Duncan McCann: 

Platforms – like Uber, Deliveroo, or TaskRabbit – connect services and products with consumers. With both sides theoretically having control over the interaction, and investing in the platform to reap the rewards, the rapid spread of platforms has the potential to revolutionise capitalism. But increasing concerns over the past few years around tech monopolies and the potential erosion of workers’ rights through the gig economy have raised questions over who really holds control over the platforms, and what impact this has on workers and customers.

Platform co-operatives present a possible alternative to traditional platforms which tend towards monopoly, concentrate power and erode workers’ rights. Drawing on a cooperative lineage which spreads out ownership and control, platform co-operatives could present a brighter future. But there are barriers to the spread of platform co-ops, including challenges of raising capital, finding the right skills within the organisation, competing with Silicon Valley, and harnessing positive network effects.

This is the second of two reports exploring the potential for platform co-ops, drawing on work we undertook with support from NESTA’s ShareLab fund. The previous report, A Better Gig? focused on the concerns of both drivers and passengers engaging in the private hire gig economy in West Yorkshire, and suggested that platform co-ops could go some way to remedying these. This paper draws on these lessons to set out the main challenges to setting up platform co-ops, and suggest ways of overcoming them.

Click on the image to download

Through our own research, and in particular through observing the development of a new ride-hailing app started by drivers in South Yorkshire, we have identified five areas of challenge for platform co-operatives. Firstly, platform co-ops are not attractive to traditional venture capitalists and tech investors. Platform co-ops can utilise other sources of capital (crowdfunding, co-operative banks and credit unions, or blockchain and alternative currencies) but will still never be able to match the billions raised in Silicon Valley. Secondly, co-operatives must commit long-term operational and financial commitment to building and maintaining their technology. Thirdly, coops need technology which can enable it to recruit drivers and passengers in parallel, and to distribute the profits of the business. Fourth, platform co-ops must find a way of subsidising their early entry into the market in order to build a profile for themselves. And fifth, platform co-ops must find a way to harness the virtuous cycle of positive network effects.

These challenges are difficult for platform co-operatives to overcome. In the ridehailing sector, we posit that co-operatives can be most successful in either focusing on a large city-scale project, or creating a network of federated co-ops to overcome some of the challenges. In other sectors, like cleaning and social care, the less complex tech demands mean that platform co-ops can make more of an impact. As well as developing alternative market interventions, we need to tackle the dominance of existing platforms.

We are at a crossroads. Traditional platforms seemed invincible until very recently, but regulatory battles and consumer action are changing the platform landscape. Platform cooperatives can be part of building a more equitable vision of the future. But small businesses cannot do it alone.

1. We provide a series of recommendations to make platform co-operatives viable.
2. We need new funding structures that can provide alternatives to the venture capital funding model.
3. New platform co-ops must collaborate with each other and, where appropriate, form federated structures.
4. Workers should be provided with the necessary skills training and support to establish their own co-operatives.
5. Locally-focused commissioning from the public sector could provide a vital revenue stream to platform co-operatives.
6. Government must enforce existing regulation robustly to ensure a level playing field for new platform co-ops.
7. Users and consumers need to understand the impact of spending their time and money on established platforms, and be given opportunities to spend their money on ethical alternatives.

The structural challenges outlined in this report offer some of the answers as to why we have not seen more platform co-ops emerge and flourish. Platform co-ops offer us hope that we can harness the benefits of digital platforms without the harms that many of the current ones create. But their creation will require both continued experimentation and the support of policy makers both to enforce existing regulations on platforms, and create new support structures. Only by working together can we hope to create a digital economy that truly works for everyone.

Photo by the meanMRmustard

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The Political Economy of the Common. Ed. by Andrea Fumagalli

(as yet untranslated Italian-language book)

Economia politica del comune, collects a series of essays, mostly published elsewhere, which summarize his analysis of post-crisis contemporary capitalism.

