Uber eyeing Australia-style peer-to-peer gig in India, but driver needs vastly different

However, the Australian and the Indian markets are substantially different for Uber to be able to easily replicate the model here, especially given the dissimilar priorities of the drivers in the two countries.

Currently, Indian regulations call for drivers to have a commercial registration of their vehicle, a commercial driver’s licence and a host of background checks to be done by the platform before these people are able to operate their four-wheelers with platforms such as Uber and Ola.

Over time, regulations overseeing such platforms have evolved to include a mandatory 12-hour service cap for drivers, identification markers of app-based ride-hailing platform on a car; some states even have commissions monitoring point-to-point transportation that recommend, monitor and enforce safety and other standards.

On the back of these light-touch regulations, Australia has emerged to become one of Uber’s most penetrated market. Weekly active consumer penetration in Australia is around 6.5 per cent, as against 4 per cent in the UK, 3.9 per cent in the US and a meagre 0.5 per cent in India.

According to a study commissioned by Uber, in Australia, flexibility of schedules is an important factor for 89 per cent of the earners when they’re looking for work. This also supports Uber’s business model, which is dependent on the company not employing its drivers.

“If they’re an employee, we’re required to do a whole lot of different things and as a result if we’re going to employ them and pay them like full-time
employees, we will start to say ‘you’ll have to work for 40 hours, and here are your shift assignments, and we need you on the road at these hours on these days’. That does not make sense for someone who says I just drive on weekends,” Mike Orgill, Senior Director, Public Policy & Government Relations, Uber for the APAC region, told The Sunday Express.

This also means because of the potential for misclassifying employees and contractors in a legal context, Uber does not provide the benefits to the gig workers on its platform that it would provide its employees. The average Indian driver, however, is vastly different from the Australian driver on an app-based platform.

While in Australia, flexibility and gig work is more descriptive of a person driving with an app-based platform, in India, driving for these apps has evolved to become a full-time profession. Reports of drivers plying their cabs for more than 12-15 hours a day have been rife, especially since platforms like Uber and Ola rationalised their incentive structures after the initial euphoria of onboarding drivers.

“I think that if we were to look at drivers in Australia and ask what is it that you most value, first would be earnings and second would be flexibility. In India, it would probably be first: earnings, and second: earnings again. Flexibility (in India) is probably not as important as it is in Australia but I do think they enjoy being able to service whatever area they’re comfortable servicing. They do enjoy going back and forth between different apps should they choose, whichever has the best incentives,” Orgill said.

“But when it comes right down to it, India has been quite progressive in being very early in saying, we’re finally in that system where people are their own individuals, they can run this thing the way they want to run it but we got to have some minimum standards for them.”

In India, the government has come out with a Code on Social Security, which recognises gig workers as a new occupational category, where there is no traditional employee-employer relationship. While the code is yet to come into effect, it envisages various benefits for gig workers, including life and disability cover, accident insurance, health and maternity, old age protection, and other benefits.

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The Labour & Employment Ministry is also working on a Social Security Fund, which will make aggregator platforms contributing 1-2 per cent of their annual turnover. This is to ensure that part-time contractors associated with different aggregator platforms are covered.

(The correspondent was in Sydney at the invite of Uber)

EDot: Future of Indian gig workers

Unlike in Australia, where a recent study by Uber has claimed that its contractual drivers overwhelmingly prefer flexibility of work schedule, most of the ride-hailing platform’s drivers in India reportedly prioritise earnings over a flexible work schedule. However, the passage of the Code on Social Security in India might give gig workers more benefits.