Author: Vincenzo Maccarrone
Co-Authors ⁄ Presenters: Arianna Tassinari (PhD student, Warwick Business School)
Organising the unorganisable: gig economy couriers' mobilisation in UK and Italy
Until a few months ago, workers in the gig economy were thought to be ‘unorganisable’, due to the conditions of precariousness and atomization characterizing their jobs. However, over the summer of 2016 the couriers of the food delivery platforms Deliveroo and UberEats were protagonists of several wildcat strikes in London over their working conditions. Then in October of the same year the workers of Foodora, a German start-up similar to Deliveroo and UberEats, went on strike in Turin (Italy) due to a dispute with the firm after the management announced a change in the pay policy (from hourly wage to a payment-per-delivery system).
In the present paper, we will present a comparative study of these two cases of mobilization of gig economy workers. The similarities between them are striking, in terms of the issues around which workers are protesting and with regard to the methods of labour organization which are being used, despite the different institutional contexts in which these industrial actions took place.
Our aims are twofold. On the one hand, through an in-depth analysis of the issues emerging from these two cases, we hope to disentangle what is old and what is new in the gig economy, from an employment relations perspective . While for some aspects the jobs offered by Foodora or Deliveroo are yet another example of ‘bad jobs’ (precarious employment, with low remuneration and adverse working conditions), the use of algorithmic management methods offers new possibilities for firms to deprive the workers of control over the process and timings of work. We argue that this might have relevant implications for a return of a 18th century-like putting-out system.
On the other hand, by analyzing the development of couriers’ strikes in London and Turin and the role played in both cases by rank-and-file unionism, we aim to contribute to the debate over the mobilization theory of collective action. We do not think it is by chance that strikes in the gig economy have so far been primarily concentrated in those services where there is still an element of physical compresence of the workers, as in the case of Foodora and Deliveroo. This will be used as a basis to develop broader reflections on the potential for workers’ unionization and organizing in the gig economy in different institutional contexts.