Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

Study digital platform workers in organized and unorganized sector. Are welfare gains of workers on platforms in unorganized sector (services) greater than for those engaged on platforms in organized (education)? We hypothesize that welfare effects for workers will be greater in unorganized sector.

Paper long abstract:

According to a NITI Aayog study, around 7.7 million workers participated in the gig economy in 2020-21, projected to grow to 23.5 million by 2029-30. Welfare gains for digital platform workers can be analyzed through economic, sociological, psychological, and geographical perspectives. In economics, welfare refers to resource allocation and economic policies. Sociology emphasizes social structures and relationships, while psychology considers individual motivations and behavior. Geography highlights the spatial aspects and the importance of location in community well-being.

We propose an interdisciplinary framework that incorporates these aspects to evaluate the welfare gains of digital platform workers. Companies engage platform workers to improve resource allocation and demand-supply matching. Workers in digital platforms may face precarious conditions but can benefit from social networks and psychological motivations like agency and empowerment. We focus on two cities to emphasize spatial considerations.

Our research question investigates whether welfare gains for platform workers in the unorganized sector are greater than those in the organized sector. We hypothesize that unorganized sector workers will experience more significant changes in welfare compared to organized sector workers.

We conduct a survey of digital platform workers (along with smaller sample of non-platform workers) using a structured questionnaire to gather information on various welfare dimensions—economic, social, motivation, and agency—in both sectors. We plan to use descriptive statistics to understand welfare gains through various lens and estimate a difference-in-difference equation to analyze whether platform workers in previously unorganized or organized sectors fare better in terms of earnings and indicators of agency or empowerment.