Hello y’all, I’m representing the Tech Workers Coalition.

The TWC is a network of progressive and left-wing workers throughout the tech industry who are trying to organize and bring the labor movement into Silicon Valley, particularly parts of it that have not been grounds for labor organizing thus far. You can consider us to be a kind of workers center, that facilitates the building of new communities and new networks that are separate and in opposition to the business interests of the tech industry.

We’re mostly made up of people in various white-collar occupations in the industry: programmers, engineers, product managers, and so forth. But it’s important to note that we really want to help organize the entire industry, across all occupations and stratas: everybody from cafeteria workers, to customer service reps, to data scientists. In fact, TWC originally started as a group whose main purpose was to help unionization campaigns among service workers, and to enlist the support of the skilled technical workers at various sites. But since then, our ambitions have grown, especially as the experience of being in solidarity with service workers has lead to more of us thinking of ourselves as workers as well, as part of the same struggle.

So with regards to labor organizing in and against platform capitalism, we’re very excited and enthusiastic about considering the possibilities for leveraging the strategic position of skilled technical workers in the tech industry, in conjunction with the ongoing movements of what we could call “platform workers”. In other words, we’d like to think seriously about the potential to build a class alliance between the workers that build platforms and the workers that use – or are used by – platforms.

For example, imagine if Amazon warehouse workers were able to coordinate with Amazon engineers. Or if Deliveroo workers could organize with Deliveroo programmers. Bringing in the skilled technical layers of platform capitalism into the labor movement opens up a whole realm of possibilities for what we can accomplish.

Of course, right now, we’re a bit of a ways off from any of that. There has been a lot of spontaneous organizing and unrest happening in the industry in the past couple of years, but still the key task right now for us is to start with the basics of agitation and organizing. This is where “workers’ inquiry” comes in.

Our use of workers’ inquiry is a bit different than what’s been discussed before. We’re not academics or researchers, we the workers are ourselves doing the inquiry – on ourselves!

Our premise is that getting workers to talk to each other about problems that they have in the workplace is a powerful way to agitate, and build toward organizing; and that for would-be organizers like the core of TWC, there is no way in hell that you can have an effective campaign if you don’t know what your coworkers are actually thinking about and care about. It’s also an effective way to better understand what we can call the “class composition” of the tech industry; or in other words, where are people coming from in terms of backgrounds and occupations, where are they specifically located in the industry, what supply chains they’re a part of, and so on.

The reason that these kinds of discussion sessions can be effective is because oftentimes, especially in tech, workers feel like their gripes and grievances are their own problems. But once you start hearing other workers openly complaining and being angry about certain aspects of the industry, you start to realize that these aren’t, in fact, individual problems, but systemic problems. You also might start to realize that maybe you’re not some kind of “entrepreneur” or a temporarily-embarrassed founder or startup CEO, but that you are in fact a worker, who is under surveillance and managed and exploited. You are a cog in capitalism, just like everybody else.

And so for the Tech Workers Coalition, a lot of what we’ve been doing is grounding our organizing around creating space to simply hang out and talk, and discuss our gripes and grievances with the industry, and help our fellow workers develop some class consciousness. Or at least a bad attitude about work. And in this way we can start to build the foundation on which an alliance between skilled technical workers and platform workers and other segments of the working class can be developed.

So how do we go about doing inquiries?

Mostly, we’ve done the straightforward thing of having an event for a couple of hours where people show up, break off into groups of 2-4, and go through a questionnaire. And then maybe have a big group discussion.

The questions inquire into different aspects of working in tech, ranging from the details on specific occupations and the commodities and services that are produced, to general grievances that people have, or have seen expressed around them. So questions can be pretty simple conversational topics, like “Where do you work? What’s your job title? What tools do you use?”, and they can also be somewhat agitating, like “what do you dislike most about your workplace? How many hours do you work every week? What’s the stupidest thing you’ve seen management do?”

This stuff may seem pretty basic, which it is. This isn’t really complicated or advanced stuff here. Again, it’s worth emphasizing that a key objective right now is to simply get people to talk to each other in a critical manner and engage in some mutual and collective agitation.

