Delivery jobs should be seen as flexible employment, not gig work: Swiggy executive

Calling the large force of delivery partners in India a ‘third pillar’ of the job market, a top Swiggy executive has said their job should be seen as flexible employment rather than gig work.

“Gig sounds like a little bit of a fancy term, but the reality is it’s flexible employment. And I truly see this as a third pillar,” Swiggy’s Food Marketplace CEO Rohit Kapoor said.

Speaking to PTI here on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, he said the first pillar is the formal employment sector, where you sign up for a long-term job with a company and work there.

“Second is, of course, entrepreneurship, and by entrepreneurship I don’t mean the fundraisers or the large businesses. I mean everybody who’s chosen to work on their own, be it opening a shop or running a small service business or whatever it is,” he said.

“I think this (delivery workforce) truly is the creation of a third leg to creating livelihoods. And this also flows across, so it’s not like the people who are in the formal sector don’t come here and don’t go back,” he said.

Sharing numbers, he said, almost 2.5 million people would have worked on the Swiggy platform at some point last year.

“And this is just our platform, and therefore, the scale of this is very large. And frankly, I think this is bound to grow,” he said.

He said these people are making their own choices to do this work.

He welcomed the government’s social security code and said it’s in the right direction.

“My only request to every stakeholder is treat it truly as different from formal employment. The moment you apply the same parameters, you will end up throttling something which is truly different,” he said.

“We’re deeply interested in terms of making sure that this grows. And also, I think we have a job cut out for both improving this on every dimension possible over time, and also in explaining a lot more to people in terms of what the characteristics of this sector are, who is actually doing it,” he said.

“For example, it’s not monolithic. There are people who want to do this long-term. There are people who want to do this just for the month. There are students who want to do this for extra income, and there are people who want to do it for a second income.

“There are a whole lot of people who come into the flexible employment category or flexible category,” Mr. Kapoor said.