Gig Workers: An Ideological Strike

On the last day of 2025, unions of gig workers struck work. End of the year is a particularly busy time for such workers as online delivery orders for food, various goods and other services bump up greatly. The gig segment, which includes cabbies working for app-based transport aggregators, has seen strikes earlier. But these have largely been in the transport sector. This was the first time that other segments, especially delivery workers, participated in the strike.

The strike call was given by the Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT), the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union (TGPW) and the Gig and Platform Service Workers Union (GIPSWU). TGPWU chief Shaik Salauddin told the news website The News Minute that the strike was a “significant achievement” and “More than two lakh gig workers participated in the strike with us.”

In contrast, Deepinder Goyal, the founder of Zomato and the face of the gig economy start-up ecosystem, said he was all for peaceful protests. But violent protests and stopping others who want to work is not okay. Taking to social media, he showed instances where alleged delivery workers tried to stop others from working. Goyal said that, “Here’s what we know—a number of these protestors were not even our delivery partners. They were agents of political interests, piggybacking on the narrative to gain mileage.”

So, what was the reality of the “strike” and what is the nature of the demands made by the striking unions?

Conservative estimates suggest that the number of gig workers in India was around 12 million. This number is not fixed as gig workers drop in and drop out at a significantly higher rate than workers in formal jobs. If one goes by Salauddin’s claim of two lakh workers on strike, approximately 16% of the gig workforce struck work on 31^st December. That should have paralysed the sector. The fact that it didn’t tells a very different story: the strike was more ideological in nature than based on some real grievances or working conditions.

Some of these claims of adverse working conditions include the fact that the 10-minute delivery system is inhuman and poses very serious safety risks to the workers who have to deliver orders in an impossible time schedule. Then there is the issue of these workers being “underpaid.” Salauddin and the unions had demanded that gig workers be given a monthly minimum wage of Rs40,000 and that gig workers be classified as “workers” rather than “partners.”

These are classic heavy-handed union tactics that can destroy any industry, let alone a nascent start-up sector. The economics of the sector does not allow the approximately 12 million workers a monthly wage of Rs40,000. Even if this outlandish demand were, for a minute, to be conceded, the demand for the classification of delivery partners as “workers” is a ham-handed attempt to form unions in a sector that has no organic option of unionization. Unions are prevalent in “shopfloor” sectors where workers congregate to a specified workplace. In a sector that is disaggregated, that kind of politics is not feasible except through the “legal” route where delivery partners are classified as “workers” and the labour laws kick in.

In independent India, demands of this kind where “worker rights” were cast in stone and wages negotiated by unions in a coercive manner killed the possibility of industrialisation. The same effort is now sought to be replicated in the 21^st century in what is one of the biggest job providing sectors of the Indian economy.

Goyal, in contrast, presented a different set of facts. On Friday, in a post on X he calculated that if a delivery partner were to work for 10 hours every day for 26 days in a month, he would earn Rs26,000 in gross earnings. After accounting for fuel and maintenance, around 20% of those earnings, the partner would get Rs21,000 in a month. This is based on the 2025 average earnings per hour (EPH), excluding tips, for a delivery partner on Zomato. This EPH stood at Rs102 in 2025 and was Rs92 in 2024. Delivery partners get all the tips given by customers.

Goyal said that, “In 2025, the average delivery partner on Zomato worked 38 days in the year and 7 hours per working day, reflecting true gig style participation rather than fixed schedules. Only 2.3% of partners worked more than 250 days in the year. Demanding full-time employee benefits like PF, or guaranteed salaries for gig roles doesn’t align with what the model is built for.”

Similarly, the claim that delivery partners have to rush and meet 10-minute deadlines conveys the impression of a system where workers have to navigate the urban traffic crawl by risking their life and limb for measly earnings. In reality, the system of warehouse in urban areas is dense. Otherwise, it would be physically impossible to fulfil orders within 10 minutes. The alleged claims that workers risk their lives to traverse “large” distances to deliver stuff to customers is the stuff of myth.

The reality of work in India is sad not because workers are being exploited but that of a situation where there is little work. India remains a poor country in terms of per capita incomes. The reasons for that lie in the absence of work and not because workers don’t get enough. If gig workers undertake work that is underpaying and unpleasant one needs to ask the question, why do they associate themselves with such work? Econ101 gives a simple answer: what is offered to them by delivery start-ups is much higher than their reservation wage, the wage below which they will not work. In rural and semi-urban India from where the majority of such workers hail, there is little on offer in terms of income-generating work. One doesn’t starve—the government takes care of that through a plethora of schemes and handouts—but income requires that these prospective work-seekers do something else. And that is precisely what gig work offers.

The questions to ask are not about the fairness of work but about those who are making these allegations: what is their politics and what are their motivations in trying to derail a growing sector of the Indian economy.