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How to Start a Gig Worker Rebellion
One of the first workers to organize a protest for better conditions at a delivery app shares his story — and it’s more relevant than ever now
When Callum Cant started working as a courier for Deliveroo in 2016, he was taken aback at how little human interaction was required in his job. Deliveroo is the UK’s answer to DoorDash or PostMates; it’s a fast-growing, app-based food delivery company that currently operates in 200 cities. Yet Cant only met one person who worked in the Deliveroo office on his first day: the staffer who handed him some paperwork and basic bike lights.
In the hilly town of Brighton, on the south coast of England, Deliveroo couriers would often gather in the zone center to make sure they were in the right range to pick up as many orders as possible, and some would briefly chat between deliveries. Over the next few months, more and more riders joined the courier network, even though the overall amount of orders stayed around the same. On average, the payment per drop-off started to decrease.
The conversations, as he puts it in his book Riding for Deliveroo, started to “become more and more militant: You could see the cogs whirring in people’s heads.”
Cant, who is pursuing a PhD researching trade unions in the UK, worked as a courier for Deliveroo for eight months. His experiences, analysis of the decline in trade union power in the UK, and a whistle-stop tour of neoliberalism make up the backbone of Riding for Deliveroo. Now, as the fallout from the coronavirus reorganizes the economic order, it’s an opportune time for gig workers to organize for better conditions.
Deliveroo is just one gig economy app among many, of course. Seamless has been available in the United States as a web-based food ordering service since 1999, and Instacart offers grocery deliveries in more than 5,500 cities. Uber has its food delivery service, UberEats, which is one of Deliveroo’s main competitors — it also operates in 45 countries. Some restaurant owners — and workers — are increasingly concerned that the growth of food delivery apps could put restaurants themselves out of business, as the commissions that apps take (which often don’t go to the riders) cut into already…
