Abstract
The ongoing global wildcat strike wave by primarily precarious service and health care workers resisting dangerous working conditions during the Covid-19 pandemic has made Callum Cant’s first book, Riding for Deliveroo, extremely urgent reading. Weaving together workers’ inquiries and class composition theory to understand an emerging movement of self-organized food delivery app workers in the United Kingdom and Europe, Cant offers a case study that can inform further organizing and strikes.
Workers’ inquiries and class composition theory are quickly being rediscovered after nearly half of the decade languishing in obscurity. Last wielded by Socialisme ou Barbarie in France, and Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia in Italy, Zerowork and the Johnson-Forest Tendency in the United States in the early-postwar years, Callum Cant’s new book Riding for Deliveroo is the latest critically important addition to the emerging field of workers’ inquiries. A founding editor of the online magazine Notes From Below, Cant has given us less a theory of class composition and workers’ inquiries and instead a militant workers’ ethnography of self-organized class struggle in a new rapidly expanding platform or “app” work sector of capitalism.
Cant takes us along on his journey from his desk chair at his day job with the Students’ Union at the University of West London to the harrowing streets of Brighton, England, when he signs on to deliver fast food for Deliveroo, inspired by a high-profile 2017 strike by its London workers.
Deliveroo riders provide their own bicycles or mopeds in a modern variation on what Karl Marx called the “putting out” system in Capital, Volume I. Employers provide the capital and materials, and workers labor remotely with their own tools and are paid by the piece. Cant breaks down how Deliveroo manages its thousands of pieceworkers using its own data driven putting out system with exquisite detail. As with all other app-based work, the “black box” app creates an authoritarian “algorithmic management” system, as Cant calls it, that processes data on speed, efficiency, location, to drive workers’ intensity and productivity, and alter the piece rates upward or downward to expand the supply of drivers and maximize profits.
In Riding for Deliveroo, Cant shows with detailed class analysis how the work is an example of precarious work. The company is constantly hiring workers who are pitted against one another to make “drops,” only to find that the harder they work the lower their piece rate. But to the company’s surprise these are not atomized disempowered workers who muddle through the best they can.
Cant is not content with only critically analyzing “platform capitalism” but in understanding how workers self-organize to disrupt it while circulating the disruption to other related sectors of the capitalist economy. Getting past the quirky British slang and idioms, tendency to hyperbole (“explosions” of striking Deliveroo workers), and the oversimplistic, and sometimes wrong, attempt to explain Marx’s analysis of capital, value, surplus value, and work, and mistaken idea that technology can be used for “human benefit rather than profit,” offers great rewards. Cant has written a captivating and utterly honest portrayal—a “how to” guide for carrying out a workers’ inquiry using social action co-research.
It is not hyperbole to say this workers’ inquiry is a page turner. Cant fills the pages with vivid accounts of overcoming racial divisions, gaming the “black box” algorithmic management strategy of the app, and the harrowing details of zipping through traffic on the hilly rain-soaked Brighton streets to make what amounts to a sub-poverty level wage. These anecdotes keep you coming back to the book’s step-by-step process of Cant’s role in organizing and participating in two strikes of Deliveroo workers. Consciously avoiding dwelling on the terminology of class composition theory, Cant makes brief but effective passing references to just enough of the theory to contextualize the lessons learned when these workers decided to self-organize and fight the virtual and human boss.
Taking us through his analysis of the “technical composition” of the app-based work, an exploration of the “social composition” and “political composition” of the workers riding for the company, Cant identifies the difficulties, missteps, mistakes, and opaqueness of trying to confront and resist a company that manages thousands of workers across the country remotely using automated virtual management strategies.
In his refreshingly honest portrayal of the ebb and flow of the organizing that led to the first strike in 2017, Cant explores how workers found ways to interact both off and online. He takes us through the detailed process by which the workers assessed what existing networks of what Romano Alquati called “invisible organization” among workers that already existed and what further information, relationships, and resources the workers would need to take collective action. Agile and flexible, these workers effectively identified the social composition of workers riding for the company, students who need part-time work to cover outrageously high tuition and rent, undocumented workers working 60+ hour weeks to support their families, and the cultural, linguistic, and gender divisions among them. This information about both the workers and how the company managed their labor using alogorithmic-based management informed their tactics, strategy, organization, and objectives.
