This paper examines the impact of artificial intelligence and digital technologies on the blue-collar gig economy in India, focusing on algorithmic management. This paper examines the impact of artificial intelligence and digital technologies on the blue collar gig economy in India, focusing on algorithmic management he use of automated systems to allocate, monitor, and evaluate work in location-based services such as ride sharing and delivery. Using a social justice framework and a mixed-methods approach comprising interviews with 16 gig workers and 21 key stakeholders, the study uncovers a dual reality: while AI-powered systems expand access to work and generate operational efficiencies, they simultaneously introduce significant challenges related to fairness, transparency, and worker dignity. Key findings reveal that algorithmic systems are opaque by design, produce inequitable outcomes, and are not structured to reward additional labour with proportionate pay. The study advocates for a pragmatic hybrid governance model an Algorithmic Human Manager framework in which technological efficiency and human accountability operate together rather than in opposition. The findings carry implications for policymakers, platform companies, and civil society organizations working to design equitable AI governance frameworks for the gig economy in India and across the Global South.
Worker utility is not observed -- only its consequence is. Each gig transaction produces a single bit: accepted or rejected. We argue this structure points directly to the Preisach hysteresis model as the natural representation of latent worker preferences. The Preisach operator models aggregate output as an integral over a population of binary threshold elements -- precisely the structure that emerges when heterogeneous workers each carry a private acceptance wage. We estimate two latent utility surfaces: acceptance utility U_1(X) and rejection utility U_0(X), via a dual-output neural network (shared layers 256->128, margin loss enforcing U_1 >= U_0). Classification reduces to the Preisach gap U_1(X) - U_0(X), passed into an XGBoost classifier alongside clip-stabilised price-to-threshold encodings. On 36,891 gig transactions, this pipeline achieves Jaccard = 0.827 and ROC AUC = 0.799. The price-to-threshold encoding accounts for +11.0 pp AUC over raw utility features. The model confirms the directional asymmetry hysteresis predicts: price decreases depress completion rates more than equivalent increases raise them. Applied to the full dataset, the model's recommendations simultaneously reduce the total wage bill by 21.3% and increase expected fill rate by 9.7 pp. For 74.2% of transactions, P(accept) already exceeds 0.80; reducing the wage keeps it above threshold (mean post-cut P = 0.972), releasing cost savings (median 31%). For the remaining 25.4%, a median 7% wage increase recovers +43 pp acceptance. A model without an explicit indifference zone cannot execute both moves simultaneously.