PLATFORM FOR CHANGE: A WOMEN-LED UNION GIVES VOICE TO INDIA’S GIG WORKERS
Puja Sen
Seema Singh’s frustrations with her employer were coming to a head in 2020. Two years earlier, she had quit her job at a salon after seeing an advertisement by Urban Company that promised flexibility, autonomy and better pay. Seema liked the idea of working on her own terms—choosing her hours, and earning more per appointment, would potentially allow her more time with her children.
Founded as UrbanClap in 2014, Urban Company was one of the pioneers of India’s platform-based gig economy, connecting customers with a range of service professionals, such as electricians, plumbers, cleaners and beauticians. It joined an expanding ecosystem of companies involved in ride-sharing, food delivery, groceries and logistics. The platform model was presented as a win-win: customers received services at unprecedented speeds, companies scaled rapidly without taking on the obligations of conventional employers, and workers were told that they were gaining flexibility. According to the union labour ministry, there were 7.7 million gig workers in India as of 2020–21, and this figure is expected to rise to 23.5 million by the end of the decade.
It did not take Seema long to realise that the cost of the added convenience would be borne by the workers. “The system in India is so bad, there is no limit to how much these companies take advantage,” she told me. “Outside India, the gig economy must be as they say it is. Here, we do the work out of necessity—there is no choice.” Platforms such as Urban Company, Zomato, Swiggy, Uber and Ola are able to sidestep accountability and obligations under labour law, while workers have weak legal standing, ineffective grievance redressal mechanisms and negligible institutional protection. For all the talk of flexibility, they are forced to work long hours if they are to make a living off their meagre earnings.
Seema said that the first signs she noticed were the debt traps. Beauticians like her were required to purchase equipment and products through loans facilitated by the platform, with repayments automatically deducted from their earnings. They were sorted into tiers—classic, prime and luxe—with each higher tier advertised as an opportunity to earn more, though they came with higher costs, such as more expensive kits. Workers often had to absorb discounts offered to customers, while also having to pay for their travel and platform commissions. “After all that work, we have no savings in hand,” Seema told me. “Banks don’t give loans, no health insurance, we have nothing.”
The situation sharply deteriorated during the COVID-19 pandemic. On some days, almost nothing appeared in Seema’s account. Along with a colleague, Gunjan Choudhury, she decided to raise their concerns with the company. “Initially, we were just doing this for ourselves, but lots of other women started joining in,” she said. Around ten of them signed a handwritten letter to the management, she added, demanding clarity on “very basic, normal things,” such as lower commission rates and the right to use washrooms at their clients’ homes. Not much happened.
Companies discourage unionisation by blocking IDs, warning workers against joining WhatsApp groups and, at times, involving the police to intimidate organisers.
In late 2021, Seema and Gunjan led a group of around two dozen women to Urban Company’s Gurugram headquarters, seeking a meeting with the management. They got the meeting, but the leadership was unwilling to agree to even their most basic demands. This was a turning point. In October that year, after coordinating with each other over WhatsApp, women workers of Urban Company from Delhi and Jaipur staged a strike—their first collective action. The company responded with a 12-point agenda, promising to reduce commissions, enable better earnings and commit to greater transparency. However, it also introduced harsher penalties for workers failing to complete their monthly targets, leading to another strike that December. Seema recalled camping outside the headquarters in the freezing cold.
Urban Company’s response was more belligerent this time. It filed a case against the striking workers in the Gurugram district court. Seema and Gunjan had their IDs blocked on the platform, effectively cutting them off from work. They eventually left Urban Company but continued assisting those who remained. Gunjan told me that, throughout 2022, “we ran around with no money in our pockets, trying to help the women who were reaching out to us.” When they approached lawyers or the police, she recalled, “they asked for documents proving employment. We only had the app.”
At this point, Seema and Gunjan, along with other activists, began to think about building something more organised, as a response to the isolation inherent in platform work. They cofounded the Gig and Platform Service Workers Union. The GIPSWU was meant to achieve more than just organising strikes—workers needed to fight on multiple fronts. It would enable coordinated media outreach, legal advocacy and public pressure, as well as foreground the experiences of women, who made up almost the entire workforce of beauticians but were marginal in the larger gig economy.