Capitalism has changed. Andrea Fumagalli says so. And he said that, for a long time, his school; the tradition of autonomy, starting from the early writings of Mario Tronti and Raniero Panzieri of the sixties, passing through the intellectually fertile experience of Potere Operaio of the seventies and the brilliant analysis of post-Fordism and the new figure of the social worker ‘of the eighties, always with the analysis firmly anchored in the thought of the now internationally recognized master of the Italian Theory Antonio Negri, has developed a Marxism for the digital age, focused on the Grundrisse, and in particular on the famous’ fragment on the machines ‘, more than on Capital. Together with Christian Marazzi and Maurizio Lazzarato, Andrea Fumagalli is the person who most contributed to this perspective, adding a solid empirical basis based on his experience as a professional economist.

The new book by Andrea, Economia politica del comune, collects a series of essays, mostly published elsewhere, which summarize his analysis of post-crisis contemporary capitalism. For the author, the scenario of the last ten years has been a strengthening of a model of biocapitalism where capitalist exploitation is based no longer on the mere theft of working time in factories or on the appropriation of intellectual production – in the form of technological innovation or intellectual property, central to the analysis of cognitive capitalism – but now on the subsumption – that is, the inclusion and putting to work – of the deepest dimensions of the human condition, such as those related to affections or relationships, particularly when they are articulated through the ubiquitous connectivity of smartphones and social media, and even to life itself as an object of biotechnology.

The man-machine union, visible and potential object of criticism or sabotage in the Fordist factories, has now progressed to become part of the human condition and in this way capable of making life itself – la nuda vita, Agamben would say – in its dimensions pre and post human, in vitro as well as in silico, object of appropriation and capitalist valorization.

In biocapitalism, production is based on putting the commons to work, a concept that is different from that of common goods, even if these are part of it, but which also refers to that life in common – made up of elements such as language, the gestures, the affections, the corporality and the relationships – which now, through digital technologies, is potentially put to work in its most varied manifestations: the freelancer who organizes his temporary cooperation with a team for a specific project, the Airbnb guest who strives to offer a positive stay experience or the teenager who posts a selfie with her favorite brand on Instagram.

Capitalist valorization has also progressed far beyond the Marxian model of the bourgeois drinker of the worker’ sweat. Financial markets play an increasingly central role and, through the financialization of life and productive relations, operate like giant vacuum cleaners that suck up crumbs of surplus value from the global productive and reproductive factory – the credit card, the shipping insurance required in the just-in-time value-chain – to then redistribute them, without transparency or democratic regulation, on financial markets. In this situation in which the socialization of the productive forces, the commons that constitute the true source of value – has now left the greedy pockets of the individual bourgeois to circulate on the financial markets in the form of digitized data – communism is already with us, only that does not belong to us. Biocapitalism represents the realization of the communism of capital, the famous concept taken up by Antonio Negri – and by Marx who, although he never uses it, mentions this possibility in the Grundrisse.

What to do then, comrades? There is no longer a factory to be sabotaged, nor a winter palace to be conquered. But, Andrea suggests, we can re-appropriate the tools in the hands of the capitalist class: finance and money. The currency, – writes Andrea – is now a direct expression of capitalist power, without the intermediation of the state. Andrea proposes the creation of coins and alternative financial instruments, suggesting the use of the seductive technology of the crypto-currencies: blokchain and bitcoin, which are able to establish circuits of valorization external to global finance; it would be desirable for a new currency of the commons suitable to finance a new welfare of the commons, triggering processes of local redistribution of wealth, to then let them grow and acquire more and more powerful autonomy. A strategy similar to that of the autonomy of the eighties, the age of the Hakim Beyi’s TAZ’s, the golden age of the Italian centri sociali of the nineties that, among other things, Andrea recognizes as his main source of inspiration.

The book offers a theoretical sum by one of the main representatives not only of the contemporary Marxist thought but of one of its most fruitful veins. As such it should be seen, in particular the introductory essay “The premise and Twenty thesis on bio-cognitive capitalism”, which sums up the subject with admirable clarity. For me it was a very fruitful reading: Andrea is and always has been, since its brilliant analysis of the new forms of self-employment of the second generation in 1994, a Master.

