Driving for Ola or Uber? Platforms are quietly making drivers pay them 

Hyderabad: If you have ever taken an Ola, Uber or Rapido, you know how it works. You pay the app, the app pays the driver. But a growing number of platforms are quietly experimenting with turning that arrangement on its head, making drivers pay the company just for the right to log in and work instead.

This is the subscription model, also called the Software as a Service (SaaS) or leasing model, and according to a report released on Thursday, March 5, by the International Alliance of App-based Transport Workers (IAATW), it is spreading fast across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Under this system, a driver pays the platform a fixed fee to access its app for a set period, which can range from six hours, 12 hours, a week or a month. Some platforms charge for a fixed volume of rides, say Rs 10,000 worth of bookings, before the driver sees a rupee of profit. If business is slow, that is not the platform’s problem but that of the driver.

Shaik Salauddin, who represents South Asia on the IAATW board and is based in Hyderabad, said the model was already taking hold across the region. “Some of the giants of the platform economy have already announced that this might be the future of the platform sector. It reverses the direction of the payment transaction from company to the driver, to the driver to the company,” he said.

The IAATW says this is not just a business model tweak. It is a deliberate strategy to keep drivers classified as software subscribers rather than workers, cutting them off from minimum wage protections, social security and the right to organise.

Drivers are being left out

The timing of the report is pointed. The International Labour Organization (ILO), the United Nations body that sets global labour standards, is finalising new rules for platform workers ahead of its annual conference in Geneva in June, which is less than 12 weeks away. The ILO estimates that 154 million people work in the platform economy worldwide, with the vast majority in transport and delivery.

The draft rules, however, do not account for the subscription model at all. The IAATW says it submitted detailed written comments flagging this gap well within the ILO’s own deadline. Those submissions were ignored.

Omar Parker, Secretary General of the National E-Hailing Federation of South Africa and an IAATW board member, said workers had been frozen out of the process entirely. “Throughout this ILO standard-setting process, IAATW and its members have attempted to raise our concerns about constantly changing complexities of these emergent problems. We have been locked out and our concerns dismissed,” he said.

Global South drivers must have a say

The alliance is also pushing a broader argument, that any new global rules for platform workers must be shaped by the workers most affected by them. Over 80 per cent of platform workers globally are from the Global South; yet, the loudest voices in the ILO process, the IAATW says, remain unions and leadership from wealthier countries, far removed from what drivers in Hyderabad, Nairobi or São Paulo deal with every day.

For millions of drivers already working long hours for thin margins, the Geneva conference may be the last real window for change.