Directions: Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below. Certain words are printed in capital letters to help you locate them while answering some of the questions.
When a delivery rider accepts an order on an app, the transaction looks simple: a task is offered, a fee is paid, and both sides move on. Behind that simplicity lies a question that labour law has struggled to answer for more than a decade. Is the rider an employee of the platform, a customer of it, or an independent business that happens to use its software? The answer decides who pays for an accident on the road, who contributes to a pension, and whether the rider can ever take a paid day off.
Platforms have generally insisted that riders are partners rather than workers. They point out that riders choose when to log in, can work for several apps at once and are free to reject orders. Flexibility, they argue, is precisely what attracts students, homemakers and people between jobs, and treating every rider as a salaried employee would destroy the very model that created these opportunities.
Critics reply that the freedom is more apparent than real. Algorithms decide which rider sees which order, ratings determine who is offered the best-paying slots, and a rider who rejects too many tasks may quietly find fewer of them. For many, gig work is not a side income but the only one, and the cost of a single hospital visit can wipe out weeks of earnings. To call such a person an entrepreneur, critics say, is to stretch the word beyond recognition.
Governments have begun to search for a middle path. Rather than forcing platforms to hire riders as employees, some recent laws ask platforms to pay a small share of each transaction into a welfare fund that offers accident cover and, in time, pensions. The appeal of this approach is that benefits follow the worker rather than the employer: a rider who switches between three apps in a single day is still covered.
Such schemes are only as good as their EXECUTION. A fund that collects money but makes claims difficult will breed cynicism rather than security. Registration must be simple enough for a rider to complete on a phone between orders, and payouts must arrive while the need is still pressing. Equally, the levy must be set with care; if it is too high, platforms may pass the cost on to customers or cut the fees paid to riders, leaving workers no better off.
The debate, in the end, is less about labels than about risk. The digital economy has made it easy to buy labour by the minute. It has not yet found a fair way to share the risks that come with that labour, and until it does, the ESCALATING convenience enjoyed by customers will rest on a fragile foundation.
Q1.Which of the following best describes the question raised in the first paragraph?
- Whether delivery apps should be allowed to operate in cities
- Whether riders should be paid per order or per hour
- Whether a delivery rider is an employee, a customer or an independent business, since this decides who bears costs such as accidents and pensions
- Whether customers should pay extra for faster delivery
- Whether labour law should apply to students and homemakers
Q2.Which of the following arguments is made by the platforms?
- Riders should be allowed to work for only one app at a time
- Ratings should be removed to protect riders
- Governments should pay riders' accident costs
- Riders earn more than salaried employees
- Treating every rider as a salaried employee would destroy the flexible model that created these opportunities
Q3.What do the critics mean when they say that the riders' freedom is more apparent than real?
- Riders are legally forbidden from rejecting any order
- Riders are free but choose not to use their freedom
- Riders have more freedom than salaried employees
- Although riders seem free to choose, algorithms and ratings effectively control the work they get
- Freedom matters less to riders than income