To this end, the general inquiry sessions have been relatively effective and there’s been some good positive feedback. Some people have appreciated just having a space where people can openly vent frustrations and gripes about the tech industry, as opposed to more mainstream networking spaces where the expectation is that you are very cheerful and optimistic and enthusiastic. So in our spaces, instead of having to spin working 80 hours a week as “oh the work is so challenging and I’m learning so much”, you can admit “yeah this actually really sucks, I’d rather have an actual life outside of the workplace”.

For others, it has been useful to have a space to ground themselves into local concrete issues, as opposed to the big-picture macro-political stuff that they are used to thinking about. A lot of us are already very politicized, but we tend to think about politics in a very abstract and global way; so it’s really helpful to have discussions that force us to think about our own lives and how politics and political economy is impacting us on a day-to-day basis and how the workplace can be a node through which you can make a difference both for yourself and for others.

There has even been at least one case where a fellow worker, who is now a very enthusiastic member of TWC, explicitly pinned a workers inquiry session as being a pivotal moment when he recognized himself as a worker rather than a professional or an entrepreneur and how suddenly all this pressure was lifted from him. I’m not special! I’m just a fucking cog! Who cares!

All in all, we’re definitely going to continue to use workers inquiry as a strategy to facilitate conversations and reflections, as well as genuine relationships.

So inquiries have been a great tool to help build relationships between workers, but it’s also been effective at helping us understand what kinds of grievances and gripes that people around us have, that are driving them into organizing spaces. Or in other words, it helps shine a light on why the hell we techies are getting all worked up even though we supposedly have it really good with nice salaries and ping pong tables.

We can generally categorize tech worker grievances into three areas.

The first is standard workplace issues: things like bad management, long working hours, salary disparities, etc. I think it’s noteworthy that tech workers can still be riled up about basic workplace issues despite being relatively privileged and economically secure. We still may be working 60-80 hours a week, with an abusive manager, and heavy surveillance at work, and so on. Long working hours is definitely one of the popular grievances. Another is transparency around salaries; this is especially relevant when it comes to patterns of women and people of color getting underpaid, but not having a good way to figure this out with hard numbers. All in all, with regards to organizing, the fact that basic workplace issues are still a source of unrest means that we can apply a lot of the old lessons of union organizing to the tech industry.

The second category is issues of what we could call the “social composition” of the workplace, specifically issues of diversity (or lack thereof), and racism and sexism. Sexual harassment is a particularly key point of contention in the tech industry, and a lot of workers are really keen on figuring out ways to deal with it. And the general lack of management interest in dealing with these types of issues can be a big source of disillusionment and anger. So a key goal moving forward is going to be crafting strategies for rank-and-file solutions to issues of racism and sexism. We’ve actually already had some level of organizing success in certain workplaces where people were able to put collective pressure on serial harassers and get them disciplined or kicked out.

The third category is ethical and political issues. This is mainly with respect to how a company generally fits into the larger political context. For example, a company’s management trying to smooch up Donald Trump can be a serious source of anger for a workforce which is largely anti-Trump. It’s worth noting that this kind of grievance has actually been a very visible source of unrest for some time now; for example, workers at big companies like Google and Comcast had walkouts to protest Trump’s immigration policies. The ethics of technology are also a hot-button topic right now; for example, people working for various kinds of data companies are getting increasingly uneasy with the realization that actually, they’re working for surveillance companies. Shortly after the 2016 US election, a whole bunch of tech workers signed on to a petition pledging to never work on tech that could be used for the surveillance and targeting of minority groups. There’s also a disconnect between workers and companies on issues of privacy and security; a lot of workers take seriously the importance of privacy, but of course this runs against the very reason why a lot of tech companies exist in the first place.

So, those are the three general categories of grievances among tech workers. Hopefully it’s a little more clear now why TWC is optimistic about the prospects for bringing skilled technical workers into a larger working class movement. And one more thing I would note about this is that among all those grievances, by far, the most prevalent motivation for people who are agitated and want to organize is around issues of solidarity, either with underrepresented minority groups, or with tech workers who are not in relative positions of privilege, like contract workers and temporary workers. And it’s worth repeating that TWC originally started as a group that wanted to get skilled technical workers to be in solidarity with service workers on tech campuses.

So with this in mind, maybe it’s not such a crazy idea to think that we could organize tech workers to disrupt the disruption of the labor market, and resist right alongside platform workers.

