By making gig workers of house helpers, Urban Company introduces more insecurity in an already precarious sector, raising serious ethical and legal concerns
Urban Company, one of the largest gig platforms in India, recently launched its latest offering, ‘Insta Maids.’ The service, currently in pilot mode in Mumbai, offers household help within 15 minutes for tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and mopping at an introductory price of just Rs 49 per hour.
While the company claims this will revolutionise household services and make them more accessible, its business model raises serious ethical and legal concerns regarding workers’ rights and the role of the state.
Informality and exploitation
Domestic work in India has long been characterised by informality, low wages, and the lack of legal protection.
They remain part of the unorganised sector, which means they have neither job security nor the protective cover of statutory minimum wages or social benefits such as paid leave, pensions, and health insurance.
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Efforts to formalise the sector, such as the Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act, 2008, have largely failed to improve their working conditions.
Significantly, a large proportion of domestic workers come from marginalised communities, including Dalits, Adivasis, and migrant workers, making them even more vulnerable to discrimination and exploitation. With limited bargaining power and no collective representation, they are often compelled to accept lower wages and harsh working conditions.
Gigification of domestic work
By turning the domestic work system into an on-demand gig service, the Insta Maids service introduces further instability and insecurity into an already precarious sector.
Traditionally, even informal domestic work offered a degree of continuity of tenure, albeit one which mainly depended on informal arrangements with households that, in their long-term interest, often employed the same worker for months or even years.
This offered a degree of job security and income, even if it was entirely dependent on the caprices of employers. However, a per-task, per-hour model eliminates even this tenuous possibility, rendering their livelihoods even more precarious.
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Incidentally, Urban Company has not disclosed how much the workers are likely to earn in an average working day, thus not revealing whether minimum wage norms will be adhered to.
At the mercy of algo
It is not even clear whether the average “maid” would be employed regularly or have enough opportunity to work through a working day. The possibility that algorithmic ‘fine-tuning’ could be used to achieve this cannot be ruled out.
One significant risk for workers on such platforms is that as more workers join, those who benefited from the initial phase — when demand was high, and worker supply was low — will lose their relative advantage.
In such cases, platforms often limit the number of tasks or job opportunities per worker to regulate wages and distribute tasks more evenly. Ultimately, this leads to a long-term decline in wages. The platform's overall lack of transparency further deepens this issue.
Bait for customers
Of course, given that Urban Company is likely to adopt the well-tested methods adopted by other platforms – most notably the cab and food delivery platforms – it is quite likely that this low-price offer is being offered as a bait to lure prospective customers.
But we know that platformisation around the world follows a particular trajectory: initially, it offers large benefits to consumers by burning capital thrown in by venture capitalists to offset early losses. As the Uber and Ola examples showed, they may even offer attractive terms to the workers to start with so that the platform is up and running.
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However, once these platforms acquire a considerable market share, they charge more while pushing wages lower. A cursory look at already developed gig platforms in areas such as food delivery and commuting in India reveals this. Given the desperate search for work, it is not surprising that many opt for this kind of work.
Many apartment societies already have internal structures to regulate and cap domestic workers’ salaries. The entry of an app-based service offering extremely low wage rates would push wages even lower, leading to a downward spiral in earnings.
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City-wide pricing
Urban Company’s city-wide pricing model further exacerbates the issue by disregarding the neighbourhood-based wage structures that have traditionally governed domestic work.
Unlike in other sectors, where wages may be standardised across a city, domestic workers’ pay has always been negotiated locally at the neighbourhood level, based on factors such as the cost of living, the cost of the commute for the worker, the nature of demand, and availability in specific neighbourhoods.
By imposing a uniform rate for an entire city, the platform effectively undermines these traditional local wage structures, pushing earnings downward in areas where workers may have previously secured higher pay.
Unions hit back
The Bengaluru’s Domestic Workers Rights Union, along with the Stree Jagruti Samiti, have strongly condemned Urban Company’s Insta Maids service, calling it “extreme exploitation” of informal labour.
In a statement released on March 19, the Union questioned whether the Rs 49 per hour wage is even legal under Indian law and criticised the model for stripping workers of job security, benefits, and legal protection.
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In this business model, the worker’s logistics is a major concern. How is a domestic worker expected to reach a household within 15 minutes?
This increases stress, raises the risk of work-related injuries in Indian cities —already notorious for their traffic — and imposes additional commuting costs on workers. With urban transport becoming increasingly expensive, who bears the cost of travel?
Without a commute allowance, this model can force them into an unsustainable cycle where travel costs exceed their wages for short gigs.
Power imbalance
Like other gig workers, Insta Maids workers will likely be subjected to algorithmic management and control, where their access to jobs depends on ratings, automated work distribution, and penalties.
