Cant, C. and Woodcock, J. (2021) 'The Cycle of Struggle: Food Platform Strikes in the UK 2016-18', in B. Dolber, M. Rodino-Colocino, C. Kumanyika, and T. Wolfson (eds) Gig Economy: Workers and Media in the Era of Convergence, Abingdon: Routledge.
Mi son alzato
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao
Una mattina mi son alzato
E ho trovato l'invasor
When hundreds of strikers were crowded outside Uber’s East London head office, it was the Italians who started up Bella Ciao, the iconic song of the Italian partisans. Three of them, with their arms around each other, stared up at the glass and steel of the HQ as they sang. This was the first national Uber ride hailing strike in the UK – but it had been built on the back of a wave of mobilisation led primarily by UberEatsdelivery workers. The two workforces were responding to each others’ initiative. Amongst these striking Uber taxi workers was an UberEats courier from Wales, who had booked a cheap coach ticket to London at the last minute just to support their action. He had brought his own megaphone. It was an unlikely, heterogenous movement, but it was a movement.
Food delivery has been a successful growth area in the platform economy for capital. Platforms including, Deliveroo, UberEats, Food Panda, Swiggy, Zomato, Caviar, Meituan, and so on have sprung up across the world in different contexts. The rapid spread of these platforms is changing the technical composition of work - both recomposing previous forms of food delivery, as well as drawing in new workers to the sector. While some early commentators claimed that workers could not organise (or at least not easily) on platforms, there is increasing evidence of a political recomposition of food delivery platform workers. This is something that has not come about through a service model of trade unionism that some called for (Park, 2016).
The European cycle of struggle in food delivery platforms began in London in August 2016. From that point onwards, strikes spread rapidly across the UK and then transnationally. These strikes were almost all wildcat actions led by mostly migrant workers and supported by a ramshackle infrastructure of unions, bulletins and informal networks. In the UK, the last two years have seen the movement spread from London to Bristol, Brighton, Southampton, Plymouth, Leeds, Cardiff, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. But so far, the exact dimensions of the struggle across the UK haven’t been systematically understood. The order of events, processes of organisation and specific outcomes have all been unclear. A single account is required, so that all discussions of the phenomena can begin from the same baseline.
This chapter presents a survey of food platform strikes in the UK in the two years since August 2016. It uses a combination of surveys, interviews and ethnographic data to develop a thorough and in-depth understanding of the workers movement from the perspective of workers themselves. In doing so, it provides the first authoritative account of this cycle of struggle. Food platform strikes demonstrate the opportunities that lie within the changing class composition of contemporary capitalism in the UK. The militancy of these platform workers is a signal development in the wider workers movement, and an analysis of that development opens the way for further discussions about overcoming long-term quiescence in working class self-organisation. As more and more capital develops in the direction indicated by platform capitalism, the strategies employed by food delivery platform workers will become ever more important.
There is an epistemic problem facing any analyst of food platform strikes: informal action organised through primarily invisible worker networks is hard to identify from the outside. Through detailed processes of inquiry we have significantly more information on the cycle of struggle than would otherwise be possible (Woodcock and Waters, 2017; Cant, 2018a), but even the extensive work done so far cannot produce a complete picture. Our account is informed by the approach of workers’ inquiry and the theories of class composition. Workers’ inquiry is a practice of research tied to organising, which starts from workers’ ‘actual struggles: their content, how they have developed, and where they are headed’ (Cleaver, 1979: 58). While it is inspired by Marx’s postal survey (1880), it was developed extensively by Italian Workerists from the 1960s. Contemporary examples have explored at call centres (Woodcock, 2017), as well as increasingly being used to make sense of the gig economy (Cant, Forthcoming), drawing on first-hand ethnographic accounts, as well as interviews and forms of co-research with workers. This involves actively engaging with workers, seeking to draw them into a process of co-research about their own struggles.
Class composition was developed as a framework to make sense of the findings of inquiries, putting forward theory of how classes are formed and relate to each other under capitalism. The framework developed by Italian Workerists focused on the technical composition of the labour process and its relation to the political composition, or forms of struggle, of workers. Through our involvement as editors of Notes from Below (2018), we have helped to develop this to include social composition as part of:
a material relation with three parts: the first is the organisation of labour-power into a working class (technical composition); the second is the organisation of the working class into a class society (social composition); the third is the self-organisation of the working class into a force for class struggle (political composition).
