Riding for Deliveroo

Resistance in the New Economy

Callum Cant

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509535521
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Politica economica

What is life like for workers in the gig economy? Is it a paradise of flexibility and individual freedom? Or is it a world of exploitation and conflict? Callum Cant took a job with one of the most prominent platforms, Deliveroo, to find out. His vivid account of the reality is grim. Workers are being tyrannised by algorithms and exploited for the profit of the few – but they are not taking it lying down. Cant reveals a transnational network of encrypted chats and informal groups which have given birth to a wave of strikes and protests. Far from being atomised individuals helpless in the face of massive tech companies, workers are tearing up the rulebook and taking back control. New developments in the workplace are combining to produce an explosive subterranean class struggle – where the stakes are high, and the risks are higher. Riding for Deliveroo is the first portrait of a new generation of working class militants. Its mixture of compelling first-hand testimony and engaging analysis is essential for anyone wishing to understand class struggle in platform capitalism.

1
Introduction

Deliveroo is a food-delivery platform. That means different things depending on where you stand. From the point of view of the customer, it is an app which charges you a fee to deliver restaurant food to your home. From the point of view of the restaurant owner, it is a bolt-on outsourced delivery service that takes a cut of the value of all delivery orders. For the couriers, it is an app you work for which pays you to take food from restaurants to customers. For investors, it is an app you pump hundreds of millions of pounds into, in the hope it will eventually turn a profit.

Anyone who lives in, works in, or visits a major British city will be familiar with the blur of Deliveroo couriers rushing food through traffic or standing around on pavements. The company was founded in London in February 2013 by Will Shu and Greg Orlowski and has gone on to expand globally. Between 2013 and 2016, Deliveroo’s revenue grew by 107,117 per cent – that is, one hundred and seven thousand, one hundred and seventeen per cent – making it the number one fastest-growing company in Europe over that period, by far.¹

This rapid expansion has been based on abundant investor capital, which has allowed Deliveroo to rack up huge losses.² Whilst Deliveroo’s total revenue increased 611 per cent in 2016, with sales of £128.6 million, it also recorded a loss of £129.1 million.³ In 2017, those losses widened to £185 million as the company continued to plough money into rapid growth.⁴ Even looking past the expansion plan, Deliveroo’s margins remain tight. Delivery costs for 2016 were £127.5 million, just £1.1 million less than total sales. Despite only paying its couriers poverty wages, the platform’s profit margins were smaller than 1 per cent, although Deliveroo claims that mature markets are significantly more profitable. The platform is a prime example of how the ‘gig economy’ relies on huge bubbles of investment to create global start-ups with disruptive models, limited profitability, and exploitative practices.

Every day, thousands of Deliveroo couriers work delivering food in towns and cities across the UK. This book is about them and the reality of their work, behind the glossy exterior of the app. To hear CEO Will Shu talk about Deliveroo, you would think it was a company defined by innovation, entrepreneurship, and flexibility. But from the point of view of workers, it’s more about low pay, precarious conditions, and conflict. This is not just a sob story about workers being exploited in bad conditions by bosses who get rich off their work – it’s also about how workers have squared up and fought back.

Workers and Bosses

That contradiction between workers and bosses is a class contradiction. But what is a class? Classes are social groups defined by their antagonistic economic relationships to one another. By their very nature, classes are always in more or less organized conflict with one another, and this conflict shapes society. The class which dominates society and all the other classes in that conflict is called the ruling class. Because this class is dominant, it gets to organize society to suit its interests. In a capitalist society, the majority of people belong to one of two classes: bosses or workers.

Bosses are the ruling class of capitalist society, and are defined by the fact that they own and control the ability and the means to produce the stuff that everyone else needs in order to survive. They use this ability to produce huge amounts of value, by selling things which workers produce back to workers as commodities. As such, they turn the means of producing useful things into a way of making profit, otherwise known as ‘capital’. Some of these bosses are CEOs, whilst others are just investors or landlords who let other people run the nuts and bolts of exploitation but take a share of the profit anyway. In order to maintain this system based on profit for the few and scarcity for the many, bosses have to stay on top. To do so, they use the power they derive from their control of the economy to capture parts of the state and other social institutions

Workers are defined by the fact that they have to work in order to survive. Being a worker means spending most of your life making someone else rich. They make up the vast majority of society, but do not benefit from the way it is organized and run. Without workers, capitalism would be impossible, but capitalism is not in workers’ interests.

