Arrival of the gig worker

Subir Roy

Senior Economic Analyst

Moonlighting has always been around in small measure. But during Covid, when work from home became the norm, moonlighting bloomed. After doing justice to your regular nine-to-seven work from home, you could do an additional something for some other entity from maybe the same laptop, as who was to know. But now that most employers are asking staff to return to office, moonlighting has become a dilemma for the staff, particularly those who do not want to miss out on the additional bit they were earning.

If an organisation fails to recognise and respect this ‘need’, it will not be able to hang on to the most creative talents.

This has posed a dilemma for employers. They have to decide whether they will crack down on moonlighting or come to terms with some form of it. They have to take a call on what kind of mix is good for their businesses.

Normally, regular established businesses will frown upon moonlighting in the same vein as they will disapprove of staff trying to earn something on the side during their normal course of work. To them, moonlighting is almost unethical.

But the problem is that the nature of work itself changed during the pandemic. With consumers going in majorly for online ordering so that they do not have to risk contracting Covid by going out shopping, home delivery became a major business activity.

Similarly, instead of taking the family out for a meal, householders began to regularly order food at home. This gave a further fillip to the job of home delivery. And with home delivery snowballing, the gig worker truly arrived. It is not as if he did not exist before. He drove the car that you booked via Uber or Ola. But as life changed under Covid, the gig worker became a significant issue in industrial relations.

A gig worker is one who is his own agent, is not employed by anyone but takes on a task from a business on a contractual basis. His dealing with the entity that gives him the task to execute is on a principal-to-principal basis. He does not earn a salary and naturally there is no question of long-term benefits like provident fund. At the end of every working day, he gets a portion of the job giver’s takings.

The first business that stepped out of line from the rest of the businesses was Swiggy, which home-delivers food. It deals with two kinds of workers — a large number of those who deliver the packages and a small number who run them, that is the permanent employees.

Swiggy has unveiled a new policy that allows its regular full-time employees to take up a second job. The condition is that before going in for such work, employees have to let the company know. And the company will decide after satisfying itself on three aspects — the second job can only be done outside of office hours or during weekends, it does not affect the way the employee delivers on his full-time job and there is no conflict of interest.

The last means that the second job must not be in the line of the first. To take an extreme case, a Swiggy employee can’t, after office hours, work for its major competitor Zomato.

Why has Swiggy broken ranks with the rest of the employers? It realises that during Covid-related lockdowns, a good number of workers have discovered new hobbies or activities that offer an additional source of income. Be it volunteering for an NGO or working as a dance instructor or creating content for social media, such additional jobs can aid the professional or personal development of the staff. If you have a better or more contented worker, he will do greater justice to his full-time work.

This is not the majority viewpoint among employers. Who is opposed to moonlighting? To begin with, the foremost software company of the country, TCS. It says flatly that the employment contract does not permit an employee to take up secondary employment. Its chief operating officer Ganapathy Subramaniam feels that moonlighting falls down foremost on ‘ethical’ grounds. Plus, employees going in for it can end up losing out in the long run by chasing short-term gains.

The employment contract that Infosys, the second-largest software company, hands out also does not allow secondary employment. What is more, it gets a promise from its staff that they will not work for a competitor within six months of leaving Infosys, if they choose to do so.

To the chairman of the third-largest IT company, Wipro, Rishad Premji, moonlighting is ‘cheating, plain and simple.’

But there is a dissenting minority viewpoint within the IT industry. Tech Mahindra, another leading IT company, also prohibits taking up secondary employment. But its chief executive C P Gurnani recently said he had no problem with moonlighting, adding that, ‘I would like to make it a policy. I welcome disruption in the ways we work.’

Mohandas Pai, a former director of Infosys and considered an elder statesman of the IT industry, feels moonlighting is not cheating. He draws a distinction between office hours and non-office hours. During office hours, an employee has to abide by the employer’s conditions, like maintaining client confidentiality. But what an employee does after office hours is his own business. Putting restrictions on that amounts to curtailing his freedom.

A clue to explaining the whole controversy may lie in the following: CRED, a fintech unicorn, has said it actually encourages side hustles. Proof? Its heads of design and engineering are part of the Carnatic rock band, Agam.

The nature of work is changing. The traditional ethos has been that at least in the initial years of one’s career, one must slog away without having the time to note when day had turned into night. Today, young talented people not only seek satisfaction in their regular jobs but also look for a rich life outside of regular office work when they can nurture their varied interests.

If an organisation fails to recognise and respect this then it will not be able to hang on to the most creative talents.