Deliveroo food delivery drivers in London are showing the way in the fight against increasingly casualised working conditions and pay cuts. On 16 August, after a week of spontaneous strikes and protests, Deliveroo management backed down from its plans to force drivers onto a new contract that would mean a huge pay cut for many. The workers’ action, carried out by predominantly migrant labourers, organised with the International Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) radical trade union and supported by the RCG, attracted huge public and media attention to the casualised labour conditions in the food delivery industry.
The British food delivery industry is valued at £9bn. Smartphone app-based companies such as tech start-ups Deliveroo and UberEATS are dominating the market through the raw exploitation of their workforces. 2016 has been a lucrative year for Deliveroo, with projected revenues of £130m on top of £200m investment from venture capital funds, including Index Ventures, Bridgepoint Capital, Accel and DST Global – a firm headed by Time magazine’s ‘Titan list’ billionaire Yuri Milner. This most recent round of funding brings Deliveroo’s total investment to $472.7m (£355m). Deliveroo has now made it onto the ‘Unicorn list’ of start-ups valued at over $1bn. UberEATS – launched in London in June this year – is a delivery start-up owned by multinational transport firm Uber; a company with a total valuation of $66bn (£49.6bn).
‘Self-employment’ and the ‘gig economy’
The delivery drivers of these firms are falsely classed as ‘self-employed contractors’, meaning that they are not entitled to sick pay, paid holidays or even the national minimum wage. Their time is rigidly controlled by a smartphone app which requires them to accept jobs within 30 seconds, and tracks and ranks all aspects of their performance. Both Deliveroo and UberEats have introduced a piece-rate pay system by which drivers will be paid per delivery instead of receiving a wage. In the case of Deliveroo, drivers working in certain areas outside central London will be paid £3.75 per delivery rather than £7 per hour wage plus £1 per delivery. This has resulted in some drivers receiving as little as £45 for a 12-hour shift. Deliveroo has said that this will benefit drivers as it will increase ‘flexibility’ which it claims is of ‘utmost importance’ to its drivers. UberEATS initially paid its drivers up to £20 per hour, in order to attract drivers and undermine competition. Within months, and after the collapse of rival Take Eat Easy, the rate per delivery had been cut to £3.30. This system of exploitation, characterised by low wages, job insecurity and casualisation, has come to be widely known as the ‘gig economy’.
The ‘gig economy’ currently accounts for 2.9% of all employment in Britain, after a 25% increase in the last eight months. Half of the recent increase is made up of people over 26, showing how older people are being forced into casualised work as the capitalist crisis further restructures the labour force. Deliveroo makes use of 20,000 ‘self-employed’ drivers in 84 cities across 12 countries. North Africans, black British, Latin American and Bangladeshi people are proportionally more likely to work in this sector. 51% of economically active Bangladeshi people in Britain, work, or have worked, in the gig economy. Deliveroo scooter drivers, who usually work full time and have the most to lose in attacks on pay, are primarily Brazilian.
The Deliveroo strike
The introduction of the new pay system to the London Deliveroo zones of Belsize Park, Hampstead and Camden was met with the spontaneous self-organisation of drivers from those areas, who organised a strike and protests outside the Deliveroo head office in Central London through the use of social media and app-based messaging platforms. The strike action began on Tuesday 9 August and continued for a week, attracting around 250 drivers at its height on the Thursday and Friday. The demand of the strikers was the London Living Wage – £9.40 per hour – plus costs (insurance, vehicle maintenance, clothing etc), a £1 drop fee per delivery, plus tips.
A group of Deliveroo drivers had already organised themselves into a branch of the IWGB trade union. IWGB members and organisers, including a supporter of FRFI, played a role of providing guidance to the strike. The IWGB has previous experience of representing casualised workers, most notably in the case of Latin American outsourced cleaners organising within the University of London as part of the ‘3 Cosas Campaign’. Through this and other campaigns, those who would go on to form the IWGB broke from Britain’s two biggest unions – Unite and Unison. The Deliveroo strike action was also supported by a similar radical union, United Voices of the World (UVW).
On the Thursday of the strike (11 August) Deliveroo Managing Director Dan Warne came out to the picket outside the head office in an attempt to quell the rebellion, informing drivers: ‘We want the chance to listen to everyone individually…It’s a change of payment method, not lower wages…First of all, this is a trial.’ At which point he was forced to retreat to the safety of the office to a chorus of booing and chanting of ‘Out! Out! Out!’ from the strikers. Later that same day, IWGB organisers who were not Deliveroo employees went in to the head office to negotiate with management due to fears drivers would be victimised if they went in to negotiate. Upon entering into negotiations, one IWGB organiser reported being told by the Head of Driver Operations for Deliveroo for Britain and Ireland, Sebastian Gilbert, that the drivers were all ‘entrepreneurs’.
After the head office had closed and management had escaped by slipping out of a rear exit, drivers took to their bikes and mopeds and took their protests to the clients of Deliveroo: premium restaurants across the capital. Targets included Byron – a burger restaurant chain which had recently been exposed for collusion with the Home Office, organising fake ‘training sessions’ for migrant cleaning and kitchen staff which turned out to be immigration traps. Drivers travelled from restaurant to restaurant, disrupting service and demanding that restaurant management make an official complaint to Deliveroo.
A major reason the action was so effective was the use of social media in building public support for the strike, including the establishment of an online crowd-funded strike fund which raised almost £13,000 in the space of five days. As well as this, an online #BoycottDeliveroo campaign was started. Striking drivers were informed by the manager of the Hampstead branch of the restaurant chain Gourmet Burger Kitchen (GBK) that while usually they would take £2,000 from Deliveroo orders on a normal Friday evening, on the evening of the strike the restaurant only took £160. The Kingston branch of GBK only took £90 that evening.
Fighting to win
On Tuesday 16 August, following a week of daily strike actions and protests, an all-day picket of the Pentonville Road recruitment office, huge media attention and mounting public support, Deliveroo management backed down. A delegation of Deliveroo drivers met with the management, and the enforced transfer of drivers to the new contract was withdrawn, with drivers’ pay per hour guaranteed for the trial period. The management also agreed publicly that there would be no victimisation of those involved in the strikes, with verbal agreement from Deliveroo’s Director of Operations David Scott. This was a significant victory, forced on Deliveroo by the workers’ action. This should send a signal to other employers of casualised labour that, when pay and conditions are attacked, workers can fight and win.
Deliveroo and UberEATS drivers are continuing to build their branch of the IWGB and continuing their efforts in building a campaign demanding the London Living Wage. The trial period agreed by Deliveroo management came to an end on 14 September and the drivers are organising to resist any further attacks on pay and conditions the management announces. This form of organising in workplaces made up predominantly of migrant workers, in some of the most precarious conditions, represents an important new wave of labour organisation attempting to represent the interests of some of the most oppressed sections of the working class. This is a section that has so far been completely neglected by the traditional labour movement; written off as ‘unorganisable’. The drivers continue to prove them wrong.
Ben Geraghty
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 253 October/November 2016