At the same time I think that the book a little exaggerate the grip and power of bio-capitalism. The result is a totalitarian image, where every human activity is immediately subsumed and exploited, from pedaling for Deliveroo to being on Facebook, and, using the same logic – why not -, playing soccer is actually a way to help reproduce the basics of the football market that exploits the fans as well as the television audience. What to me it sounds “weird”, however, it is the astonishing ineffectiveness of contemporary capitalism in exploiting the common which has partly generated. Facebook, Airbnb and Amazon earnings all in all modest, Uber and Deliveroo are at a loss, start-up incubators around the world are abandoning the cash for equity model, finding that they do not make a lot of money by incubating start-ups. Above all, there is a lack of innovation and ideas: large multinational companies have liquid reserves of unprecedented historical size – Apple announces a stock buy back of $ 100 billion – and no one seems able to find profitable use of big data or algorithms that go beyond the completion of the advertising targeting or the advice of other songs you may like on Spotify.

Capitalism like that will definitely not be able to survive the radical challenges that await us as we begin to cross the Anthropocene. To paraphrase another great master of Italian postwar Marxism, Giovanni Arrighi, the problem is not that the cognitive biocapitalism exploits our life, but that it isn’t able to do it well enough. I say this because as long as there is exploitation at least there is a rationality to criticize or sabotage. Instead contemporary biocapitalism looks increasingly like a rotting body that no one has the power to take away, as the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck claims. In this context, the alternative currency will certainly contribute to creating alternative valorisation circuits. My intuition is that the protagonists of this process are not so much those of Macao or Teatro Valle, but rather the entrepreneurs of that pirate modernity that now connects the small Chinese factories with the needs of the popular classes of Lagos or Tangier, passing through Piazza Garibaldi of Naples.

Photo by Lanpernas .

The post Book of the day: The Political Economy of the Common appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Deliveroo, Foodora, Giovo. The success of these companies depends on the exploitation of an invisible precariat. Now, against all expectations these workers are mobilizing across borders to claim their rights.

Callum Cant, writing for politicalcritique.org, examines recent development in worker-led action in gig economy settings.

A strike by Deliveroo workers London in the summer of 2016 was the first sign that food delivery platform workers were capable of mass collective action. The strike spread from Deliveroo to UberEats, and then around the UK. A year on, that struggle has spread transnationally. Food delivery platform workers have now been on strike in over ten cities across the UK, Italy, France, Spain and Germany.

Their struggles have both won victories and faced serious setbacks, but the fact remains that a transnational movement of precarious labour has emerged from what appeared to be the most unlikely of circumstances. Workers who were supposed to be weak and powerless have spread their antagonism with capital across borders in militant, unmediated action. This transnational circulation of struggle provides an example of how the changing composition of the working class can provide new opportunities, even as it demolishes old certainties.

It all kicks off in the UK

The UK movement began when Deliveroo workers in London were told that their contracts would be shifting from an hourly wage (£7) with a bonus per delivery (£1) to a piece work system (£3.75 per drop). Informal networks in seven different areas quickly mobilised to respond. Hundreds of riders went on strike over the course of a week. This action forced the company to allow striking riders a choice of pay structure, and set the tone for the disputes to come.

After the initial wave of action in London had subsided, two unions got involved in organising with Deliveroo riders. The Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB), a small breakaway union formed in 2013, began to organise with workers in Camden in London, the epicentre of the summer strikes, and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) engaged with workers nationally and in Bristol and Leeds particularly. The Rebel Roo, a self-organised Deliveroo workers bulletin, also began to be produced with support from the political group Plan C.

Precarious Mayday.

Month by month, the level of organisation and action outside London developed. Workers running  training shifts for Deliveroo went on strike and won in Bristol, followed by unionisation and strike action in Brighton over low pay and the beginning of a concerted organising effort in Leeds. By February the circulation of Rebel Roo had grown to 1500 a month (about 10% of the national workforce) and there were the beginnings of organisation in cities as socially and politically diverse as Bath, Middlesbrough, Liverpool, Portsmouth, Manchester and Glasgow. Key parts of the movement converged for discussions at the Transnational Social Strike Platform’s assembly in London in late February, and the movement seemed to be approaching a critical point.

Struggles in Leeds and Brighton achieved significant victories but failed to scale up nationally.

When seven workers from Leeds were victimised, the IWW were keen to push for national strike action, but there was hesitation elsewhere about the possibility of such an escalation. This hesitation coincided with a fall off in momentum nationally. Struggles in Leeds and Brighton achieved significant victories but failed to scale up nationally. The victimised workers in Leeds were reinstated and the manager who had victimised them sacked, and workers in Brighton won a recruitment freeze, but the movement at large faltered. In Brighton, riders pushed forwards with forming a coalition with other precarious workers, culminating in a ‘Precarious Mayday’ demonstration. But despite these positive steps, the moment had gone.