And just a couple of notes about our actual organizing. I’d like to say that in general, it’s been going really well. And actually it’s going a lot better than a lot of us expected. Late last year we set some goals for the organization for 2018, and already we’re hitting those goals or surpassing them. In addition, there’s a lot of spontaneous organizing that’s happening independently of each other. At one big workplace where we have a presence, we’re discovering that there are a bunch of other informal groups who are also organizing to pressure management or subvert the company or whatever. And this gets at the concept of “invisible organization” that some people mentioned earlier today. So TWC in no way has a monopoly on tech worker organizing, which is great. It means there is a lot of energy around this stuff. Although we’re definitely the coolest.

There was also a really interesting recent case where the engineers at a tech startup ran a really successful unionization campaign, and all 15 or so engineers and programmers were on board. But then, after about a week after they told the company, they all got fired. Which is kind of hilarious; a tech startup fired all their tech workers. But in any case it’s a great example of the contradictions that we’re talking about here, and last week TWC helped organize a rally and a picket outside the company and we had about 70 people show up. And one thing to keep in mind about this kind of stuff is that even if initial attempts at organizing are met with retaliation like this, at the end of the day, that’s just going to increase the gap between management and workers in the tech industry.

So yeah. Things are going good. And we’re excited for 2018.

Photo by Berliner.Gazette

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“We are the ones who make the robots, with our own labour,” he says. “We make the criteria according to which they operate. And then we teach them to learn how to improve. The problem is not that robots are stealing our work, but that we continue to work more and more, and that the platforms are fragmenting and rendering invisible the labour that is necessary to make the algorithms work.”

Roberto Ciccarelli interviews Antonio Casilli on digital labour and platform capitalism while refuting the “end of work”. Originally published in SP’s The Bullet.

Roberto Ciccarelli: Antonio Casilli, a professor at Télécom ParisTech, is considered one of the leading experts in the capitalism of digital platforms. He is known for his pioneering research on “digital labour,” refuting the apocalyptic common-sense notion that is proclaiming the end of work as such because of automation.

Roberto Ciccarelli (RC): In Italy there has been a lot of discussion about the firing of two IKEA workers, Marica in Corsico and Claudio in Bari. They were fired because their lives could not fit into the algorithm that governs the workforce. Have we gone back to the 19th century?

Antonio Casilli (AC): The capitalism of digital platforms makes labour discipline more rigid, as it imposes seemingly “scientific” measurements and evaluations, which can resemble the old industrial manufacturing. The key difference is that the workers, in exchange for their submission to this discipline, are not getting the social safety and the political representation that they obtained before in exchange for their subordination. This new Taylorism has all the disadvantages and none of the old benefits. The workers are caught within a contradiction in terms: subordinate and precarious at the same time.

RC: After the Amazon strike in Piacenza, you advised the unions that they should also pay attention to data politics, not only to labour policy. What does that mean?

AC: In Piacenza, only the visible tip of the iceberg was seen. That was a strike in a physical location, for better working conditions in connection to tangible assets. There is a whole other part of Amazon that for years has been engaged in struggle. I am thinking of the micro-jobbers on Amazon Mechanical Turk, a system for the creation and training of artificial intelligence that is powered by micro-workers, people paid piecemeal, only a few cents, for data, image and text management tasks. These workers must organize themselves for better compensation and more humane working conditions. In this case, trade unions need to recover lost ground, because the “Turkers” perform tasks that are too small for them to take into account.

RC: Are the unions doing this?

AC: Yes, although there are several different initiatives at the moment working at the national scale. In Germany, the metalworkers of IgMetall have provided a platform for these workers’ claims: FairCrowdWork. In France, the CGT has created Syndicoop, which helps trade unionists to organize employees around a campaign. In Belgium, there is SMart: a cooperative, not a trade union, which works with freelance workers and also with home delivery workers (“riders”). A process is taking place in which the classical trade unions are seeking to “platformize” themselves, while the cooperatives develop services on a mutual basis for workers on the platforms.

RC: From the struggles of Italian “riders,” the demand emerged that they should be put on the same contract as logistics workers. Is it the same in France and in other countries?

