Logged In, Left Out: On Writing About Gig Workers and the Code on Social Security
Earlier this week, Live Law published a piece I wrote on the Code on Social Security, 2020, and its structural failure to protect India’s gig workforce.
- The Code acknowledges gig workers exist. It does not meaningfully protect them.
- The deeper problem is the multi-platform worker: someone earning from Swiggy, Zomato, and Urban Company simultaneously. The Code's architecture makes this worker legally invisible.
- Contribution rates under Section 109 remain unnotified five years after the Code's passage. The Social Security Fund exists on paper only.
The piece is titled Logged In, Left Out, and the title is doing real work. These workers are digitally hyperconnected and legally invisible at the same time. That gap is the argument.
Why this problem interested me
Labour law is not my primary area. But this piece sits at an intersection I find genuinely interesting: the point where legislative architecture meets economic reality, and the two do not match.
The Code was designed around a dyadic relationship: one aggregator, one worker, one contribution obligation. That design made sense for a simpler model of platform work. It does not make sense for a market where multi-apping, working across two or three platforms simultaneously, is not an edge case but standard economic behaviour. A delivery rider toggling between Swiggy and Zomato depending on which has orders is not doing anything unusual. The law just has no way to see them as a whole person.
The multi-platform worker problem is, at its core, an information architecture problem. No single platform has a complete picture of a worker’s total earnings and hours. No regulatory authority aggregates that data. The result is that each platform sees only its own slice, reports only its own slice, and contributes only on its own slice, while the worker’s actual economic reality remains invisible to anyone with the authority to act on it.
What I proposed
The piece argues for five structural changes: a portable benefits account tied to a universal gig worker ID, mandatory real-time data disclosure by aggregators, immediate notification of contribution rates, a rebuttable presumption of platform liability for primary platform relationships, and adjudicatory authority for the National Social Security Board.
None of these are radical. The EU Platform Work Directive (2024) and the UK Supreme Court’s reasoning in Uber BV v Aslam are instructive not because India should copy them, but because they demonstrate what a worker-centric unit of analysis looks like in practice. India’s Code chose the platform as its unit of analysis. That choice has consequences.
Read the full piece
The full article is published in Live Law and sets out the argument in detail, including the statutory provisions, comparative framework, and proposed reforms.