We use this threefold analysis of class composition in the chapter to make sense of the inquiries that both of us have undertaken.
The account of collective action presented here is, to the best of our knowledge, as complete as possible. However, it is quite likely that over the course of two years some localised actions have taken place which were never communicated to a wider audience. The political composition of these strikes are such that workers have the capacity to use their leverage as they see fit with few, if any, procedural qualifications. So, this account should be considered a provisional survey of the most visible and best communicated examples. Food platforms are an acute example of how elements of the subterranean individual and collective trench warfare of class struggle nearly always exceed our analyses.
The first open moment in the struggle of food delivery platform workers started in August in London. Jamie started an inquiry with these workers, as they had become an increasingly noticeable presence on the streets of London. A Deliveroo worker that Jamie had been in contact with outlined how frustrations were building among the drivers, and was convinced that action would follow soon. They visited a series of the “zone centres”, algorithmically determined meeting points within each of the geographic zones assigned to workers to return to after making a delivery. At each of the zone centres, the Deliveroo driver pitched the idea of joining a union to the other workers, and they were incredibly receptive. In each conversation, grievances were aired about the payment structures, the organisation of the work, and the lack of communication from the company. In clear opposition to those early commentators who said these workers could not organise, there were already networks of workers forming across the city. From the meeting points workers got to know each other and started WhatsApp groups that kept them in contact. Like the traditional water-cooler conversations, these often turned to discussing problems with the work and what they could do about them.
From these meetings, we were added to the Deliveroo worker’s WhatsApp groups. Later in the week, the sense from the meetings that something was building came to head: Deliveroo had announced they would be unilaterally changing the payment scheme from a £7 an hour with £1 per drop, to only £3.75 per drop. The workers found this out via text message, with no opportunity to negotiate around the changes. Worker saw this as an attempt to shift more of the risk from Deliveroo’s business model onto them, meaning if there was no demand they would be standing at the zone centres without making any money. This also happened in the same month that the company raised £212m from investors, while facing increased competition from UberEATS (Woodcock, 2016). The idea of a strike was floated on the WhatsApp group, quickly filling with multiple messages to go on strike and meet outside the Deliveroo headquarters in central London.
As Jamie wrote about at the time (Woodcock, 2016), the strike started on the 11th of August. When the time for the strike arrived, there were very few drivers, and it was starting to look like the excitement around it had been misplaced. However, thirty minutes later more drivers arrived on mopeds, and an hour later there were hundreds of striking workers outside of the Deliveroo headquarter. This strike had not followed any of the balloting rules required under the anti-trade union laws in the UK, as they only apply to workers with employment contracts. As Deliveroo relies upon “self-employed independent contractor” status - a form of bogus self-employment - workers did not have to organise within a registered trade union and complete the lengthy postal balloting process. Instead they could collectively decide not to work, using the “flexibility” of the arrangement against Deliveroo.
The strike itself was chaotic and energetic. Workers drove up and down the street, with horns blaring and chants directed at the headquarters. A panicked Deliveroo manager came out to address the crowd. He walked into the middle of the group of workers, who were now crowding both sides of the street, and began to patronisingly explain that the proposed changes were actually better for workers. When workers disagreed with him, he tried again to explain how the new terms were better. What was clear from this encounter is that the manager had not previously interacted with any workers, and was definitely out of his depth. The crowd got increasingly angry with his attempted PR spin, chanting over his comments. On noticing that he was now surrounded, two police officers intervened in order to shephard him back into the headquarters.
As the strike developed, workers began discussing what the next steps would be. The impromptu speeches were translated into Portuguese, catering for the large number of Brazilian workers in attendance. The worker that Jamie had visited the zone centres with had reached out to the IWGB (the Independent Workers union of Great Britain) after seeing the successful struggles of bike couriers that they had supported (IWGB 2016). An organiser from the IWGB addressed the crowd, explaining how they had won previous struggles at CitySprint, eCouriers, and Mach1. The organiser facilitated a discussion, and the workers settled on rejecting the changes and demanding the London living wage plus costs (£11.40 per hour) plus £1 per drop. Jamie and the worker from the zone centre agitation handed out forms for the IWGB, with many drivers signing up on the spot.