AC: In the on-demand economy, the services based on real-time platforms and products are the focus of a major legal and political dispute regarding the contractualization of workers. Up to now, the goal has been to regularize their position in a common sector contract that would apply to the area covered by the platform. In the case of Uber, in America, Europe and South Korea labour struggles are converging toward calling for their recognition as urban transport workers. For Amazon, workers are seeking the application of the common contract for postal workers. The action plan still needs to be widened further.

RC: Widened how?

AC: By recognizing all the micro-work done by the “click workers,” even those paid a few cents per piece to accomplish tasks such as managing data, images or texts. Their work is useful for machine learning, for teaching a machine how to learn and creating artificial intelligence.

RC: And how can this be achieved?

AC: Everything is tied to the quantity of information produced, and to how and to what extent the platforms are taking advantage of this production of data. Uber takes between 20 and 40 per cent on each transaction that takes place on its platform, and is fully aware of the value that is being produced. Some of the wealth produced must be redistributed to the workers on the platforms. While this wouldn’t be a wage, such a redistribution would be more equitable than the existing situation.

RC: What are other examples of digital micro-work?

AC: There are many. It is a global market that counts at least 100 million workers. In China, India, the Philippines and Indonesia, platforms and services exist that are little known in Europe. These workers do a very wide range of jobs that allow Western digital economies to function. In these countries, you can find the Google search engine evaluators (raters). They are the workers who check whether the results of a search are appropriate and correct the range of results by adjusting the algorithm. There are also the content moderators on Facebook or Youtube, who spend their days judging whether particular videos or photos respect the platforms’ terms and conditions. They teach the filtering algorithms what content should be censored. We can also mention the “click workers” who are sharing, “liking,” and promoting advertising or celebrity videos, for which they are paid even less than a cent per click. These people are the real fuel behind viral marketing, which brings the most famous brands to life on the social networks.

RC: The on-demand economy is also a reputation economy and an economy of attention, where the figure of the consumer is central. How can workers involve consumers in their claims?

AC: First of all, by recognizing that the consumer performs the same type of labour as the Deliveroo delivery person or the micro-task worker on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

RC: What is the labour that the consumer performs?

AC: They produce data as well. This data is used to train artificial intelligence. The consumer produces a critical mass of exchanges and transactions that allow the platform to exist on the market. A consumer is an active and crucial part of the existence of the algorithm. They carry out a large amount of productive actions every day, which are similar to those of digital workers. Even the users on Youtube are doing video moderation for free, by reporting those that are not appropriate. Anyone who uses Google is training the algorithm of the search engine to learn the terms most often sought based on the words entered into it, by us and by others. The consumer is a producer. The boundaries between these economic actors are converging, to the point that we can say that when a platform doesn’t want to pay you, they call you a “consumer,” while, if they are willing to pay you (a little), they call you a task worker or micro-worker.

RC: You mentioned “free labour.” What is the role it plays in the digital economy?

AC: This “free labour” was already defined by Tiziana Terranova 20 years ago. Even then, being online was labour, because it produced content for websites and for the sites that were called “portals” at the time. Over the past decade, this idea of ​​free labour has changed, as we realized that the platforms aren’t just buying and selling our content — most importantly, they are buying and selling our personal data and personal information: which brands we like, or what time we usually listen to music; or where we are, using GPS. The free labour of the internet user is not creative work, but rather work done without awareness, and much less satisfactory, as it is invisible. As such, it is alienating, to the extent that we do not realize what the data is useful for, and how it will be used, when we solve a “captcha” on Google or add a tag to an image on Instagram.

RC: What is this data used for?

AC: It is used to produce monetary value for the large platforms that buy and sell information, but it is also used to create value for automation: to train artificial intelligence, teach the chat boxes to communicate with humans, and create virtual assistants like Siri on the iPhone or Alexa on Amazon, who speak to us and help us make choices, or even make them instead of us.

RC: So, is digital labour the common characteristic between the struggles of the bicycle messengers on Foodora or Deliveroo, those of Amazon workers and those in the countries of the “click workers”?

