Articles like this make it difficult to understand when the don’t explain the context. How far does one US dollar actually go in India? I mean, I can look up the conversion rate, but I don’t know how much it’s actually worth to a person there.
Like, what’s the average weekly or monthly living cost for someone in India?
It’s in the story:
“The potential annual earnings from working eight hours a day can be as high as $5,000 - a figure that far surpasses India’s per capita income of around $3,000.”
yes, there’s some context, but I think it would be helpful if there was a bit finer context than just an annual income statement-- if they were more granular.
These kind of articles feel sort of… dehumanizing? I mean, the whole thing is supposed to be about how these gig jobs are possibly changing these peoples’ lives, but it talks mostly about the companies themselves and how they work, and the people who use the services, hardly mentioning the actual workers, referring to them mostly as statistics.
I dunno, maybe it’s just me.
You are right. This story does feel like a fluff piece to highlight the corporation.
well… not exactly?
ok, so, the headline directly addresses the pay rate, the workers, and a direct affect, but the article focuses almost entirely on the corporations and consumerist element of the story, only mentioning the workers as a statistic until the end, where a worker experience is only passingly mentioned for those who may have actually bothered to stick around to the end of the article, with no commentary or context offered afterward.
it’s from Reuters, which is a well-reputed news source from Germany. I don’t dispute the facts in the article. But it feels very… sterile and clinical? Maybe that’s a cultural thing. I’m American and I expect a bit more humanism in my reporting. But for a story that’s supposed to be about how people are being affected by some new service, the article surprisingly avoids much of any reporting on those very pekoe and how they’re being affected by this new service that they are, themselves, now running. Instead, it focuses on (generally) the companies that run the services and the users of those services.
But, beyond simply the coldness of the reporting (which, again, maybe that just a cultural thing), I find it kind of disturbing how much it seems to ignore the workers involved, an entire class of people, and the people who should really be the focus of the whole story.