The strike lasted almost a week. Deliveroo refused to negotiate with any collective group of workers or the IWGB, only offering consultations with individual workers. The decision to change the payment system was moved into a trial in certain zones, a partial victory of the strike. However, despite the first Deliveroo strike not winning the workers demands, it did show that sustained collective action was not only possible for platform workers, but they could form union structures to prepare for future action.
In Winter of 2016, it looked like the London strike might be a one off. Despite food platform workforces in other cities around the UK facing a similar social and technical class composition, there was no evidence that they would mobilise and take collective action to fight for common demands. However, as 2016 turned in to 2017, evidence would start to emerge that, under the surface, things were moving. Gradually, the same composition that gave rise to a wildcat strike in London would lead to similar outcomes elsewhere, as a common political composition of food platform workers began to emerge. The fuse was burning.
During this period, Callum was undertaking an inquiry in Brighton.[1] Whilst working part-time for Deliveroo he began to understand that there were strong underlying networks that linked workers across the city. The workerist Romano Alquati observed the role these informal networks could play in the development of apparently spontaneous wildcat strike action in Italian FIAT plants in the early 60s, and dubbed this underlying spider's web of worker to worker connection ‘invisible organisation’ (Alquati 2013). The WhatsApp groups and zone centre meetings linking Deliveroo workers in Brighton appeared to play an analogous function.
The clearest evidence of the subterranean developments within food platforms was to be found in a bulletin which Callum was involved in producing. The Rebel Roo was a double- sided sheet of A4, written, edited and distributed by Deliveroo workers. Its goal was to ‘help Deliveroo workers in the UK and internationally communicate and organise.’ It made the simple argument that ‘together we can build solidarity and fight for better wages and conditions’ (Rebel Roo 2018). This argument found some immediate resonance, and the distribution network began to expand.
Workers with an interest in inquiry and class composition have often invested significant effort in producing bulletins and newspapers with the intention of circulating struggles. Roman Alquati wrote about the role of the Wildcat newspaper in catalysing the development of unofficial strikes in multiple different factories in Turin. In his analysis, the paper, first distributed in August 1963, contributed significantly to the process of militant working class self-organisation in the workshops and foundries it was distributed in (Alquati, 2013). There are similar examples to be found in the history of the Johnson-Forrest Tendency in Detroit (Correspondence) and Socialisme ou Barbarie in Paris (Tribune Ouvrière). The common thread between all of these examples of ‘proletarian documentary literature’ (Hastings-King 2014) is that they attempt to articulate the political ‘leap’ from the everyday confrontation and antagonism of capitalist production into a broader process of class struggle.
The Rebel Roo was no different. It primarily consisted of short articles from workers in different cities, alongside a multi-lingual introduction and some information about which trade unions (the IWGB and Independent Workers of the World, IWW) were supporting Deliveroo workers. The bulletin was circulated both online via the website of an autonomist political organisation, Plan C, and offline through the post to a network of local distributors.
After beginning monthly publication in November of 2016, it was at its most influential in January 2017. In that month its circulation reached 1,500. The exact readership of the bulletin is impossible to pin down. Any estimate has to make assumptions about the percentage of paper copies which were successfully distributed, the percentage of double-views, the percentage of non-workers who got a copy and so on. However, given that the total Deliveroo workforce in February 2017 was 15,000 strong it seems reasonable to estimate that somewhere between 6% and 10% of the workforce had some contact with the bulletin. The peak of the bulletin’s distribution also coincided with the outbreak of strikes in two new cities. In Brighton and Leeds, longer-term organising process broke into the open. February saw strikes involving large numbers of workers in both cities over wages and victimisation. This further development of food platform worker mobilisation indicated that the London strike was not an isolated incident, but the beginning of the cycle of struggle.