On the surface, this may seem efficient, but in reality, it places immense pressure on workers to maintain high ratings, often at the cost of their well-being.
More significantly, the algorithms, non-transparent to the workers, can be tweaked in exploitative ways. A single bad review – whether fair or not and whether planted or genuine – could reduce work opportunities or even result in sudden deactivation, cutting off their income. Workers cannot even challenge these arbitrary actions of the platform.
Illusion of convenience
Every new app that promises “instant” services is hailed as a breakthrough, welcomed as a work of genius, offering convenience. Indian social media, especially its influencer segments, have gone euphoric over the ‘genius’ move from Urban Company.
Think about it: a maid at your doorstep in 15 minutes for just Rs 49? Is this truly an innovation, or just another way to underpay those who have no option but to sell their labour? In reality, such models exist only because of two factors: the desperate plight of the workforce and a legal void that facilitates its abuse.
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The trajectory of gig platforms in India shows that the convenience factor is ephemeral. Low prices, and sometimes even higher wages, are only meant to enable the platform to gather critical mass.
Workplace safety
Another key concern is whether commissions charged to workers are set transparently. How much is Urban Company deducting from workers’ earnings as a “platform fee”?
As the many examples of gigification in other sectors show, high commissions are at the cost of the worker’s take-home pay.
Finally, workplace safety needs to be addressed. Are there guidelines to protect domestic workers from harassment or exploitation at customers’ homes?
Under the POSH Act, an Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) is mandatory. Will these workers be covered by Urban Company’s ICC, if one is indeed in place?
Also read: Gig workers need national legal, social security architecture: Congress
State’s role
This would be a good time for the state to step in, setting up regulatory mechanisms to protect gig workers. The core legal issue with platform-based work, including domestic work, is the obfuscatory classification of such workers as “independent contractors”, “partners” or other such terms. This enables the companies to maintain the legal fiction that they are not employers and that the workers or not indeed workers.
As a result, they evade labour protection regulations governing minimum wages, provident fund (PF), gratuity, and employee state insurance (ESI). Any meaningful correction of this fiction that both sides – the worker and employer – are legally defined as such.
The state must ensure two things. First, these workers must be legally assigned and recognised as workers. Second, existing labour rights must be extended to them without discrimination.
Regardless of the nomenclature employed by the platforms, a worker ought to be regarded legally as a worker because almost all the labour rights in India originate from having a worker status.
Traditional definitions
Since data from almost every aspect of the work is stored by the platforms, it should not be difficult to determine how many hours a worker has worked or the distance she has travelled in the course of her assigned task.
The state should come up with innovative definitions for worker status utilising such available data. Most of the labour laws in India were enacted considering a worker with a particular routine, like a 9–5 shift, a specific place to work or a formal contractual relation with the employer.
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However, in changed circumstances, especially in fields such as gig work, traditional definitions might not work. For example, since a gig worker often performs task-based work, there may be no specified locations or periods of work. Also, gig workers may enjoy a sense of flexibility such as taking leave from work for days or weeks without approval from a manager, unlike in traditional employment.
Neutral arbiter
The role of the state as a neutral arbiter demands that it must mandate fair wages, social security benefits, and job security for platform-based domestic workers. This would ensure that technology-driven “convenience” does not come at the cost of workers’ rights.
This requires existing protective legal provisions to be extended through legislative changes to cover gig workers as well.
In many cases, existing laws, even in their current form, can be effectively utilised to ensure basic labour standards. For example, under Section 3 of the Minimum Wages Act, of 1948, the law provides the state with various options to set minimum wages based on criteria such as time worked, piece rate, guaranteed time rate, etc.
Legally, nothing prevents the state from extending this to gig workers by mandating a minimum per-task wage that platforms must provide.
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Beyond social welfare
Most of the earlier interventions by the state among domestic workers and platforms at large, such as the Karnataka Gig Workers Bill, 2024, can at best be termed social welfare measures. Historically, the performance of welfare boards or state-funded welfare schemes has been poor.
For instance, the Construction Workers Welfare Act, 1996 and the Unorganised Workers Social Security Act, 2008 have failed to provide any significant protection to workers.
Any meaningful progress on this front is only possible if the state acts to plug the legal gap, which is what enables platforms to pretend that there is no employee-employer relationship in their engagement.
As a result, the state only reacts by providing some relief to this large and growing class of vulnerable workers. This is nothing but a subsidy because the funds for such welfare measures are drawn from the public exchequer.
Significantly, following a social media backlash for using dehumanising language, Urban Company has rebranded Insta Maids as ‘Insta Help’. However, this cosmetic change does little to change its business model.
(The Federal seeks to present views and opinions from all sides of the spectrum. The information, ideas or opinions in the articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Federal)