Precarious Mayday Brighton. Image Courtesy of the author.

The counter-offensive by Deliveroo involved significant concessions in certain local zones which drove up average wages, but, significantly, these were mediated through the app’s obscure distribution of work rather than contractual changes. Gradually, the most organised zones in the UK began to fall into inactivity. In the context of this retreat of worker action, the IWGB union fell back on the legal avenue it had been pursuing to challenge Deliveroo’s use of ‘independent contractor’ status to avoid legal obligations to its workers. This challenge is ongoing, and has been supported by the left-wing leadership of the Labour party.

The Movement Spreads

After the London strike, organization became contagious. Suddenly, workers across Europe began to take action. The struggle in Italy saw the first mobilisations of Foodora riders begin in Turin in October 2016. About half of the 100-strong Foodora workforce went on strike when the company attempted to change their pay from hourly (€5.40 an hour) to piecework (€2.70 a delivery). They formed a critical-mass strike demonstration alongside social movement groups and circled the city. The demands of the movement centred on costs (data, bikes), on hourly wage parity with Milan, and on employment rights like sick pay and holiday pay. The overall demand on employment status was to be covered by national collective labour contract and so to get the minimum wage.

The riders organised with the combative syndicalist union Si Cobas and managed to win a contractual €1.10 increase in the delivery fee to €3.60.  However, this significant victory was followed by the 15 most prominent organised workers being disconnected and a mass recruitment drive that diluted the organisation of the workforce. Combined with app changes designed to placate riders, the Foodora counter-offensive successfully interrupted the movement.

Strikes in France were considerably less formalized than in the UK and Italy, with riders calling and enforcing strikes with little notice or overt coordination. This chaotic situation created a sense of panic amongst platform management, with Deliveroo even threatening call the police on striking riders in Marseilles, who had set up a picket outside a popular restaurant.

 The first protest brought 80+ Deliveroo and Foodora riders together for a joint demonstration.

In Germany, organization began in April 2017 when the Free Workers Union (FAU) launched their food delivery platform organising campaignin Berlin. Their demands were: transparency about hours worked, enough guaranteed hours to live on, €1 more per drop and one hour a week paid time for shift planning. For the first time, the campaign had a large base in multiple food delivery platforms. The first protest was held in May and brought 80+ Deliveroo and Foodora riders together for a joint demonstration, calling for negotiations. A second demonstration held at Deliveroo and Foodora head offices in June attracted similar numbers. This continual pressure has forced Foodora to enter into negotiations with the FAU in Berlin, although Deliveroo are still holding out.

Spain saw some of the largest strike action yet. When Deliveroo responded to a campaign of worker-led demonstrations with victimisation, by disconnecting 13 prominent workers. However, the struggle continued and developed into a national three hour strike (between 8-11pm) of Deliveroo workers in Barcelona, Valencia and Madrid on the 2nd of July. Participation was high: in Barcelona, 150 out of the workforce of 230 were on strike. They demanded a minimum of two deliveries per hour, 20 guaranteed hrs of work per week and an end to the victimisation of unionised workers.

Mass strike of precarious couriers, Milan 2017. Credit: Deliveroo Strike Raiders.

Back in Italy, workers were pursuing the legal route to a different employment and collective bargaining status, and have been supported by the left wing party Sinistra Italiana. Mobilisation also began in Milan, with another critical mass strike on the 15th July bringing together workers from Foodora, Deliveroo, and Giovo to demand sick pay and insurance in case of accident. There is now evidence of organization spreading even further across Europe – workers from countries like the Netherlands, Austria and Greece have joined international organizing meetings led by German, Italian, and Spanish riders.

Working for the Black Box

Wherever they operate in Europe, food delivery platforms rely on the same fundamental business model. They use a platform to mediate between food providers, delivery workers and customers. Each party uses an app to interact with the others, and the labour process is controlled through algorithmic management. This means that most of the time workers respond to commands generated by an automated system contained within what labour scholar Trebor Scholz calls a ‘black box’. The platform itself owns very little fixed capital, outsourcing all delivery costs to the riders who have to provide their own bikes, data and so on. To all intents and purposes, the workers already own all the means of production required for the delivery process – with the vital exception of the coordinating platform and its algorithms, which remain firmly in the hands of the boss.

