Anita, a “gig worker,”1 delivers for one food app. At the dark store where she waits between orders, riders from three or four different apps queue up together wearing different coloured jackets. Over a few weeks, a rider from another platform starts making unwelcome comments about her appearance every time their shifts overlap.
She finally reports this incident to her platform. Her platform’s support team listens, sympathises, and then hits a wall. The man isn’t their worker, doesn’t wear their jacket, doesn’t take their training, isn’t on their payroll. The platform’s Internal Committee (IC) does not have any authority over him. Her own company can offer her sympathy, maybe even flag the dark store operator i.e. the company that runs the shared warehouse space on behalf of multiple delivery apps. What they cannot do is investigate him, because as far as its own PoSH policy is concerned, he does not count under it.
So Anita’s complaint goes nowhere, not because anyone disbelieves her, but because it lands in a jurisdiction nobody actually holds; a variation on the third-party harassment problem PoSH already grapples with, just without a shared employer at either end.
What is “gig infrastructure,” and where does PoSH fit in?
“Gig infrastructure” refers to the shared physical and digital spaces that make platform-based work possible. The term “workplace” under the PoSH Act already covers client sites, off-site events, and any place an employee visits in connection with their job. What it does not anticipate is a physical space that belongs to no employer and is shared in real time by workers from several different, unrelated companies. That’s exactly what a dark store is, and it’s exactly the kind of space the law’s architecture is still not covering.
This is exactly the situation the PoSH Act was written to prevent
Anita’s case shows what happens when that architecture runs into a boundary it was never built to cross. Her own Internal Committee (IC) believes her, but it just doesn’t have the power to initiate an inquiry. The respondent’s platform has the power but no reason to use it against its own employee. The law’s intent survives right up until it meets a situation like Anita’s, where the complaint and the authority to act on it sit with two different companies.
Where the External Member(EM) becomes the difference
This is the kind of gap an Internal Committee’s (IC’s) members are least likely to notice or push back on. It feels like this is not their territory to be involved in, as their mandate covers their own workforce, and every incentive points toward treating a complaint about “someone else’s rider” as outside their scope.
An External Member’s (EM’s) entire value lies in bringing that into perspective. An External Member’s (EM’s) role under the mandate of Section 4(2)(c) of the PoSH Act is to bring in an outsider perspective. Hence, a company operating out of shared gig infrastructure has a genuine responsibility to build a channel for exactly this scenario, before the next Anita walks into the same dark store.
Why this case matters
A single unresolved complaint at a shared dark store hardly comes into conversation. But it’s a preview of a much larger question every company using gig or platform labour will eventually have to answer. Does its PoSH compliance stop at the edge of its own payroll, or does it extend to the actual physical and working conditions its workers experience, including the moments they share space with someone else’s workforce?
Key points for employers
- In an industry and working structure like the gig economy, PoSH policy must account for every type of employee a worker might encounter, not just the ones on their own payroll.
- An independent External Member (EM), in line with the law, helps the Internal Committee (IC) function at its best by bringing in a legal, outside perspective.
- Companies need to fill in this gap with inter-platform protocols and a strong Internal Committee (IC) backed by an External Member (EM).
To know more about how we help companies build safety frameworks that hold up across shared gig and platform workspaces, explore our PoSH compliance services or reach out to us at hello@serein.in.
- A gig worker is someone who performs work or takes part in a work arrangement and earns from it outside a traditional employer-employee relationship, as defined under the Code on Social Security, 2020. Delivery riders, cab drivers, and freelance platform-based workers all fall under this umbrella. ↩︎
