
Interview with Deliveroo couriers appealing bargaining-rights decision - raaxe
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/24/deliveroo-couriers-dystopia-union
======
kop316
Serious question: If the conditions are just that bad, why even bother to work
for them? There seems to be some sort of equilibrium to me where if it gets
bad enough, no one will simply want to do this job, and choose to take some
other low paying job (e.g. retail, fast food, etc.).

~~~
roel_v
That's true to a certain extent, but experience (19th century beginning-of-
industrialization) has taught us that the floor (i.e., the equilibrium) is bad
enough that we don't want that sort of circumstances. In other words, it turns
out that people want to work to eat so badly that they'll put up with working
14-hour days and letting their 10 year old children work in factories that
literally kill 10's of them per year.

I'm not saying gig workers' circumstances are nearly as bad as those in the
19th century, I'm just illustrating the principle. The discussion then
continues at 'what is an acceptable equilibrium'. Of which certain people,
unsurprisingly, find that today's is not OK.

Note that I'm not saying here which side of the discussion I side on (that's a
political question not worth rehashing here I think), just pointing out the
(rather obvious) argument against total market freedom in this particular
market (labor).

~~~
labourcurious
Concretely though, in London, it takes under a day to find a "real" job in a
restaurant or a bar just by walking around and handing out CVs, even if your
English is _very_ bad.

Deliveroo bikers have chosen Deliveroo over those, and there must be a reason
for that, which the article fails to mention.

I'm also not taking sides, I just want to point out it's flat out wrong to say
"if they're doing this in these conditions, it is probably because they don't
have a choice".

~~~
kennydude
> it takes under a day to find a "real" job in a restaurant or a bar just by
> walking around and handing out CVs

Have you done this?

~~~
lhorie
Anecdata, but I have seen it happen many times. My cousin came to Toronto for
a few months and wanted some under the table income. I was buying some
pastries in a bakery I liked around that time, and noticed they had a hiring
sign. I told her about it and she was working there a couple days later.

A former coworker had a similar story. He got into a fight with his wife
because she was spending all day in facebook instead of finding a job, so out
of frustration and spite he went out to pretty much the first pizza joint he
could find and talked to the manager. 30 mins later she now had a job.

Heck, I have another cousin with schizophrenia who managed to land a security
job (he didn't last unfortunately due to his condition worsening), but it goes
to show finding a low pay job isn't some insurmountable task.

~~~
Karrot_Kream
Opposing anecdata, my SO's sister had an ivy league degree and spent 3 months
looking for jobs until she got the only job she could, front of house work at
a bakery. Every other job, service jobs included, turned her down.

Another friend with a strong public school degree who floated around for
months interviewing until she moved back with her parents, then finally got a
job at the local library.