Image Courtesy of Taylor Herring on Flickr.com.

These workers are engaged through a non-standard employment relation, the precise nature of which varies from country to country. Universally, however, these non-standard statuses work on the principle that you can be a worker for less of a wage than a worker. This is an attempt to reduce the cost of labour-power, the price of which was set through historical processes of class struggle, and it is mostly successful in undermining the old victories of the workers movement and the social democratic settlement. These non-standard statuses are the product of a capital-state relation which is also producing wider structural reforms of the labour market with the same goal; Renzi’s Jobs Act in Italy, changes to trade union law, apprenticeships and welfare in the UK, the Loi Travail in France, long term wage suppression in Germany, the Spanish 2012 labour law and so on. These two processes are very directly linked: platforms like Uber often use money raised from venture capitalists to aggressively lobby for changes to legal and regulatory frameworks, in the process creating the conditions their business model needs in order to thrive.

This transnational similarity in the organisation of labour is what has allowed for the very rapid spread of food delivery platforms in an attempt to monopolise and gain network effects. But as well as allowing the rapid spread of food delivery platforms, this similarity has created the conditions for the rapid circulation of a common form of workers struggle within those platforms.

The Nuit Debout protests 2016.

Invisible Organization

The Italian workerist Romano Alquati once made the point that no worker struggle is ‘spontaneous’: if you think it is, then you have just missed the invisible organisation that produced it.

The invisible organisation of food platform struggles seems to have come from two converging streams of experience. The first is the labour-process itself. Precarious delivery workers managed to forge community under unorthodox circumstances, mostly via groups on encrypted instant messaging apps. Sometimes, converging at ‘zone centres’ or common points in the city also led to mass meetings and assemblies which could not be controlled by the platform due to the lack of on-the-ground supervisory apparatus. The second is the networks of invisible organisation which grew from the subjective experience of the movements that followed the 2008 crash. Rather than coming from an experience of previous conflicts on the shop floor, many of the organisers and supporters of these platform struggles had been formed in that particular period of social movements in the squares, campuses and streets. Where these two streams have met, immediate rank and file organisation has been the result.

Disparate and supposedly disempowered workers find their power when they meet each other in the streets.

This rank and file organisation has generally resulted in workers using very similar means do develop leverage against their platform. Chief amongst these is the strike, which is combined with a critical mass/flying picket and reinforced by social movements. The leverage of the tactic comes from two sources. First is the mobile blockade/parade of the social movement, which makes a claim to the streets of the city and connects with the working class in situations beyond the workplace. This dynamic has often produced strong ‘public opinion’ support for riders, and given social movements a strong focus on structural questions of exploitation. When this tactic is employed, there is no potential for the struggle of food platform workers to be sidelined as purely ‘economic’. Second is the withdrawal of labour of the trade union. Flexible workers withdraw their labour en masse and picket the city, connecting with other riders, restraints and customers and drawing them into the work stoppage. Disparate and supposedly disempowered workers find their power when they meet each other in the streets. In every instance of this strike wave, all the dynamics of the demonstration are at play alongside the critical question of labour.

IMAGE: via IWGB Couriers and Logistics Branch.

The synthesis between social movement and labour movement even developed to the point that food delivery platform workers acted as scouts for militant street demonstrations during the movement against Loi Travail in France. Their mobility and knowledge of the city allowed them to outmanoeuvre the police in order to combat the very kind of labour law which created their own precarious conditions in the first place.

This dynamism was possible in part because of the direct use of the strike weapon that was made possible by non-standard employment relations. When the legal protections of employment were dropped in order to more fully exploit the worker, the legal protections of the employer against the worker vanished too. Suddenly, wildcat strikes were the only viable kind of strike. Labour militancy was unrestrained by the conventional state repression of strikes and worker organisation, resulting in the potential for the rapid development and spread of strikes without large trade union involvement.

Bloquons Tout!

