Abstract
Reading a book on the ‘gig economy’ in which Karl Marx is the most frequent reference may seem strange, but Callum Cant’s programmatic approach precisely analyses in Marxist terms the new platform business model in the context of capitalist development since the 19th century and the history of class struggle. The labour movement’s multiple attempts during the past two centuries to safeguard the dignity of work against exploitation and abuse on the part of capital have entered a new period, exemplified by the struggles of so-called ‘riders’ against the often invisible platform managements.
The platform economy has emerged as a growing business model in the context of the digitalisation of our economies. In a recent ETUI survey study in 14 EU countries in 2021 almost 50 million Europeans reported using the Internet as a source of income. The level of such income tends to be low, however, which means that platform work can function only as a side job, providing supplementary income (Piasna et al., 2022). Around 12 million people (4.3 per cent of working-age adults) have worked through a digital labour platform in the past year, while 3 million (1.1 per cent) are more intense users for whom platform work represents a significant part of their working lives. The real impact of platform work is still fairly marginal, but its potential in the future and the spillover of its working practices to other sectors are considered to be very significant.
The innovation and growth potential of this emerging digital business model have spawned a substantial literature on its legal and political aspects, and the European Commission is currently preparing a Directive on platform work. The generally unexpected mobilisations and collective actions of food delivery platform workers have provoked growing interest among labour lawyers and industrial relations scholars. There is still a gap in the literature when it comes to detailed insider perspectives, however, and the present study is aimed at closing it.
Former Deliveroo worker and PhD candidate at the University of West London Callum Cant provides us with very interesting insights and reflections on the working conditions, workforce composition, collective organisation and social context of food delivery workers in the United Kingdom. Cant worked for Deliveroo in Brighton for eight months, participating in a union branch and several strikes and protests for better pay and working conditions. He describes in detail the working of the app, payment conditions, relationships among the couriers, the restaurants involved and bike maintenance, among other things. Deliveroo work is high-stress and high-risk, with riders competing for orders by riding in unsafe ways to shave a few seconds under pressure from the per-drop piece-wage system. Deliveroo workers are not unorganised, but have a WhatsApp community. Cant’s analysis is part of an effort to develop these networks from chats encompassing mutual aid and sharing jokes into fighting organisations (p. 103).
The Deliveroo workforce is composed of two main groups, both of them overwhelmingly male (pp. 94 ff). The first group are young UK citizens working part-time to fill gaps in their income caused by the inadequacy of student loans, low pay in other jobs, or general precarity. They make up the majority of the workers but not the majority of orders and hours worked. Responsible for the latter are older migrant workers with limited language skills (you can manage the Deliveroo app without knowing English) and often (under the current draconian UK legislation) no right to enter into official work contracts (they pay others to hold the contract in their stead), but needing to take care of their families and lacking alternatives.
Deliveroo is a prime example of how the ‘gig’ economy relies on huge injections of investment to create global start-ups with disruptive business models, limited profitability and exploitative practices. The main difference between, say, Deliveroo and traditional systems of labour process control is algorithmic management. One of the most interesting points that emerges is that this management system is not automatic, non-human or anonymised, but based on surveillance – like the classical Foucauldian factory – carried out by a succession of human ‘app watchers’ in front of their screens 24 hours a day to supervise the app controlled workers. This control function can be conducted from any central office in the world for the entire planet. While for some this is technological progress, for others it is a panoptical dystopia.
Cant does not confine himself to describing his and his colleagues’ experiences but tries to apply a Marxist analysis oriented towards class conflict. He distinguishes three areas of class composition: technical composition, namely how individual workers are converted into a productive workforce; social composition, or how workers are converted into a social class outside work; and finally political composition, that is, how workers organise themselves into a force within the framework of class conflict. The author constantly frames the Deliveroo story within the general development of capitalism towards platform capitalism and platform workers’ struggles in the development of the labour movement.
Deliveroo’s London couriers were pioneers in platform workers’ collective action with a four-day strike in 2016 demanding a living wage. Since then strikes and collective action have emerged in many countries, with employment status and pay as the most frequent conflict issues. Cant was a leading organiser and activist in the early stages of rider mobilisation and describes in detail the dynamics, success and failure conditions, management attitudes and also internal workforce conflicts, for example, between part-time students and full-time immigrant fathers with families. WhatsApp groups and the zone centres where the riders wait for new orders are at the centre of communications and collective organisation. This experience may soon become characteristic of other branches, too. These innovative organising practices also explain the activities of small grass-roots trade unions, such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) or the Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB), in contrast to those of traditional worker organisations. Cant suggests that a network model of unionisation is more suitable for fighting against the invisible ‘app bosses’.
In the final part of the book Cant reflects on possible futures for the platform economy from three perspectives: the game plan of the bosses, a liberal reform agenda and re-democratisation from below. The first aims at fully automated food production and delivery, combining ‘dark kitchens’, apps, drones and other automated logistic systems, controlled by a few leading global players. The second perspective refers to social reformers and intellectuals such as Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim O’Reilly, who want to humanise the emerging platform capitalism and make it more sustainable.
Cant considers that these two perspectives are not very promising as they neglect capital’s intrinsic profit-oriented logic. He, by contrast, opts for the familiar ‘self-emancipation of the working class’ through a new cooperative economic structure, harnessing the potential of the platform organisation model. The huge difficulties and problems that delivery co-ops would face, however, require a purposeful political support structure, some sort of basic income and a service economy for society as a whole.
Although several parts of the book give the impression of a somewhat forced mixture of orthodox class struggle theory and empirical observations of a new and still limited form of digital capitalism, Cant’s study is full of interesting and encouraging analytic reflections and insights and is a very recommendable read.