Women Workers at Urban Company Face Poverty
Urban Company is a technology platform offering numerous in-home services ranging from beauty treatments, cleaning, plumbing, carpentry, appliance repair, etc. The company claims to have over 45,000 trained, registered professionals on its app-based service. The workers who the company refers to as ‘partners’, are meant to register on this app and create their IDs to confirm a booking slot for providing services.
However, there have been recent protests staged against the company due to its unjust policies.
While thousands of workers depend on the platform for their survival, many of them are standing up against the <4.5 customer reviews that are used as a rationale for permanent ID blocking by the Urban Company. Especially because re-registration to the platform costs a hefty amount of more than Rs 40,000 to 50,000. Unfair company norms have put multiple gig workers’ jobs at risk.
Below are the protesters who recently gathered around the company office in Gurgaon challenging the “unfair labour policies.”
What are their demands?
Gig workers associated with the company have been trained in services like beauty treatment, plumbing, cleaning, etc and the company policies allow the customers to rate the services, if falls below 4.5, there is a high chance that the partner’s ID would be permanently blocked. Cancellations of booking, taking leaves for more than a day also potentially result in permanent blockage of their work IDs.
The protesters now urge the company to reinstate their customer input policies affecting their rating and unblock the IDs. The workers also demand paid sick and pregnancy leaves.
Women gig workers committed to the in-home services offered by the platform are relentlessly working for their survival and a mere rating system along with customer input causing the blockage of their active IDs have raised worrisome situations.
Jhatkaa dedicates itself to working towards voicing these unaddressed issues. As a digital campaigning platform, Jhatkaa commits to empowering the citizens and taking action in the right direction. To learn more about the recent Urban Company protest, sign the petition and support the gig workers’ fight.
