Become a Deliveroo rider and “pick up a ton of perks to sweeten the deal, like discounts with Apple and Vue Cinema on top of your self-employed £16 an hour depending on location”.
If you click on Deliveroo, the online restaurant delivery service website, you will find that this is what the platform offers as inducements to entice young, fit “superstar cycle and scooter riders” to join the ‘Roo’.
Absent from the flimflam of “perks” and Deliveroo’s mission promising “amazing” food are any rights or guarantees for the superstar riders. So, no guaranteed hours. No guaranteed wages. No guaranteed pension. No sick leave. No holiday pay. No workers’ rights. Welcome to today’s world of work, where the employer can deny any responsibility by saying it just advertises “opportunities” for self-employed people.
We’ve become used to workers on zero hours being billed as flexible when in essence it is a form of exploitation reminiscent of workers in the docks and lump labour on construction site. Now there is a new and hip expression to disguise the reality of precarious working governed by platforms with the invitation to “tap the app” – and that is the ‘gig economy’.
Platforms have taken precarious working to another level and it is best summed up by Unite as “a technological gloss on a very old problem”.
When the Conservatives boast that we have an employment bonanza with the highest levels of employment ever, there is no regard to the quality of employment and the impact on our society of poor employment. With 4.8 million in the UK self-employed, this form of work has been the fastest growing since the recession – but there is little or no evidence on how much is bogus, or the lack of alternatives.
And when they brag that the 900,000 workers on zero hours and 1.7 million in temporary work have made the Conservative Party the Party of full employment, well tell that to those who can’t plan their futures because they have no idea whether they will be able to pay the next bill.
We are told that this way of working is now irreversible. According to the World Economic Forum over five million jobs will be lost by 2020 because of robotic and technological change. Are we all Luddites now if we regard this progress as a dystopian future? Or do we determine to make the gig economy work for working people?
Around six million people are not covered by workers’ rights that we have in the past taken for granted but which were hard won by trade unions. The gig economy seemingly doesn’t have provision for trade unions. Has it become too late for the Institute of Employment Rights’ Manifesto for Labour Law, which has as its central theme collective bargaining – with the proviso that without the right to strike it becomes collective begging?
The answer must be “No”. Workers in the gig economy have as much right to rights as the rest of us do. It is also apparent that workers themselves want to organise and act as a collective. They know how easily they can be picked off. Over the last few months, workers from Uber and Deliveroo have taken strike action over pay and working conditions.
While it may seem that we are powerless in the face of this global digital onslaught, we aren’t.
New Zealand earlier this year passed legislation banning zero hours contracts. They also have a law allowing trade unions to speak to workers at their place of work, or electronically, under a ‘right to access’. Following Jeremy Corbyn’s re-election as Labour leader the NEC passed his ten policy pledges, including his pledge on workers’ rights from day one.
“We will give people stronger employment rights from day one in a job, end exploitative zero hour contracts and create new sectoral collective bargaining rights.
“We will strengthen working people’s representation at work and the ability of trade unions to organise so that working people have a real voice at work.
“And we will put the defence of social and employment rights, as well as action against undercutting of pay and conditions through the exploitation of migrant labour, at the centre of the Brexit negotiations agenda for a new relationship with Europe.”
Pursuing collective bargaining with the right to strike is a central tenet of any employment rights agenda. Exploitation is exploitation whenever, and wherever, it occurs.
In this new world of work where workers are increasingly individualised, when work is insecure, and when large numbers are potentially facing a future without work, it may leave the impression that trade unions are no longer relevant. No, they are needed more than ever.
It is important, however, that extolling the virtues of collective bargaining embraces the riders of Deliveroo, as well as industrial workers, in large scale trade union organised work places.