australia

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Wage Theft

Published in Dawn, March 18th, 2023

THREE years have gone by since the WHO declared the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Termed as the world’s most serious humanitarian crisis since World War II, it is still being debated whether the pandemic is over or not as new infections and deaths occur in a number of countries. By February 2023, 6.8 million people had died. Besides, hundreds of millions of people lost jobs globally, millions saw their salaries cut or work hours reduced. Most countries have not yet returned to the levels of employment and hours worked before the outbreak. According to an ILO report, informality and working poverty have risen further with the Covid-19 crisis.

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Gig Workers

Published in Dawn, May 2nd, 2021

Standard employment, the long-term work arrangement with one employer, pension and benefits, is vanishing. The pandemic has made the process faster. Non-standard, exploitative forms of employment have existed since ages and remain the dominant arrangement in capitalist societies. The only difference is that another category called ‘gig’ has been added to the existing irregular, contractual, temporary or on-call arrangements. The unifying factor for non-standard arrangements is that none provides protection to workers. Gig workers constitute a significant number of those impacted by Covid-19’s economic fallout in the Western world and Asia.

‘Gig work’ refers to non-standard employment on precarious contracts with digital on-demand platforms. The nature of work varies on the basis of different types of IT-based work platforms. Crowd-work platforms outsource online clerical tasks (eg data entry, business consulting) to a dispersed crowd of workers. Location-based platforms (eg Careem, FoodPanda, AirLyft) allocate offline manual work, such as delivery or transport services, to individuals in a specific geographical area. Online tasks which require a certain level of education appear to be less exploitative than offline manual work.

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