De Facto Employment Without an Employer: Algorithmic Management and the Reclassification of Platform Workers in India

Abstract

Over the last decade, India's platform and gig economy has grown fast, pulling millions of workers into ride-hailing, food delivery, logistics, e-commerce, and home services. Most of these workers sign on as “partners,” independent contractors, or freelancers. Yet many of them experience a degree of control that looks a great deal like ordinary employment. That control does not come from a human supervisor. It comes from an algorithm, one that allocates work, sets pay, tracks performance, hands out incentives and penalties, and can cut off a worker's access to the platform entirely. A contract label cannot explain that away, and Indian employment law has long assumed that control has to come from a person who can be named as the employer. This paper asks a narrower question: can Indian law recognise de facto employment when the control in question is algorithmic rather than human? It looks closely at the Code on Social Security, 2020, the first Indian statute to name gig and platform workers at all, and asks whether that recognition actually settles the classification question or simply postpones it. The argument here is that employment status should turn on functional control and economic dependency, not on whether a human employer can be pointed to. The paper closes with a multi-factor framework for identifying when platform control crosses into employer-like authority, and with a set of reforms on algorithmic transparency and human review.