In the process of finding one another in person between drops, they set up a WhatsApp chat to communicate and coordinate, visit organized Deliveroo workers in other cities, organize a branch of the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) union, and organize in person effectively using old tech like a printed A4 newsletter. Each of these tactics inform their strategy of using a mobile strike tactic that leaves food rotting on counters and the streets of Brighton clogged with bikes and mopeds.
Following their 2017 strike, the company quickly adapted by shifting their pay structure to emphasize deliveries by moped rather than bike. While their fledgling union withered, the company cleverly adapted to use the app to weed out the primarily student bikers, who dominated the strike organizing and union, in favor of the mostly immigrant moped riders. The workers’ failure to fully recompose their power across race and legal status proved to be their weakness. Although Cant at this point had begun to move on from riding to focus on teaching he soon learned that the moped riders soon after launched a new strike. The ebb and flow of class struggle continued. Paradoxically, this seems to contradict Cant’s backwards reading of Italian philosopher Mario Tronti’s point that “the beginning is the class struggle of the working class. At the level of socially developed capital, capitalist development becomes subordinated to working-class struggles . . .” Cant rather gets this inverted when he says class composition theory demonstrates “how shifts in the organization of work and society impact on the form of class conflict,” or that the technical composition drives working-class recomposition—the opposite of Tronti’s meaning.
If the strengths of Cant’s book are much to celebrate, the weaknesses must also be acknowledged. One of the pitfalls of the workers’ inquiry approach is that it tends to over emphasize the micro for the macro. In other words, carrying out such “inquiries from below” the militant investigator is at risk of drowning in the narrow particularities of a single struggle and misses the shared lessons for circulating the struggle through the social factory. Granted, Cant is alert to the potential for such circulation to the many exploited office workers who design and tend the app, restaurant workers who cook the food, and farm laborers who grow it. But all of this is like looking out the window of a moving train. He sees it at the very same time he is passing it by, swept along by the momentum of the struggle he is focused on, presumably to write his PhD dissertation.
This matters because ultimately the Deliveroo struggles are hardly “explosive,” as Cant repeatedly asserts. Hyperbole aside, this struggle is primarily focused on softening the blow of exploitation by raising wages and reducing the impact of the faceless totalitarian gaze of the app, no small feat to be sure. But even those are phyrric victories. They are soon back at work only to find the company has adapted its technical composition to find new ways to divide and conquer while their fledgling union dwindles and the WhatsApp organizing group goes silent.
It may be that Cant’s analysis of the risks and opportunities of precarious worker organizing is the greatest strength of Riding for Deliveroo. Inspired by the Industrial Workers of the World’s (IWW) principled refusal to sign contracts, Cant makes a convincing argument that is hard to counter: There is actually strength in precarity. As he insightfully observes, “precarity doesn’t necessarily make workers weaker or stronger.” As Cant shows in Chapter 4, tracing the term “precarious” back to its first use by Parliament in 1812 and its emergence on the docks and the building trades in the mid-twentieth century, precarity is hardly a new capitalist strategy used to break powerfully organized workers using productivity deals and new technology, thereby giving employers breathing room to find a new technical composition of capital and decompose workers’ power.
Denied status as employees through now well-documented shenanigans and euphemisms of Deliveroo and other app-based companies that their workers are “contractors,” the drivers are not covered by labor law, and without a contract are not subject to discipline by a union. In Brighton, the Deliveroo workers demonstrated what I have called “no union, no rules”—a powerful weapon in the class war. While Deliveroo and other app-based companies’ business model is to do away with the employee–employer relationship, they have also lost the very tools of the state to regulate, manage, diffuse, and suppress class struggle.