The strikes in Brighton and Leeds were followed by a series of demonstrations in both cities, but as the summer continued their strength declined. There was a lull in collective action until October, when 30 workers in Bristol went on strike the payment of late wages. They won almost immediately. Then in November Central Arbitration Court defeated an IWGB claim for a legally-enforced collective bargaining agreement between the union and Deliveroo in their Camden zone (Butler 2017). Just a few days later, Brighton Deliveroo workers were on strike once again. Angered by a gradual decline in the number of orders available per worker and a corresponding decline in wages, fifty workers went on strike. The strike followed a familiar pattern, with a large meeting turning into a flying picket that circled around the city. One new feature was evident, however. For the first time, this strike involved a blockade of a ‘dark kitchen’ site, owned by Deliveroo and run as a delivery-only operation (Garlick 2017). As the technical composition of the labour process was transformed, new tactics of resistance developed in response.
The transnational development of the struggle also continued apace, with strikes spreading to seven countries across Europe in by January 2018. Looking back from the end of the year, it was possible to discern the outline of an escalating wave of action which was bringing together workers from cities as diverse as Milan, Bologna, Turin, Brussels, Paris, Marseilles, Berlin, Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona, Brighton, Bristol, Leeds and London (Cant, 2018a).
The IWW launched a new initiative directed at food platform couriers in January 2018: the IWW Courier Network. Building on the union’s previous experience of attempting to organise food platform workers in Bristol and Cardiff in 2017, the union aimed to restart its approach to the sector (Fear 2018). The strategy of the network was planned through a period of inquiry. Whereas previous IWW organising efforts had focused on a struggle for legal rights, this inquiry found that workers were more interested in organising on bread and butter issues, like waiting times at restaurants. And so, in April and May of 2018, the IWW couriers network branches in Glasgow and Cardiff delivered letters of demands to their local McDonalds regarding just these issues. Then in May 2018 the Glasgow couriers network branch organized a ‘critical mass’ cycle ride (Boal and Carlsson 2009) to remember Pablo Avendano - a courier from Philadelphia who died whilst working for food platform Caviar - and highlight the issue of rider safety.
In July, Deliveroo abolished the flat fee payment structure across the UK. Now, instead of a set value per drop, which varied from city to city between £3.75 and £4, workers would be paid a variable rate that included complex calculations about the distance. London Deliveroo workers responded by calling a strike, which was a mixed success. The main strike demonstration was small, but later that evening flying pickets of fifty plus workers assembled in local zones. Shortly after that small scale strikes broke out in Plymouth and Southampton.
The first IWW courier network-organised strike came in September, when workers in Cardiff descended on Uber’s city HQ to demand collective bargaining. They carried signs with slogans like ‘We Ain’t Slaves’ and ‘Uber Eats Shit’. A few days later, the Glasgow branch of the network were on strike too against a low “Bboost” (a multiplier that is applied to payments at peak or busy times in a zone) rates (Mills 2018). Momentum was building.
In the Autumn of 2018, UberEats changed the payment system in London. The minimum guaranteed fee per delivery dropped from £4.26 to as low as £2.62. This 40% pay cut sparked an immediate response. Workers drew on their invisible organisation to begin a strike on the 19th of September. The strike had two dynamics: first, workers picketed their local McDonalds in their own delivery zones. Second, they converged at the Uber greenlight centre and HQ in Aldgate, East London. Day by day, the weighting of these two tactics varied.
The local picketing of McDonalds ensured that the app was non-operational in large parts of London and so had the greatest structural leverage, but by and large this action was not understood as strike action by the media and other workers. On the other hand, mass demonstrations in Aldgate gained significant media attention and so developed higher degrees of associational leverage, but did little to actually prevent the operation of the app. Workers mixed and matched these two tactics to try and develop both forms of leverage simultaneously. The use of McDonalds as a focal point for self-organization during normal working time and picketing during strikes is a feature of conflicts involving UberEats as a result of the centrality of McDonalds to the UberEats labour process. A significant percentage of all UberEats order volume comes from McDonalds, meaning that these restaurants becoming informal labour concentration points where workers gather to work and wait for orders (Marotta 2018).
By the second day of the strike, a set of demands had been agreed: a guaranteed minimum fee of £5 per delivery plus a £1 per mile distance payment, an end to the “Boost”system that led to wages fluctuating in response to consumer demand, and no victimisation of strikers. These demands were presented to management at a mass demonstration in Aldgate that assembled outside the Uber Greenlight centre. As always, management refused to collectively bargain with the hundreds of workers, and instead proposed facilitating one-on-one meetings to discuss the new payment system (Cant and Hughes 2018).