~~~
lhorie
I wonder if over-qualification in resumes plays a role. In the book Nickel and
Dimed[1], the author explicitly hid the fact she had higher education even
from colleagues. And whereas she complained a lot about working conditions,
finding a job per se wasn't a challenge at all (to the point she could even
decide between two options at one point), even being restricted to non-
intensive labor jobs due to health reasons.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed)

~~~
n4r9
Over-qualification definitely makes a difference. An employer will be
reluctant to hire someone that's likely to snag a higher-paying job in a few
weeks.

------
mlthoughts2018
My brother works as an inventory clerk in a small-town factory in the midwest
that makes small batches of custom metal parts sold to other factories.

He has been there several years and is one of the more skilled employees, and
makes just under $18,000 per year. No retirement or profit sharing benefits.
The work conditions are unsafe, with lax enforcement of safety policies for
forklifts, stacks of containers, cleaning chemicals. Most employees are
expected to perform the duties of the equivalent of 2-3 workers, including
staying late without being paid overtime. The work can be physically grueling
at times, even for my brother as inventory clerk, and much worse for some of
the general factory floor workers.

The company has three salespeople who make The Office look like it was written
by Norman Mailer. They interrupt people to go on diatribes about trite
motivational anecdotes, talk about how you have to work hard to get places,
and then sit in separate offices playing solitaire on their computers with the
door open so that anyone can see them doing it. The company's absentee owner
comes in every once in a while and holds catered lunches for the sales team,
and literally excludes the ~10 other staff in the warehouse who actually do
all of the work. Sales people make 5x-10x what the other staff make, and
receive bonuses in the form of fully paid family vacations when they close big
sales contracts, despite the fact that the rest of the staff often has to do
tons of work to close the contracts, even including assisting the sales people
with creating their PowerPoint slides, or pointing out statistical errors in
charts and things.

My brother personally has saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars,
possibly over a million, just in 2017, by catching quality control issues with
batches of metal they received from an overseas supplier, which could have
caused the company to lose one of their critical contracts. He also has had to
fill in as a last-minute delivery driver for the company delivery van, working
late into the night to drive all over a rural area delivering metal parts when
the regular delivery driver was out sick.

My brother has 10 days of paid vacation and it's a dogfight every time he
wants to use them. His last raise (of $0.25 per hour) was more than a year
ago.

The company actively preys upon people with past criminal records, knowing
that they are hard up for employment in a region where employment is already
hard to find, and that once they are hired they will put up with any degree of
degrading treatment. (My brother does not have a criminal record, but about
75% of the general warehouse staff do, and many did not finish high school and
have a hard time even understanding the terms of their employment. The current
staff are sometimes asked informally if they know any people with criminal
records to recommend for open positions). This isn't a case of an employer
helping the community by fairly considering ex-criminals for open roles. It's
a situation where they tacitly _target_ these people on the assumption they
won't have to treat them fairly or respectfully, and can exploit them to a
greater degree because they'll have fewer options to leave.

My brother does not have enough personal savings to move away, and likely
would have to have a job lined up that paid relocation before he could even
consider it, otherwise just moving to a new location would put him at the
point of insolvency. Literally, the option of quitting is logically not an
option, because it directly implies insolvency and, probably, a dangerously
high risk of suicide. So, despite whatever superficial sense one might want to
say he is "in a free labor market," it is just disingenuous junk nonsense. No
matter how frugally he lives, his amount of salary is just so egregiously low
that it could never be possibly to work his way into a better life situation.
Not even decades of savings could do it for him, even if he was living at the
absolute most extreme end of frugality (which he pretty much already is). He
is just not paid a wage that can possibly sustain a viable savings rate, and
there are no other jobs nearby, and moving is not economically feasible.

He doesn't have a college degree (dropped out of college due to severe
diagnosed clinical depression and anxiety attacks -- still has student loans
of course), but is highly intelligent, curious and resourceful. He is one of
the few people who can make me laugh. He's a beautiful musician in his spare
time, a wonderfully witty writer, and generous with his free time spent
helping his friends and family and trying to do odd jobs for extra money when
he can find opportunities (not often).

And there are many people in the US with even worse employment exploitation
situations than my brother -- and vastly worse situations around the world.
His story is already so bad we should be morally outraged by it, and it's not
even among the worst stories you'll hear. I can't imagine what it's like to be
in a similar situation to his, and then to add racial abuse, sexual
harassment, or other forms of discrimination or marginalization on top of it.

It just blows my mind sometimes how ignorant we all can be of the genuine
_exploitation_ in our labor market. There's no sense in which it's a morally
acceptable reflection of some market equilibrium. It's just: one side has
inherited power and uses power to accrue and entrench more power; the other
side is literally in serfdom. Even when people "earn" positions of power
through economically productive output, it's on the backs of people in these
situations, and through infinite other forms of mass exploitation, in the form
of regulatory capture, backroom deals, outright fraud, and manipulation of
publicly provided resources. The part attributable to any one person's work
ethic or natural talent is so fleetingly small that it's just shocking how we
still try to glorify it and hold it up as an example of why they "earned"
power and wealth, and why those being exploited somehow are always to blame
for it.

~~~
labourcurious
This is very well put and the way you describe the intra-company blue-collar /
white-collar divide is on the money. You are right, this sucks.

I'm more skeptical about not being in a free labor market. I know many people
in London who get by on the minimum wage (~16K). I doubt the cost of living in
a small-town factory in the Midwest is comparable to the cost of living in
London.

It's a shitty situation, sure, but it sounds like a far cry from not being
able to change jobs because a single day without any income would lead to
insolvency.

~~~
michaelt

      I know many people in London who get by on
      the minimum wage (~16K).
    

What sort of rent are they paying?

~~~
Shoue
It's not ideal but you can share a house with a bunch of people through rent-
sharing websites for £200-400 depending on the zone. I personally used that
for a short stay while searching for something decent closer to zone 1 to
share with my friends, and saved some money at the same time. It definitely
wasn't as awful as I was expecting.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
In some ways, this type of solution assumes one to be a young person, without
obligations like e.g. a newborn to take care of, or types of mental illness
that might make it untenable to like in a dorm-like environment further into
adulthood.

For people who can sustain this situation, it does offer ways to have a higher
quality of life even on a low salary. But a lot of people have families to
raise and personal situations to manage that are fundamentally incompatible
with it, requiring them to afford other living arrangements, creating a bigger
stress factor upon on their budget.

------
raisethrowdrop
I have worked as a Deliveroo courier in London for a good while. I had no
problems with it.

The issue as I see it is with people relying on their employer, client,
whatever you wish to call it.

Business is business. If you treat it as anything other, you will eventually
encounter issues (especially at the lower end).

The union stuff should be seen in that framework. It's a negotiation.

I got on my bike, made ten quid an hour in some free time, got a bit of
exercise, and that was that. It's obviously not a career.

It's kind of frustrating to see people hypothesise. Go and apply and do it and
see what it's like, the barrier to entry is near zero.

