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Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Negotiating Dependencies and Precarity in the On-Demand Economy

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Abstract

There is growing evidence of ride-hailing platforms’ adverse impact on drivers. Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of drivers continue to work on these platforms. Why? The key contribution of this paper is to show that workers in technology-mediated labour markets come to be increasingly dependent on the technology-provider in order to connect with the customers. As more and more customers choose to get various tasks done via intermediary platforms, for workers who perform such tasks for a living, this translates into growing dependencies on these infrastructuralized platforms for their livelihoods and thus increased vulnerabilities to the impact of platform design and policies. These ‘new dependencies’, therefore, make it critical for us not to conflate workers’ continued use of platforms with their experiencing benefits. By drawing upon a qualitative study with auto-rickshaw drivers using Ola, a ride-hailing platform similar to Uber in India, the paper shows that a consequence of ‘new dependencies’ for drivers is that they are stuck ‘between a rock and a hard place’ whereby: a) on the one hand, the platform design heightens their precarity, provides them with little benefit, and often leads to tensions with customers, b) on the other, a shift of more and more customers from street-hailing to app-based hailing over time exacerbates dependencies for drivers on these very platforms, leaving them with little choice but to continue to use them for work.

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Notes

  1. For a discussion of how ‘platforms’ differ from traditional ‘pipeline’ businesses, see (Parker, Van Alstyne and Choudary 2016).

  2. Even this participant described auto-driving as his primary ‘job’ and considered his catering contracts as occasional ‘gigs’.

  3. A base meter fare of 25 INR for a distance of up to 1.9 kilometers and 13 INR for every additional kilometer.

  4. Indeed in 2015 the drivers received the entire fare, but it was only a temporary phase when the ride-hailing platforms were trying to attract participants on both sides of the market and expand their market share.

  5. From a private conversation with an Ola employee.

  6. In their mixed-methods study, Fleitoukh and Toyama (2020) found no correlation between vehicle ownership and app usage.

  7. The fact that the scores, criteria and reports are available on Fairwork’s website in Hindi and Kannada, besides English, also makes it quite inclusive.

  8. To put this in a broader context, assistance with accumulation of savings has been noted to be one of the primary financial needs of low-income communities across the globe (Muralidhar 2019, Muralidhar et al., 2019).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Peace Auto for helping us connect to the auto-rickshaw drivers and providing office space to conduct interviews in Bengaluru. Most importantly, we would like to thank all the auto-rickshaw drivers from Mysuru and Bengaluru who generously shared with us their time, insights and experiences. Last but not the least, we would like to convey our thanks to the editors and reviewers for meticulously going through multiple versions of this paper and providing detailed, constructive comments which have considerably strengthened its quality.

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  1. Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Srihari Hulikal Muralidhar, Claus Bossen & Jacki O’Neill

  2. Microsoft Africa Research Institute, Nairobi, Kenya

    Srihari Hulikal Muralidhar, Claus Bossen & Jacki O’Neill

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Muralidhar, S.H., Bossen, C. & O’Neill, J. Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Negotiating Dependencies and Precarity in the On-Demand Economy. Comput Supported Coop Work 31, 443–486 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-022-09434-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-022-09434-7

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