When, ahead of the New Year, a section of gig workers went on strike demanding better payouts and improved working conditions, the country began discussing the problems caused by the gig economy. The protest was organised to raise demands concerning the rights, welfare, and dignity of gig and platform workers across India.
The protests led to people discussing the inhuman conditions they are forced to work under and the inequality prevalent in society.
However, Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal, in a long social media post, argued that inequality has always existed; the gig economy merely exposed it.
He pointed out that for centuries, class divides kept the labor of the poor invisible to the rich. Factory workers toiled behind walls, farmers in distant fields, and domestic help worked in back rooms. The wealthy consumed the fruits of that labor without ever seeing the faces or the fatigue behind it. No direct encounter, no personal guilt.
However, the gig economy shattered this invisibility on an unprecedented scale.
The poor are no longer hidden away. "They're at your doorstep: the delivery partner handing over your ₹1000+ biryani, late-night groceries, or quick-commerce essentials. You see them in the rain, heat, and traffic, often on borrowed bikes, working 8–10 hours for earnings that give them sustenance. You see their exhaustion, their polite smile masking frustration with life in general."
This is the first time in history, at this scale, that the working class and consuming class interact face-to-face, he pointed out.
"And that discomfort with our own selves is why we are uncomfortable with the gig economy. We want these people to look the part so that the guilt we feel while taking orders from them feels less."
"We aren't just debating economics. We are confronting guilt," he said.
Pointing out that before the gig economy, the rich could enjoy luxury without moral discomfort.
Banning gig work doesn't solve inequality, it eliminates livelihoods, he said. "These jobs don’t magically reappear as formal, protected employment the next day. They disappear, or they get pushed back into the informal economy where there are even fewer protections and even less accountability. Over-regulate it until the model breaks, and you achieve the same outcome through paperwork instead of slogans: the work evaporates, prices rise, demand collapses, and the people we claim to protect are the first to lose income."
So, what happens next, he asked. The rich regain their comfort. Convenience returns, but without the faces behind it. The guilt fades away. We return to abstract moralizing from a distance. The poor don’t become safer—they become invisible again: back in cash economies, back in backrooms, back in the shadows where regulation hardly reaches, and dignity isn’t even a topic of conversation.