘group’, per a Business Standard report. A source also told BehanBox that some representatives of this group were present during the internal consultations.
The group, we were told, included companies such as Zomato, Uber, Amazon, and Urban Company. They contended that the Bill gives “wide-ranging powers of inspection” to the State government over algorithms and day-to-day work which can hurt their “ease of doing business”.
This workforce will expand three times to 23.5 million people in the next five years and comprise 4.1% of total livelihood in India, per the Economic Survey 2023-24. While governments speak of welfare measures for gig workers and boast of a shift towards gig economy, people remain employed without any proof or benefit of employment, and at the mercy of profit-driven companies. IFAT filed a Supreme Court petition in December 2021 seeking implementation of social security measures under the existing labour laws. The Court on November 19 this year questioned the Union Government’s delay in filing a response.
If the State recognises India’s gig workers as employees, all other demands can be met, Suman said. The recognition will also, to a degree, bolster unions’ bargaining power and embolden collective action, experts pointed out.
Seema called this a long battle for worker rights but she is not without hope. “Bilkul jeetenge, kyun nahi jeetenge? Aakhir hum apna haq maang rahe hain (why won’t we win – we are only demanding what is our right).”
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