AC: Yes, these struggles are united by a different form of labour than those we have been accustomed to in the last century. Today, digital labour is done through digital platforms, which must be considered a type of productive organization. In addition, these platforms are both companies and markets. Amazon is a more traditional company with a brutal culture of labour discipline, as one can see, for example, in their warehouses, but also in their offices. But Amazon is also a market, a marketplace based on an enormous catalogue of products and on a less well-known form of commerce: that of data. Deliveroo is the same: It is an enterprise, with employees and tangible and intangible resources, and at the same time it is a labour market that connects customers, productive tasks and delivery workers. In this case, the platform uses an algorithmic type of matching, creating a relationship between different subjects. For Amazon, the relationship is between those who produce an item and those who buy it.

RC: You are a supporter of a universal basic income. How would it be able to protect the workforce engaged in digital labour, as intermittent and precarious as it is?

AC: By recognizing the data labour that goes through the platforms. This has already been argued by a report by the French Ministry of Finance in 2013, and in a report by the Rockefeller Foundation last year. The digital giants should not be taxed on the basis of how many data centers or offices they have in a country, but on the basis of the data produced by the users of the platforms. If there are 30 million Google users in Italy, it is fair to tax Google based on the profits they made from these users’ activities. In this way, one could fund a basic income, arising from the digital labour that each of us carries out on the internet or on the mobile apps we use. •

Antonio Casilli is a professor at Télécom ParisTech. He has written, among other books, Qu’est-ce que le digital labor? Editions de l’INA in 2015 together with D. Cardon; Stop Mobbing (DeriveApprodi, 2000); and La Fabbrica Libertina (Manifestolibri, 1997).

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‘As an open platform, anyone can use our platform no matter who they are, where they live, and what they believe… This is why you’ll see an extremely wide range of petitions, as they’ve all been created by people in the community.’ Ben Rattray, founder and CEO of Change.org

Steve Andrews: Uber’s huge online petition, hosted by Change.org, protested the removal of its London licence for refusal to comply with safety concerns. At first glance, the petition looked like an emphatic show of support by citizens for a cab company popular for its low fares. Yet the e-petition raises serious questions about contemporary civil society, transparency and corporate power.

Uber’s petition demonstrates how large companies can manipulate democracy through contemporary modes of political participation – and also reveals some uncomfortable contradictions in the business model of the petition platform Change.org.

Uber’s lobbying strategy

It’s first worth putting Uber’s ‘mass’ and ‘viral’ online mobilisation in context. Uber faces significant challenges in convincing people and politicians that the problems caused by the platform are worth the cheap fares and precarious jobs.

The controversy is not just about Transport for London’s concerns over safety. Problems also include the welfare of drivers without rights to sick, holiday or parental pay, and their vulnerability to being removed from the platform or pay reduced without any accountability or consultation. The long-term sustainability of the platform itself, which runs at a significant loss, is also under question – this too puts drivers’ pay and continued employment at risk.

In response to these challenges, the company has developed a wider political strategy that has given the firm a reputation for ignoring, defying or co-opting elected politicians the world over. After a ban in Germany, Uber simply carried on operating until the ban was lifted. The firm spends vast amounts of money on lobbying politicians behind closed doors.

Uber’s petition on Change.org

 

Their use of online petitions on platforms marketed as progressive is just an extension of this extensive PR and lobbying work, and it appears to be part of Uber’s standard strategy for pushing back against regulation. The company initiates petitions on its own behalf, for its own interests, either hosted on its own website or on Change.org. We found examples in numerous North American cities and states (e.g. Dallas, Seattle, Houston, Baltimore, Chicago, San Antonio, Calgary, Pennsylvania, Portland) as well as many other countries (Denmark, Spain, India).It also promotes these petitions aggressively, through its access to user data, drivers and mass marketing. Uber customers are mass emailed asking them to sign the petition, Uber drivers have been instructed to sign petitions with emails and splash screens, and app users receive notifications. Uber even promote their petitions using Google advertising space (we found these by accident when searching for information about Uber). Far from being a spontaneous ‘viral’ exercise, mass marketed and widely promoted petitions are part of a wider strategy to maintain market position.

Petitioning for profit

The corporate use of petitions already contradicts a basic premise of grassroots organising. Petitions have a long history as a mode of participation allowing ordinary people with a grievance to collectively address political actors and hold them accountable: particularly important for those without other recourse to political action. The Chartists petitioned parliament to demand the right to vote, while the petition to free Nelson Mandela from political imprisonment allowed international civil society to address South Africa’s apartheid regime.