For women workers, the challenges of gig work extend far beyond wages and commissions. The GIPSWU organisers described complaints they had received from scores of women. Many spoke of the risks of entering customers’ homes alone—clients stripping in front of workers, refusing to pay, physically assaulting them—with little recourse in cases of harassment. “Half the time, they just say, ‘Come away from there,’” Nirmal Gorana, the union’s national coordinator, told me. Others described difficulties in collecting goods from company warehouses staffed by men and their fear for their safety while working late at night. Internal complaints committees exist on paper, but workers rarely know how to access them.
Long hours on the road often mean no access to washrooms—particularly difficult during menstruation. There are no maternity benefits, childcare allowances or crèches. “Most of the women in this economy are shouldering responsibilities all on their own,” Seema said. “Ninety-nine percent of them are single women and mothers, and the ones that are married usually come from households where they don’t have much support from their husbands or families.”
The GIPSWU leadership told me that they currently have around fifty thousand members. The union has encouraged workers to lodge complaints against abuse or misconduct—which many are unwilling to do, for fear of retaliation—and assisted them with legal cases. Organising platform workers, however, is fundamentally different from unionising factories or offices. Workers are spread across platforms, cities and occupations, rarely sharing a physical workplace. Companies actively discourage unionisation, Seema said, by blocking IDs, warning workers against joining WhatsApp groups and, at times, involving the police to intimidate organisers. Nirmal explained that platforms can identify workers attending union meetings through location-tracking on their phones. “Their names are immediately flagged,” he said. The fear of losing access to work keeps many women from speaking out. Those who seek to return to work after an extensive time away are often required to join using a new number, effectively erasing their work histories. Urban Company did not respond to my questions about these allegations.
Nirmal emphasised the need for interstate cooperation. “It is important to connect with other unions across states,” he said, “but those unions first need to be formed. Not many exist right now.” On 31 October 2024, during Diwali, the GIPSWU organised its first nationwide strike. “Urban Company workers have no holidays on festivals,” Seema told me. “We are made to work. We rarely even get a bonus.” Called “Black Diwali,” the strike involved workers in 11 cities logging off various platform apps. On New Year’s Eve in 2025, the union joined other organisations, including the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union and the Indian Federation of App-Based Transport Workers, in another national strike, protesting unsafe ten-minute delivery mandates—which the union government banned the following month—as well as low earnings, lack of security, algorithmic control and arbitrary de-platforming. The GIPSWU held another strike on Republic Day this year, with workers across the country switching off their apps, and plans to organise protests at various locations on 3 February.
The union’s aim, Nirmal told me, is to provide what the designation of “partner” systematically denies workers: a collective voice, legal support and public visibility. He said that the companies’ insistence on calling employees partners is deliberate. “It is important to use the word ‘worker,’” he argued. “Recognition as workers would trigger minimum-wage protections and other labour rights.” The present arrangement, he added, is part of a larger political project that pushes workers—the vast majority of whom already engage in informal employment—into more precarity. Coupled with high unemployment, the loosening of labour laws and the whittling down of the right to work by the restructuring of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the obstacles arrayed against gig workers are immense.
The Code on Social Security, passed by parliament in 2020 as part of the Narendra Modi government’s consolidation of labour laws, formally recognised gig workers as eligible for various protections, such as the provident funds and maternity benefits. Nirmal called the code “just a name” to rebrand old schemes, since gig workers were already eligible for most of the benefits as part of the informal sector. “What’s new in it?” he said. “There is nothing new.”
For the GIPSWU, the Modi government’s claims to act in their favour appeared hollow. Seema pointed to the Skill India Mission, which often cites platform-based work as evidence of success. “These companies don’t teach us new skills,” she told me. “They profit from people who are already trained.” Nirmal went further, describing the gig economy not as an innovation but as an attempt to normalise “forced labour” under a digital guise. Drawing parallels with other forms of precarious labour, such as the Agnipath scheme in the armed forces, he warned that, slowly, “doctors, teachers, everyone will become gig workers. The entire country is being pushed in that direction.”
Puja Sen is the senior editor at The Caravan.
https://caravanmagazine.in/labour/women-led-union-gipswu-gig-workers. Please consider subscribing to and supporting Caravan.
Top - Home