E8: Against the Dying of the Light

In 2021, a year during which large parts of India had been under lockdown, Albinder Dhindsa wanted his company Blinkit to provide “instant commerce indistinguishable from magic”. A few months later, the delivery workers that were integral to the magic in Delhi-NCR were protesting their new rates and refusing to work. In 2021, Urban Company, which wanted to provide standardised home-based services through trained service professionals, was valued at an astounding 2 billion US dollars in 2021. On October 8 of that year, roughly 100 women, most of them beauty workers, protested the abrupt blocking of their IDs and compulsory retraining programmes. In December, more than fifty of them stayed overnight in front of the company’s office, in freezing temperatures.

 

Both these protests were supported by trade union activists from the All India Gig Workers Union, a national federation of gig worker unions affiliated with the Centre of Indian Trade Unions,  a national trade union of more than 62 lakh workers. The CITU believes in socialising the means of production and is the trade union arm of a leftist political party. The AIGWU’s work with Blinkit and Urban Company workers is a window to understand what it means to be part of the mainstream of the Indian labour movement today, more than thirty years after the liberalisation of the economy in 1991. During these years, much doubt has been cast on union strategies of mobilisation that rely only on formal state protections and employer accountability. Pushing back, the AIGWU contests the characterisation of Blinkit and Urban Company workers as part of the informal sector and advocates with them to use the labour law and to petition the state labour administration to enforce the labour law. While it is tempting to perceive it as a twentieth century union raging against the dying of the light, the potential growth of the platform economy is also an opportunity to expand the country's trade union movement.