“After Covid, [cab-hailing platforms] don’t have any management. They have fired many employees. There aren’t many staffers to help out [drivers on ground]. Who do we take these issues to?” Matthew says. “At least before, there was a concerned office [to address disputes], now there is no concerned office. Everything is online.” 

Ola didn’t reply to questions despatched by WIRED. 

Rathi from CIS says {that a} responsive grievance mechanism for gig staff is “completely absent” and continues to be “one of the top three demands” that staff have. “The firms are able to provide more responsive services to customers,” he says. “The workers are as important if not more [than customers], and they should be able to extend the same kind of mechanisms, practices, and policies to workers.”

Because staff are sometimes in precarious financial conditions and don’t have any jobs to fall again on, being mugged or attacked has a huge effect on their capability to earn. 

Some of the platforms do provide restricted insurance coverage for gig staff, together with for accidents. However, these don’t essentially present a lot respite, in accordance with Aditi Surie, a senior marketing consultant on the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, a analysis group primarily based in Bangalore, who has studied the schemes. Her analysis confirmed that making a declare towards the platform-provided insurance coverage is an extended and laborious course of. “So even if you have grievous bodily harm, there are lots of steps that prevent anyone from making use of any insurance or offering from the platform,” Surie says. “So, if you’re in a road accident, for example, the police have to get involved. Now finding the right police station, contacting your insurance in time, getting the ambulance there—these are all things that platforms say they try and help with but there is nothing there—which again then falls back on the worker.”

Uber spokesperson Tomar says that the corporate gave Devi monetary help to cowl her lack of earnings on account of the incident, and that the corporate “helped her claim her medical expenses under Uber’s on-trip insurance policy, which covers all drivers on the app.” Devi claims that each the insurance coverage cash and Uber’s monetary help for her lack of earnings haven’t made it into her checking account.

“Uber is deeply committed to the safety of drivers on the Uber app,” Tomar says. “Uber drivers have many of the same transparency and accountability features that riders do, such as feedback and ratings for every trip, GPS tracking, an emergency button, and shared trip feature.”

In Delhi, Devi has had sufficient of Uber, which she says isn’t secure or worthwhile sufficient to justify the dangers. Devi, who beforehand labored at a hospital for a meager wage, discovered to drive simply so she may begin working for Uber, and commenced driving for the platform in 2019. A single mom, she needed to discover work to help her two kids. “That time, many women around me told me that Uber is a good option and the earnings are good,” she says. “They did not even deduct high commissions back then.”

The first time she complained to Uber was in 2020, when a buyer verbally attacked her. “He was hurling abuses at me. I had complained against the customer then, but Uber didn’t do anything about it,” stated Devi. “Uber never does anything when a driver complains. But even a small complaint against a driver means that they will block their account.”

At the time, she remembers spending 500 rupees ($6.08) on gas every day however taking dwelling 2,000 rupees ($24.39) in earnings. But these days she says the gas prices have gone as much as 700 rupees a day, whereas her earnings have fallen to lower than 1,000 rupees.

Devi is upset that regardless of the life-threatening incident she skilled, the one calls she’s obtained from Uber are about when she is going to resume driving once more, as a result of she has been offline since January. She says, fuming, she has blocked these numbers. “I am worried about my children—what if something like this happens again? So I need to think really hard before taking the next steps,” she says. “For now I don’t intend to go back to driving for Uber.” 

(Reporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network.)