Following this refusal to negotiate, workers went on to blockade a key road junction in East London outside Uber HQ in Aldgate tower. This caused significant traffic disruption until the police were able to gather enough resources to disperse them. The Metropolitan police then imposed conditions on the demonstration, threatening any workers who stayed outside the Uber office past 4pm with arrest. This was a significant escalation in the use of the repressive powers of the police against food platform worker collective action (Cant and Hughes 2018).
Over the coming days the strike moved back to a local focus, with workers returning to picket their local McDonalds rather than converging in Aldgate. The strike also spread from city to city, with workers in Plymouth joining the fight on the third day. For the first time ever, there were food platform workers in two UK cities on strike at the same time. It was evident that there was substantial momentum building for an even larger food platform worker mobilisation. Strikes were becoming for frequent and more interconnected as the downwards pressure on wages continued. The IWW wanted to make use of this energy, and an opportunity arose to do just that.
The Bakers Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU) and Unite were coordinating strike action for October 4th. That was about two weeks away. Workers at McDonalds, Wetherspoons and TGI Fridays would be walking out, and significant support from the Labour party was already planned. The IWW couriers network saw the chance for food platform workforce to also join this coalition of precarious service workers. Due to their independent contractor status, food platform workers and their unions had no responsibility to follow employment law. Therefore, the IWW could set a strike date at short notice without formal balloting periods without any risk of legal repercussions. They took full advantage of this flexibility, and called the first ever national food platform strike. October the 4th was quickly dubbed the ‘Fast Food Shutdown’.
On the day, food platform workers took significant strike action in Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow and London with community support pickets in Birmingham, Bradford, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle and Swansea (Woodcock and Hughes 2018). The strike in Bristol was probably the largest ever outside of London. Workers within the food service and delivery industry built practical links of solidarity on both a rank-and-file and union-to-union level.
On the first of December, Deliveroo founder Will Shu’s birthday, the Transnational Courier Federation held its first day of action. Food platform workers in Paris, Turin, Milan and Bologna blockaded dark kitchens and held demonstrations in their city centres. In the UK, however, it was not until a week later that Deliveroo and UberEats workers in Bristol launched a spontaneous strike, following up on their action in October. Fifty workers joined a flying picket roaming around the city centre. Within an hour of the strike starting, the app was non-functional. Their demands were the same as they had been in October, with a central focus on wage increases across both platforms.
In Hanworth, West London, an unprecedentedly low “Boost” was leading to unprecedentedly low wages. Rather than the usual x1.6 payment multiplier, UberEats was offering them a x1.1 multiplier. Workers decided that they wouldn’t continue to work for that rate. So, a small group of them pulled up in their local McDonalds - the centre for food platform work in the zone - and began localised strike action (Cant, 2018b). Whenever other riders arrived to take new orders, they were told a strike was on and asked to stop work. Most of the time, these other workers agreed.
The Hanworth strike was not only built on the networks of invisible organisation which underlie all food platform strikes: it was characterised by a longer history of collective action. The workers in the zone had been on strike before - they knew what they needed to do to shut down the app through personal experience. In miniature, Hanworth provided an example of a more general phenomena: the consistency of food platform worker militancy has now led to some workers experiencing multiple strikes. The cumulative development of experience and knowledge about the processes of collective action is an emerging factor in the political composition of the workforce.
In Hanworth, however, this experience could not prevent UberEats using the workers’ ‘independent contractor’ legal status to enforce mass victimisation. Every worker who was reported by McDonalds to have been involved in the strike was removed from the platform. For some workers, with dependents to look after, this victimisation led to them becoming suicidal. The social composition of food platform workers means that they rarely have access to the kinds of informal safety nets and buffer zones which can cushion the blow of being fired without any compensation. In response to the victimisation, local workers organised another strike with the support of the IWW. They picketed the McDonalds to prevent orders being delivered, and fellow IWW members occupied the service area of the restaurant. This action was continued for two consecutive weekends, although it did not prove to be successful.
It seems likely that the pattern of increasingly coordinated and significant self-organised collective action will continue beyond into 2019. Already, in Bristol, workers are preparing to take action in the new year. The social and technical factors which allow for the development of political composition based on self-organised militancy continue to define the experience of work at Deliveroo and UberEats.