Only a social revolution can fully resolve this contradiction, by getting rid of capitalist social relations and replacing them with something else. As a result, organized workers have generally spent the last 170-odd years aiming for a different kind of society from capitalism, one which would benefit them: socialism.

However, the ruling class is opposed to any transformation of society. It is precisely those class contradictions of capitalism that they rely upon for their profits. So, the ruling class are always interested in maintaining capitalism, no matter how badly things might be going – they do not even want to solve the problem. So, when organized workers fight for socialism, they end up in a class struggle with their bosses. This struggle has shaped the world we live in today. Working-class victories include weekends, the NHS, the limits on the length of the working day, an end to child labour, and the ability to vote. But whilst workers have succeeded in changing the form of capitalism we live under, they have not yet got rid of capitalism altogether. Nonetheless, the working class is the only class capable of acting in the interests of everyone and abolishing class-divided society forever. The only other alternative is to continue on in a system that is coming apart at the seams.

In-between these two struggling classes are all sorts of other groups with their own specific interests. Bureaucrats, shop owners, leftover aristocrats and the rest are part of neither of the predominant classes, but most of the time, apart from when things are going really badly, they throw their weight behind the ruling class.

The analysis of class proposed by the establishment is the complete opposite of the argument above. For mainstream liberals, capitalist society isn’t made up of two opposed classes at all. Instead, it is a jumble of propertyowning individuals. These individuals, whether bosses or workers, all have a universal common interest in a system that maintains the rule of private property above all else. For them, capitalist society isn’t class against class – it’s a deathmatch, all against all, with a consistent set of rules.

As a result, liberals think that the people who make up the ruling class are legitimately successful entrepreneurs. They’ve out-competed everyone else and risen to the top because they’re the best and they work the hardest. Workers, on the other hand, are lazy. They are playing the same game as the bosses under the same rules, they are just not very good at it. After all, if a worker is stuck in a low-paying job, they could always just get another – it is a free society.

Karl Marx’s response to this argument is as accurate now as it was in the nineteenth century. Yes, workers are ‘free’ – they are ‘free’ to sell their labour-power to an employer, and they are ‘free’ of any ability to survive if they don’t get paid. Once workers have sold their labour-power, it is then used by their boss to produce commodities. These commodities are worth more than the value paid back to the worker in wages. This extra ‘surplus value’ is either reinvested by the boss, redistributed to other members of the ruling class through rent, interest and dividends, or converted into profit. In reality, capitalism gives workers no choice: they have to sell their labour-power in order to get a wage and buy the stuff, the commodities, they need to survive. They can stop working for any one capitalist and go and get another job, but they can never stop working for the capitalist class altogether. You work and are exploited to make your boss rich, or you starve – some ‘freedom’.⁵

It’s not unusual to hear pundits argue that people who understand class as Marx did are living in the past. In the new ‘sharing economy’, everyone is a winner, they say. But that same struggle between workers and bosses that has defined the last two centuries of our history still defines it today. Society is still predominantly divided into two camps: that small group of people who live off the value produced by others, and that big group of people whose only choice is to work or starve. It doesn’t matter whether that system is organized by telegraph or by app, it’s still capitalism.

The question is, do you see the 2,208 billionaires who run the world as a ruling class, or as legitimately successful business people who just worked harder than the billions of people living in absolute poverty? This book takes Marx’s side. So, it is written from the perspective of the working class: the class which has nothing to lose but its chains. In order to do so, it is based on research carried out through a method called ‘workers’ inquiry’.

Workers’ Inquiry

The term ‘workers’ inquiry’ comes from a 101-question survey written by Marx in 1880 and distributed to workers and socialists across France. Late in his life, Marx argued that only workers really understood the concrete reality of capitalism, and that socialists had to gain an ‘exact and positive knowledge of the conditions in which the working class – the class to whom the future belongs – works and moves’.⁶ This research wasn’t just about finding things out for the fun of it. In ...