Gig worker strike shows what’s holding back labour organising in India

The New Year’s Eve strike on December 31 by app-based transport and delivery workers across India briefly sparked a widespread discussion on poor working conditions and the disproportionate power that platforms wield.

The strike resulted in some gains, such as the government urging quick-commerce platforms to end 10-minute delivery guarantees, but little else.

It points to a deeper limitation in India’s labour movement: an extraordinary capacity for protest, but a chronic inability to convert disruption into sustained, transferable worker power.

This is the result of India’s labour movements being held back by political alignments and the absence of shared organising methods. Similarly, platform worker unions frequently align with existing political formations, like the CPI(M)-aligned All India Gig Workers Union and the INC-linked All India Gig and Platform Workers Union, or depend on NGOs and external advocacy groups, limiting their ability to build autonomous worker power.

Gig workers, who do not have legal employee status nor the political leverage available to workers in more traditional sectors, can win better conditions only through disciplined, worker-led organising – the very capacity India’s labour movement never systematically developed.

Inherited limitations

From the first unions emerging in textile mills and railways in the late 1800s, organising was shaped by nationalist movements, social reformers and philanthropic elites rather than worker-led experiments in power-building.

Trade union leaders like NM Joshi and VV Giri, who came from elite backgrounds, saw unions as vehicles of social reform and nationalist mobilisation, embedding unions within broader political projects.

Post-independence, this pattern deepened. The Congress, the Communist parties as well as regional outfits developed various affiliated central trade unions – like the Indian National Trade Union Congress, the left-aligned All India Trade Union Congress and Centre of Indian Trade Unions, and Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh aligned with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

Organising capacity grew alongside party affiliation, not independently of it. Legal recognition through the Trade Unions Act and formal dispute resolution processes gave unions official status, but didn’t require or encourage them to develop methods for building worker power. The ways and means of organising itself remained within the parties and unions.

Labour power was presumed to flow from legal recognition and political connections, rather than being won through disciplined organising methods and bargaining for rights and better conditions through demonstrated workplace strength.

As party-affiliated unions proliferated – often competing within the same workplaces – fragmentation was institutionalised. Rival unions were incentivised to differentiate ideologically rather than collaborate on the methods and means of organising labour. In such conditions, sharing techniques would have undermined organisational control.

This continues to shape Indian labour organising today, including among platform workers formally denied employee status altogether.

The knowledge of organising

Jane McAlevey, the late American union organiser, built her life’s work around precisely this problem. McAlevey insisted that organising be treated as a discipline – something that could be learned, practised, evaluated and improved.

She developed “whole-worker organising”: to map workplace power dynamics, identify natural leaders among workers and build what she called “supermajority” support – getting an overwhelming majority of workers, and just a vocal minority, actively on board.

For McAlevey, worker power has to be constructed through structure, numbers and confrontation, rejecting the turn toward staff-driven campaigns and symbolic protests that substituted for building durable worker majorities. She also recognised that effective organising requires engaging with workers’ lives – their families, communities, and social ties – a principle especially relevant in India, where caste, kinship and neighbourhood networks shape workplace solidarity.

From 2004 to 2006 as executive director of the Service Employees International Union, Nevada, McAlevey led hospital organising campaigns that achieved more wins than any other local wing of the union. The campaigns won unprecedented gains, including 10% raises, fully employer-paid family healthcare, and staffing standards through supermajority strikes and mass open bargaining sessions.

Graduates of McAlevey’s Organising for Power training programme, launched in 2019, have scored major organising victories in countries like Tanzania, Peru, Indonesia and Scotland, showing how systematic methods can be taught and replicated across vastly different contexts.

In India, Subhashini Ali, who organised textile and electricity workers in Kanpur during the 1970s, shares similarities with McAlevey: both understood that organising workers meant mobilising their households and neighbourhoods, addressing issues from housing to children’s education. But Ali’s work remained embedded within the broader workings of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), focused on building party power alongside worker power.

Another example is the Self-Employed Women’s Association, India’s closest approximation to a systematic labour organising school. SEWA, was founded in 1972 to organise informal sector women workers –like street vendors, manual labourers, agricultural workers, home-based producers ignored by traditional unions. SEWA disproves the belief that it is difficult to organise informal workers by achieving employment and self-reliance for 3.7 million members across 20 states.

Yet SEWA differs fundamentally from McAlevey’s model. It combines organising with running a bank, cooperatives and health schemes – training people in SEWA’s ideology to build SEWA’s organisation, rather than producing organisers with portable methodology.

Potential of gig work organising

In India, where a bulk of the workforce is informally employed and the gig economy is rapidly expanding – from 7.7 million workers now to a projected 24 million by 2030, according to the NITI Aayog – the demand for stronger labour organising is unmistakable.

The International Labour Organization’s Recommendation No. 204 recognises that informal workers – who make up over 60% of the global workforce – need collective bargaining rights, which is the ability to come together to negotiate wages and working conditions with employers as a group rather than as individuals.

In India, only about 15% of workers are covered by any agreement negotiated by unions, which means that nearly five out of six workers have no collective say in how they are paid or treated at work. The UN’s Decent Work for Platform Workers framework calls for “innovative approaches to worker organisation”. But innovation cannot rely on improvisation alone: it requires clear methods.

The scale and heterogeneity of informal and gig work – spread across regions, languages and caste hierarchies – can also make developing systematic, teachable methods which can be shared challenging.

But the possibility exists.

The raw material exists in India’s organising history. What is missing is the institutional space and resources to systematise it independently of partisan structures. A small group, which is willing to do the meta-work, can codify India’s organising experience, develop curriculum teachable across movements and educate trainers rather than workers directly.

Until then, India’s labour movement will continue to fight heroically, disrupt episodically and sacrifice disproportionately. It will lack what Jane McAlevey gave others: a science of building worker power that travels beyond any single organisation, ideology, or moment.

Sahasranshu Dash is a research associate at the International Centre for Applied Ethics and Public Affairs (ICAEPA), an independent research organisation based in Sheffield, the United Kingdom.