What has been particularly striking about recent forms of collective action by platform workers is their relationship to consumers
January 2, 2026 04:05 PM IST First published on: Jan 2, 2026 at 04:05 PM IST
On New Year’s Eve, platform workers across different cities declared a strike to draw attention to poor working conditions. Unreasonable expectations and demands — such as the pressure to complete deliveries in 10 minutes — have come to be increasingly normalised across platforms. Strikes such as this raise an important question: What is the price paid by workers to provide such convenience to customers? Express deliveries put enormous pressure on workers to increase their pace of work, and pose risks to their own health and safety. Platforms often claim that such risks are exaggerated, as the logic of such time margins rests on a network of dark stores at the neighbourhood level, so that the distances covered by delivery workers are small. But irrespective of distance, the extremely short window causes workers to rush unnecessarily and poses a risk to other commuters.
Is there an urgent need for deliveries or services in such a short window? When we put grocery items on par with an emergency service that we would expect to reach our doorstep quickly, we end up treating our convenience as an inalienable need. Someone pays the price for that, and it is the platform worker.
It is useful to recollect that the express delivery/service model is fairly recent to platform work. As urban customers shifted to platforms for their requirements, they did so by blocking delivery slots and times well in advance. The pattern of immediate gratification was introduced by a single grocery delivery platform to gain a competitive edge over other established platforms. More recently, this unfortunate “development” has been widely adopted across platforms, and now encompasses a wide range of products and services, including domestic work.
Platforms may point to the wide use of quick delivery services as a sign that they have met consumer needs and demands, but consumers’ support for the strike demonstrates that they are not averse to longer delivery schedules. Rather than responding to a market demand, platforms have created the service and produced customer use through it. Few platforms give an option to opt out of such express deliveries, a signal that they are pushing the service onto customers rather than responding to the market.
One explanation for these developments is that the platform model in India forges ahead not through innovations in technology but through a deepening control over labour. Platform companies, irrespective of what services they provide — grocery delivery, home services, transport etc. — all register themselves as technology firms. Yet aside from their initial breakthrough in organising services over digital platforms, few location-based services have made any significant technological advancement in consumer-facing practices. Rather, the innovations have been limited to the time and cost of services, both of which are derived from increasing the pressure on workers. The ability to introduce convenience for customers has rested on the wide pool of labour available to platforms because other forms of urban employment remain restricted.
Low costs and quick deliveries are thus not the result of technological change improving productivity or lowering costs, but of compelling workers to meet new time margins and by steadily lowering their incomes. Demands for higher incomes and improved conditions have led to workers being blocked, as platforms easily replace one set of workers with others, signalling the emphasis on a low-cost labour force for this sector. Long hours and poor pay have now become the norm in platform work, and repeated strikes and protests in different cities demonstrate that workers are suffering. This has even necessitated state intervention to provide basic social security to platform workers.
The writer teaches at IIIT, Delhi
Curated by Aisha Patel
