Riding for Deliveroo, Resistance in the New Economy, October 2019, reviewed

Interesting new book by Callum Cant about the challenges of working in the new economy for food delivery company Deliveroo. It is called Riding for Deliveroo, Resistance in the New Economy and is available here.

What is life like for workers in the gig economy? Is it a paradise of flexibility and individual freedom? Or is it a world of exploitation and conflict? Callum Cant took a job with one of the most prominent platforms, Deliveroo, to find out.

His vivid account of the reality is grim. Workers are being tyrannised by algorithms and exploited for the profit of the few – but they are not taking it lying down. Cant reveals a transnational network of encrypted chats and informal groups which have given birth to a wave of strikes and protests. Far from being atomised individuals helpless in the face of massive tech companies, workers are tearing up the rulebook and taking back control.

New developments in the workplace are combining to produce an explosive subterranean class struggle – where the stakes are high, and the risks are higher.

Riding for Deliveroo is the first portrait of a new generation of working class militants. Its mixture of compelling first-hand testimony and engaging analysis is essential for anyone wishing to understand class struggle in platform capitalism.

Review of Riding for Deliveroo, Resistance in the New Economy, published October 2019

This is a timely book as so many new jobs are emerging along similar lines to the Deliveroo model, of people who are, nominally, considered as self employed workers. Something which Uber, JustEat and many other companies are looking to do, outsourcing all the costs of working to the ‘non-employee’, including their mode of transportation, their lights, lock, clothes. And then also looking to leave them unpaid when they don’t need them, the so-called ‘zero hour contracts’.

A PhD student at Sussex University, living in the nearby city of Brighton, Callum Cant effectively describes his experiences from first researching the company, joining it and gradually getting involved the campaigns to recognise and improve the workers rights and pay conditions. It is a tough environment to work in, especially when you factor in how hilly Brighton is too, with some areas requiring a 100 metre gain in height over a very short distance of road.

In many ways the strategies of the company sound like the anti-union activities of 100 years ago. It is a clear reminder that for all the tech-bro talk of the founders of these app based companies, the reality is that down at the bottom there are often many people working very hard for very little return.

Cant applies classic theories of labour, capital and attempts to contextualise what is happening, and what could be considered to be a fair and unfair working arrangement for its ’employees’. Even the term employee having become contentious, whereas the reality seems to actually be that these people are clearly working for the company, but with very poor working conditions. For these reasons this book is well worth reading, and has relevance and applications for a wide range of other ‘gigs’ as we are being increasingly pushed towards taking these gig economy forms of work.

See more reviews here.

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