The so-called libertarian “disruptors” are now finding themselves disrupted. Since “all legal restrictions on strike action no longer applied,” Deliveroo workers no longer had to give notice that they would strike or even have a strike vote. While they were also not protected by a legal strike, the barriers and impediments to striking put there by capital and the state were swept away. Cant writes, “We could use workplace democracy in its most immediate form to decide our course of action.” And like that, “suddenly, we began to understand how precarious conditions could be a source of strength.” Workers, we have nothing to lose but our employment status.
We can adapt the concept so that it now reads “no union, no labor law, no rules.” This may be the most important lesson in Riding for Deliveroo, that even the hyper-precarious Deliveroo app workers “proved that they have the capacity to self-organize, form alliances, and fight back together.” But to truly understand its existence and impact will require using class composition theory and workers’ inquiries, “the best chance we have of getting out of the mess of the twenty-first century in one piece.” This is a conclusion with which I wholeheartedly agree and which motivated me to edit Workers’ Inquiry and Global Class Struggle (2020), to which Cant and other members of Notes From Below have contributed.
Nevertheless, Cant is tempted to want to use this small but promising upwelling in strike related action in the United Kingdom, at a time when the number striking has been the lowest since 1893 (p. 11), to reinvigorate the moribund Labour Party then under the once promising left-wing leadership of now defeated Jeremy Corbyn. Cant proceeds to toy with the idea of a “peoples Deliveroo” under a plan to nationalize the service economy under a 2017 plan for “universal basic services.” Here’s where Cant appears to revert to a social democratic scheme to nationalize, perhaps out of impatience with the long game of workers’ struggles to actually circulate sufficiently through the capitalist economy to topple it.
This patience may lie in the low level of position and disruptive power of isolated app-based workers strikes. Cant is right to celebrate the sudden take off of the app-based workers movement in the United Kingdom, documenting its spread to other companies, E.U. countries, and even to some of the biggest restaurant chains such as McDonald’s connected to them. An impressive struggle to be sure but what is its strategic impact? Hundreds of bikes and mopeds blocking traffic and access to Uber Eats and Deliveroo’s HQs is only marginally disruptive and quickly managed by the police. Restaurants lose business for several shifts and some bad food goes soggy for want of delivery. The potential for this struggle to deeply disrupt the relations of capital hinges on its ability to circulate the struggle up and down the supply chain as Cant observes.
As Cant notes in passing, to understand why companies like McDonald’s or Deliveroo exist in the first place, we need to connect the app workers struggle to struggles around reproductive labor, which has been increasingly outsourced as primarily female careworkers increasingly refuse to do unwaged work at home, enter the waged workforce in larger numbers, and struggle to raise wages. In return, capital responds by driving up work hours and throttling pay. With less time, fewer hours of unwaged housework at home, workers outsource the production of food, paid for out of their wages. This process is vividly analyzed by Harry Cleaver in his recent book 33 Lessons on Capital (2019).
This is a critical missing part of Cant’s workers’ inquiry and strategy. This outsourced reproductive labor is now proving to become a critical choke point during the pandemic as it manages to rebound and amplify the disruptive impact throughout the labor force. In contrast, the app workers in Cant’s book have extremely little disruptive power by shutting down the app for one day strikes leaving a few thousand workers to shop and cook their own meals. But as is now vividly clear during the pandemic, when many workers wildcat throughout the food and logistics sectors, the entire system of production and reproduction is extremely vulnerable to systemic crisis.
Here’s where the limits to Cant’s social democratic plan for state funded “universal basic services” shows itself. Rather than democratizing or nationalizing Deliveroo and other platform companies, capital can be forced to pay for now unwaged reproductive labor, drastically eliminating the need for app-based businesses altogether. In proposing such democratic state-led “social investment” Cant departs from the objective of rupturing life around endless work—a key principle of class composition theory. Here Cant’s analysis of how and whether these struggles are potentially disruptive of both productive and reproductive labor comes up short, failing to anticipate the impact of the widespread wildcat strikes today.
