The regulation should ensure that flexibility is for real, with no incentive structure that seeks to distort it.

What does the word ‘flexibility’ mean in the context of platform work? The two stakeholders, platforms and the workers, are debating the term. The platforms argue they offer ‘flexibility’ but workers disagree.

But both the workers and platforms are right because they are talking about different things. The platforms refer to the flexibility between various jobs, i.e., the worker can work across multiple platforms or work partially in a traditional job and partially in a platform.

In contrast, the workers are talking about flexibility at work i.e., the ability to choose how much to work, what hours to work and what locations to work on the platform.

The platforms’ concept of ‘flexibility’ is neither novel, nor driven by the presence of a networking platform. It has always existed in India. There is overwhelming research evidence that workers especially in developing countries like India hold multiple jobs (Choudhuri, 2021). The Code on Social Security 2020 further recognises non-traditional work.

Beyond pensions and health insurance that the Code on Social Security 2020 promises, the Central and State Governments should develop metrics to assess the flexibility-at-work of platform workers across different sectors and companies. If the platform fails the flexibility test at work, one needs to ask whether workers may be classified as ‘partners’.

There should be tests to evaluate whether payments to platform workers distort the incentives to flexibility. In the end, flexibility is just another feature of platform work. There are other features that also need to be evaluated/assessed to get a sense of work conditions of platform workers.

Concept of ‘flexibility’

The novel concept of ‘flexibility’ that a platform offers (for example, a food delivery platform) is allowing the worker to choose the number of days they want to work, the specific days the workers want to work, the shifts they want to work (hours of work), the timing of operations and place of work (zones). A platform typically divides a larger city into various zones and the platform worker is free to choose to work in a particular zone when they sign up. Workers have some degree of choice in the time and location where they can work in contrast to a traditional job, where time and space are fixed and non-negotiable.

The test for the policymaker is to determine the actual choice a worker has in any particular platform and the test comes up when the worker wants to change any of the variables. How easy is it to change, if at all? There should be a manifest trade-off between flexibility and wages, without the worker signing up for a traditional job in the garb of flexible work.

In the NCAER Food Delivery Platform Report 2023, we had probed workers on four aspects of flexibility: perception of flexibility in their work, desire to change work arrangements (such as zones and work shifts), ease of the process, and the importance to them of flexibility in their work. About a third of workers cited flexible work hours/days as a reason for joining the platform (28.4 per cent), but the percentage was higher for Tier 3 city workers (44 per cent).

A majority of workers expressed satisfaction with the flexible work norms in terms of easily changing the time, duration and zone to suit their convenience. (About 76 per cent of the workers found it highly or moderately flexible.) About 16 per cent said that ‘flexibility was not an option because one had to work the long shift to meet family expenses’. About 44 per cent of the workers who tried to change shifts found it either moderately easy or extremely easy to change shifts.

While this particular food delivery platform is deemed to be ‘flexible’, what about other platforms in this sector and other sub-sectors? More data is necessary to improve the rights of workers in the platform economy.

The writers are faculty, NCAER, Delhi. Views are personal.