The remarkable existence of a transnational strike movement across food delivery platforms is evidence that the development of what has been called ‘platform capitalism’ is not a conflict-free process. Whilst class struggle is not yet at a stage where it can shape the development of the sector, it’s no longer impossible to imagine that it could become a determining factor. If the strike wave continues and we see a growth of increasingly connected and powerful food platform strikes, there is a potential for further developments in the self-organisation of precarious platform workers under conditions of algorithmic management.

The transnational movement has developed some significant insights for the transnational movement against capital.

Both algorithmic management and platform capitalism are phenomena that go far beyond just food delivery. Supermarkets and warehouses are increasingly reorganised with algorithms determining the labour process, and platform workers range from taxi drivers working for Uber to the general labourers of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. If the militancy of the food delivery platform workers spreads towards these two other groups, then the level of conflict over exploitation in Europe would increase significantly. There are some signs that this spread might be taking place: organisers are already taking steps to prepare for a blockade of key Amazon logistics infrastructure on black Friday. The transnational movement within platforms has developed some significant insights for the transnational movement against capital.

This article has been reposted from politicalcritique.org  with permission to republish and digitally distribute, with the full support and consent of the Krytyka Polityczna team and European Alternatives.

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Matthieu Lietaert: The sector of online food delivery is booming in many cities in the economically developed world. It’s a promising market and many corporations like Deliveroo or UberEATS are pedaling fast to move in and win the race. The recent strikes of couriers’ have shown that despite all the millions of dollars in venture capital, the human factor is often forgotten. The recent bankruptcy of Take Eat Easy in Europe, for example, turned into a real opportunity for couriers to start their own co-op.

About 3 years ago, a new rising star entered the landscape of upstarts in Belgium. The media called it “a revolutionary app” for online food delivery, operated by bicycle couriers. Take Eat Easy went from an idea – connecting couriers with restaurants and hungry clients – to 6 million Euros in funding in April 2015 and 10 million more by August of the same year. In some cities, the company even became a challenger to Deliveroo.

One year later, an all-too-familiar story unfolded. On July 26, 2016, the company announced by email that they would cease their activities. The startup would not pay its 4500 couriers and more than 3000 restaurants for the entire month of July. Adrien Roose, CEO of Take Eat Easy, wrote an article on Medium thanking all who worked for them and who “made this adventure possible.” The bankruptcy was not especially surprising for Sacha, one of the couriers who is now actively setting up a new couriers co-op: “Working conditions had changed suddenly. Relations with the management of the company became more tense and we could feel that bankruptcy was in the air.”

When Adrien Roose talked about an adventure, he must have referred to the artificial funding that boosted his enterprise for some 15 months. It was an expensive game that he lost. The story of Take Eat Easy was simply picture-book Silicon Valley:

(1) sketch up a business idea and make it shine,
(2) raise as much capital as possible,
(3) heavily invest in marketing,
(4) be there first and dominate the national or even international market, and then
(5) lobby governments to change the rules of the game.

Does this traditional approach benefit the greater good? If the answer is at least a partial “no,” then the question to ask is: what can we do about it? Well, the story of the former Take Eat Easy couriers in Brussels can inspire couriers in other cities.

It all started with an article by the Hackistan collective in August 2016. Next, a few messages circulated on the Facebook group of the couriers. 50 cyclists were curious about the idea of a cooperative. Here, they could be both workers and owners!!! Two weeks later, in the headquarters of the SMart co-op, 15 of the couriers met to draft their business model.

“It became to us that we were not natural-born-entrepreneurs”, says Arnaud, one of the co-op’s spokespersons, smiling. “Initially,” Arnaud quipped, “we met to build an innovative delivery service taking into account a green environment, urban congestion, sustainable mobility, and fair working conditions. … Now, we are no longer just atomized individual couriers working for a company that considered us not much more than ‘legs-on-bikes-without-brains.’ We are convinced that with sufficient human investment, there is space for such co-op of couriers in Brussels.”

The couriers have created working groups focusing on their business model, web development, and a legal structure. Most of the couriers are specialized in one or sometimes even two of these areas. They sent a proposal to enter the CoopCity incubator for social entrepreneurs, a new program funded by the Region of Brussels and the European Union. The CoopCity incubator for social entrepreneurs is a first in Belgium; it’s an 8 month-long program, led by professional coaches from the best business schools and co-ops in the city.