------
andrewingram
One thing to note, whilst article claims that nobody would utilise the
substitution clause, this is false. It's unusual, but it does happen. I work
for a business with Deliveroo couriers as customers, and it's occasionally
asked by some of them whether we support substitute drivers.

------
crankylinuxuser
On a different reading and assessment:

Many jobs, no, most jobs are combinations of small individual parts of a whole
action. And this shows that piecemeal work by dozens of different people not
only works, but bypasses the whole level of employee/employer level controls.

Take a lawyer's job for example.. The research can be farmed off crowdsourced
style. Nobody has to know what the case is about, only the search parameters
given. All the gruntwork can be contracted can be cheaply contracted with
little knowledge about the actual case. Then, a paralegal, again contracted
out, can sign the appropriate NDA and do the paperwork for the filing. And
finally, the actual lawyer just signs their name after a quick review. This is
doable right now.

We also see this in medical establishments, where interns (aka: unlicensed
people) can actually do surgery under a doctor's license. I could see mega-
health orgs using maybe 4-5 doctors, and hire hyperspecialized interns to do
the gruntwork. The doctors would primarily overview routine stuff and take
over in catastrophes.

The only people who're safe right now are us automators. My labor = 1000 or
10000 physical laborers, as my tools (computers) give me leverage of a massive
multiplier. A journeyman's tools maybe provide *5 labor speedup. And these
contract delivery people are literally 1x. (It's shitty to compare, but that's
what capitalism already does with $$$/yr)

~~~
amelius
Except lawyers and doctors are highly protective of their employment and
status. There's often a numerus clausus in universities, limiting the number
of doctors that enter the field. And there's the FDA which controls medical
practices, and since they consist of medically trained people, they are
probably also highly protective of the status quo.

~~~
chimeracoder
> There's often a numerus clausus in universities, limiting the number of
> doctors that enter the field.

The number of doctors that enter the field is limited not by the number of
people who graduate with medical degrees, but by the number of residency
positions available for training. Every year, we graduate more medical
students than we have residency slots available, and that's not including
foreign graduates who do their medical studies abroad but want to practice in
the US. There is no artificial limit for residency slots; the limit is the
amount of funding available.

Most of these are heavily subsidized by the government. Hospitals are free to
create their own positions in addition, if they can fund them themselves. Very
few do, because residency programs actually lose money on margin.

------
kyle-rb
>Such a system encourages riders to travel at dangerous speeds: once, 25-year-
old Mohaan came off his motorbike and badly injured his knee cap, but
continued to his destination for fear that terminating the job would get him
the sack.

So this is basically Snow Crash.

------
justherefortart
Too bad the governments of the world seem more interested in protecting the
corporations than the general population.

~~~
msiyer
Government is a corporation. Corporations are the government.

------
moe98ntuin34
To me, the real takeaway is this:

> unlike, say, immigration law, there is weak enforcement of employment law.

For me in the US, this is the crux of the current wave of anti-immigrant
sentiment. The problem isn't "immigrants stealing our jobs." It's shitty jobs
that don't cover basic costs and have inhumane working conditions. But the
people in power have done a great job of misdirecting people's attention to
immigrants. Boy are they going to be disappointed when all the immigrants are
gone and they still can't make a living.

~~~
sykh
Shouldn’t the decrease in available labor as a result of decreased immigration
lead to wage increases? Particularly for jobs that aren’t going to be shipped
overseas (construction, manual labor..).

EDIT: I know the topic of immigration can evoke strong emotions. I’m just
pointing out that a decrease in labor pool ought to increase wages. Isn’t this
just law of supply/demand?

~~~
moe98ntuin34
You would think that. The problem is they still can't find people to fill the
jobs. (Or maybe more accurately, people believe they are above doing those
types of jobs.) Take for example this Planet Money piece [1]:

>Tom Deardorff has had to compete for workers. He's raised their pay by
actually quite a lot. Back in 2006, working the celery field paid about $8.70
an hour. Now it pays more than $21 an hour. [...] Tom says his workers all are
documented and that even _doubling wages hasn 't solved the labor problem_.

[1]: [https://www.npr.org/2018/05/03/607996811/worker-shortage-
hur...](https://www.npr.org/2018/05/03/607996811/worker-shortage-hurts-
californias-agriculture-industry)

~~~
magduf
If he paid $100 per hour, I think he'd probably find enough people to do the
job.

If that causes celery prices to rise so high that no one wants to buy it, then
maybe celery just isn't an economically viable crop.

------
jesdjkeujjuju
Good that it is absolutely not an one-sided article, favoring the viewpoint of
the union exclusively. Garnered with some anecdotes of somebody having had an
accident on the job once, or people sometimes not having assignments, to make
it all seem oh so horrible.

I would guess a lot of these Couriers are quite happy with their existence. It
enables them to earn some money on the side, while they try to become starving
artists or whatever.

In any case, the cure for worker exploitation is not more rules. It is
creating more jobs. Then workers with bad jobs can simply switch to a better
job.

