Project description
Platform alternatives for fair work and local economies
Digital labour platforms (like ride-hailing and delivery apps) connect workers and customers through apps. They have also changed how people work. In many cases, employment conditions are precarious, with low pay, little job security and limited worker rights. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the PLUG-In project will study state-supported digital platform alternatives in India that aim to improve working conditions and strengthen local economies. It will carry out qualitative fieldwork with workers, sellers and stakeholders in order to explore how these platforms operate in practice and how they affect livelihoods. The findings will help support knowledge exchange on how digital economies can be made fairer and more locally beneficial.
Objective
PLUG-In is a pioneering study of state-supported platform innovations in India that are worker- and local-economy centred, scalable, and effective in challenging monopolistic platforms, with the broader aim of fostering meaningful 'South-North’ knowledge exchange, particularly with European stakeholders. Digital on-demand labour platforms increasingly shape everyday lives worldwide, raising challenges around the regulation of monopolistic actors, the precarious labour relations they engender, and the threats posed to local economies. State-led interventions have often sought to strengthen workers’ bargaining power by extending employment rights, yet recent scholarship highlights that umbrella legislation alone cannot address gig workers’ structural precarity, as dominant platforms continuously exploit regulatory loopholes. Against this backdrop, PLUG-In pursues three interlinked objectives: 1) to develop a platform research agenda attentive to heterogeneous strategies for improving working conditions and reinforcing local economies; 2) to empirically examine the lived experiences of workers and sellers engaged in platform alternatives; 3) to foster South-North innovation exchange. It does so through an in-depth study of two Indian platforms hosted on the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), a state-funded, digital public infrastructure: Namma Yatri, a ride-hail platform co-conceived with a drivers’ union with 600,000+ drivers, and KiranaPro, a retail platform (operating in 35+ Indian cities) that supports local enterprises increasingly threatened by e-commerce oligopolies. Through qualitative fieldwork with workers, sellers, and key informants, PLUG-In seeks to distil lessons and enable knowledge and innovation exchange to address urgent societal challenges, including in the EU: promoting decent work and social rights in the platform economy, strengthening local and regional innovation ecosystems, and safeguarding micro-enterprises central to urban economies.
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences economics and business business and management commerce e-commerce
- social sciences economics and business business and management employment
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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4 Dublin
Ireland
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