As another courier, Sacha, puts it: “at Take Eat Easy, we only had to resign ourselves to hierarchy … The ultimate grievance was the introduction of an internal competition among couriers … We definitely want to avoid these kinds of management glitches with our co-op. We want a kind of governance that improves collective well-being.”

There are many obstacles: from web development to the survival on small profit margins. “We are ready to face these tough questions,” Sacha insists. But the couriers already learned one thing: if they work together, they can build their own platform co-op.

Arnaud stresses that “thanks to this experience, we see already immediate positive results: we’ve built stronger partnerships and bonds in our local community, and we’ve strengthened our identity as a group of couriers.” It’s also encouraging to see that similar groups are now also emerging in Paris and London. Couriers of the world, (keep pedaling but), and unite! 

Matthieu Lietaert, author of the book Homo Cooperans 2.0., is an investigative journalist. He is also director of the film The Brussels Business about corporate lobbying in the EU. He holds a Ph.D. from the European University Institute.

The post In Brussels, Online Food Couriers Launch Their Own Platform Co-Op appeared first on P2P Foundation.

What does the Deliveroo drivers’ strike mean for the future of the sharing economy – and the future of work?

A Podcast conversation on last August’s Deliveroo strike, from the New Economics Foundation’s always excellent Weekly Economics Podcast.

Last week, Deliveroo drivers in London went on strike for six days in opposition to new contracts which would switch their regular hourly pay, for a rate based on the amount of deliveries they complete.

Deliveroo is one of the fastest growing “gig economy” companies, offering flexible, shift based work. But what does this new model of employment mean for the future of work? And what does the drivers’ strike mean for the future of the sharing economy?

This week NEF’s Alice Martin joins guest presenter Ellie Mae O’Hagan to discuss the strike.

NEF on Twitter: www.twitter.com/nef
Weekly Economics Podcast on Twitter: www.twitter.com/weeklyeconpod
Ellie Mae O’Hagan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/misselliemae

Produced by James Shield. Programme editor for NEF: Huw Jordan. Music this week is by Crayon Mortel, Podington Bear and The Crypts.

Brought to you by the New Economics Foundation – the independent think tank and charity campaigning for a fairer, sustainable economy. Find out more at www.neweconomics.org.

Photo credit:   Sam Saunders

The post The Deliveroo drivers Strike appeared first on P2P Foundation.

After a week of protests, UK workers for the takeaway delivery firm Deliveroo have won the right to continue their old contracts rather than being forced onto a new contract. Whereas the old contract guarantees an hourly rate of £7 plus £1 per delivery, the new contract has no hourly rate and only pays per delivery. The Guardian reports that:

Riders, who believe that the new deal could result in them earning less money and remove the certainty that they got from an hourly rate, cautiously welcomed the deal.

This is certainly good news in terms of worker’s rights, and I also think it is interesting from a feminist perspective. This is not for the obvious reason, however: it’s not the case, as far as I know, that workers in this type of job are disproportionately women (in fact I suspect there are more men than women, though I don’t have figures).

But feminists have had some very relevant insights to offer into the ‘gig economy’ – jobs undertaken on a self-employed, casual basis co-ordinated through technology such as apps – into which category Deliveroo riders fall (another big example is Uber). These jobs are presented as offering ‘flexibility’, which in practice means that workers cannot rely on fixed hours and that risks and costs of such work are placed squarely on the workers rather than on the (often large and extremely profitable) companies that co-ordinate the services. For example, Deliveroo riders supply their own bikes or motorbikes and are not eligible for sick pay or holiday pay. This is a pattern of work that was predicted by  Maria Mies in her 1986 monograph, ‘Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale’:

The new strategy of obscuring women’s productive work for capital is propagated under the slogan of ‘flexibilization of labour’. Not only are women pushed out of the formal sector – as happened some time ago to Indian woman – they are reintegrated into capitalist development in a whole range of informal, non-organized, non-protected production relations, ranging from part-time work, through contract work, to homeworking, to unpaid neighbourhood work. Increasingly, the dual model according to which Third World labour has been segmented is re-introduced into the industrialized countries. Thus, we can say that the way in which Third World women are at present integrated into capitalist development is the model also for the reorganization of labour in the centres of capitalism. (126)

Photo by Môsieur J. [version 9.1]

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