Throughout this chapter we have documented the struggles of food delivery platform workers from the summer of 2016 onwards. This started with the strike at Deliveroo in London, but has since spread across Europe, as well as more recently connecting with other fast food workers. Through these different cycles of struggle there have been different intensities as well as different forms of action. However, what is common across all of the these examples is groups of workers refusing to accept the terms that platform capital hasisattempted to force upon them.
We have presented this account of food delivery platform workers as part of our analysis of class composition today. The militant workforce that is emerging is the organic product of class composition in platform capitalism. The technical composition that platforms have chosen to organise their workers has facilitated the emergence of this militancy. They have recruited large numbers of young and migrant workers, connected them via smartphone applications, ordered them to meet in specific places, attempted to immiserate their conditions without any space for negotiation, while claiming not to actually employ any of them. What is important to note here is that this technical composition combines at many points with what we - along with the other editors of Notes from Below (2018) - have termed the ‘social composition’ of work. In this case, it means drawing attention to how the dynamics of migration (both with and without papers), housing, and community networks have played into the struggles of these workers. The examination of the social composition of these workers show that they are not isolated points on GPS maps, instead connected through common routes of migration and using technology to build new networks across the city.
This new composition initially threw up challenges for workers resisting and organising, but did not resolve the conflict between labour and capital in food delivery. Instead, workers have been able to find new ways to refuse to work on capital’s terms - something that these food delivery platforms have sought to organise unilaterally. What we have presented here is an account of the struggles of these workers, starting in 2016. We have attempted to provide an account that has so far been split across different publication venues, presenting it here as a baseline understanding of these struggles. However, given the empirical and methodological difficulties with covering workers (often spontaneous) struggles, it is likely that this an incomplete account of the open struggles that have taken place. It is also definitely an incomplete account of all the struggles and conflicts that have happened below the surface. However, as we have argued, it is a much-needed starting point for making sense of this phenomenon.
The implications of this survey are twofold. First, for understanding food delivery platforms, it provides a coherent account of how these struggles have developed. This shows that these workers are not “unorganizable”, and if such an adjective were to be pushed onto these workers, the closest would be that they were “yet-to-be-organized-in-a-traditional-sense.” This also highlights that in many cases, these workers are not choosing to follow routes of many of the established - and often highly bureaucratised - models of trade unionism. This political recomposition shows that there are new ways that workers can successfully organise today. There is much to be learned by traditional trade unions from this model. It also underlines a point we have made elsewhere: that ‘one thing is clear for now: we need to stop talking about resistance as emerging in platform work’ (Cant and Woodcock, 2019). Instead, we need to start thinking about what forms of resistance and organisation can be successful.
The second are the implications that move beyond just food delivery platforms. Without wanting to talk in general terms about the “future of work”, platform capitalism represents the sharp edge of technical recomposition. They act, as Cant (Forthcoming) has argued, as ‘laboratories of class struggle.’ This means that the successes of management on platforms will not remain only within these dispersed workplaces. Instead, the new managerial innovations will be pushed out into more workplaces, whether in the private sector - which is already happening with the short-term staffing agency ‘Uber Works’ (Bradshaw and Bond, 2018) - or with outsourcing and privatisation in the public sector. The ability for workers to resist this technical recomposition in food delivery (as well as taxi, care work, and other kinds of platforms) is therefore part of a wider struggle over what the future of work will look like. One of the reasons this is so significant is that a central premise of platform capitalism is that workers are no longer workers, but rather independent contractors. However, the struggles documented here show that whether they are categorised that way or not, workers are finding new ways to collectively struggle. This points to the possibility of a wider political recomposition beyond platforms.
In this chapter, we have also pointed to the need for future research. By this, we do not mean abstracted academic research, but rather engaged research that takes inspiration from a Marxist workers’ inquiry. In particular, while we have argued throughout this that there is evidence that food delivery platform workers in UK are very strike prone, while European workers are quite strike prone, we do not have the answers as to why this is the case. One part of building a more sustained struggle on these platforms may involve unpacking the different dynamics, as well as comparing with other countries that have seen strikes like China. As these platforms increasingly bring workers into contact beyond national boundaries - whether directly or indirectly through shared conditions - this kind of comparative analysis involves more than just academic interest.
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[1] For more on this inquiry, see Cant (Forthcoming).