In an industry-first for gig workers, online home services marketplace Urban Company on Wednesday announced Partner Stock Ownership Plan (PSOP) for its service providers where it will award stocks worth Rs 150 crore to thousands of service partners over the next 5-7 years. This comes months after a union representing around 35,000 Indian gig workers had filed a petition in the Supreme Court seeking social security benefits.
The company said it will set up an evergreen trust to manage the PSOP plan, and award them at near zero cost to service partners. The company has already got board approval for the first tranche of Rs 75 crore worth of stocks, to be disbursed over the next 3-4 years.
"The Partner Stock Ownership Plan (PSOP) will help thousands of service partners become shareholders of the company, thereby enabling broad-based wealth creation through equity sharing," said Raghav Chandra, Co-founder of Urban Company.
Chandra said this is perhaps the first-of-its-kind plan globally, where gig workers become shareholders of the very platform they work with. "This will allow our service partners to benefit from the company's growth in the coming years," he added.
The company said the entire process will be rule-based and transparent, with an advisory panel providing overall guidance. The company has a partner network of over 32,000 service professionals. It operates in over 50 cities in India, the UAE, Singapore, Australia and The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
"Over the years, Urban Company has put in many programmes such as up-skilling, training, group insurance coverage, personal loans, vaccination support, etc. to empower the service professionals on its platform," said Abhinav Chaturvedi, Partner with Accel, and an investor and board member of Urban Company. Since 2014, the company claims it has invested more than Rs 100 crore in training and skilling of its partners.