The internet has revolutionised petitions, lowering the costs for producing and administering them, which has led to a host of mainly non-profits (eg. 38 Degrees, SumOfUs and Avaaz) as well as public platforms (such as the UK parliament’s own petition website), and a rise in the use of petitions as a mode of participation easy to engage with and cheap to administrate.

Change.org, however, also allows huge corporations a platform on the site, giving them the opportunity to orchestrate civil society methods to advance their agenda alongside the usual campaigns started by ordinary citizens. And the idea of the petition as a democratic, bottom-up tool for demanding social change is further thrown into question by Change.org’s other practices, which suit Uber’s aggressive political strategy rather well.

Unusually for a petitions website, Change.org Inc is a for-profit company rather than a charity and, following a controversial change of direction in 2012 after hosting a union-busting organisation’s petition, it became the only petitions site to stop filtering causes (apart from excluding hate speech), thus opening up the platform to anyone and everyone – including corporations and conservative organisations with a rather different agenda to those of citizens.

Yet it’s the site’s business model that must really appeal to Uber, as despite now refusing direct advertisements, Change.org allows ‘supporters’ (anyone) the opportunity to ‘chip in to help specific campaigns get seen by more people’ (‘promoted petitions’). Like Facebook advertising, promoting a petition means an increase in visibility.

Of course, ‘chipping in’ if you are a company worth $62 billion gives the corporate petition a significant advantage over the rest of us – certainly the traditional petition, where ‘going viral’ depends on the work of citizens and the level of commitment of its adherents. A lack of transparency on the part of Change.org means we can’t know just how much Uber, or any other company that might want to run a petition, has paid. This makes it hard to trust petitions and evaluate their significance.

Might a company that carries out screenings for the NHS have ‘chipped in’ to a petition asking that routine cancer screenings are carried out at a younger age? Might a building company be ‘chipping in’ to a petition on the building of more homes? While these may seem relatively benign scenarios, the point is that the platform model could give added weight to campaigns backed by corporations who happen to share a single goal with an individual – or perhaps more problematically, as could be the case with Uber, it offers them the potential to buy a successful campaign all of their own. Thanks to the opacity of the platform, we’ll never know.

Corporatising democracy

Change.org argues that these features allow a win-win situation. Its commitment to democracy, it suggests, is furthered by its openness to petitions begun by anyone. Oddly, their characterisation of petitions as set up by ‘people in the community’ includes the UK head of Uber Tom Elvidge, who initiated the London petition.

More insight into Change.org Inc’s vision comes from further statements of its CEO Ben Rattray, in the context of having raised $25 million after a funding round (investors were largely drawn from the tech sector, perhaps drawn to Change.org’s access to rich user data (see their privacy policy). He said: ‘This investment is recognition that there’s an opportunity to democratise democracy in the same way that we’ve democratised everything from media and communications to commerce to, increasingly, transportation… It’s about lowering the barriers to entry in industries that traditionally are difficult to participate in.’

This is quite a novel understanding of democracy. Rattray’s vision of democracy appears to refer to a new company’s right to corporate advantage in an ‘industry that is difficult to participate in’ (ie. regulated), and extends citizenship to corporate actors. In the case of Uber, the ‘democracy’ also comes from the company using its own drivers and customers as proxy voters against regulators in theory answerable to an entire population.

The Uber London ban and petition is part of a shift in the way transportation is organised, one that may not, as the evidence suggests, be sustainable. Yet it seems clear Uber will continue to fight legislation here and all over the world to guarantee its investors a return. There is potential for innovation around ‘sharing’ to use resources and deliver services in a way that is more responsive to our needs and more accountable to workers and consumers – but this isn’t it.

The petition controversy highlights another attempted shift: to radically change the meaning of civil society and the traditional tools of citizen participation by ‘opening them up’, ‘democratising’ them – to businesses. The growth of online civil society platforms can empower people who otherwise don’t have a voice in democracies largely unaccountable to their populations. However, the Uber Change.org petition suggests they can further entrench corporate power, ensuring that here, as elsewhere in contemporary democracies, businesses will enjoy huge advantages over ordinary people.

Photo by meliesthebunny

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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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About Platform Coops

The Internet is slipping out of ordinary users’ control. Internet technologies are transforming our workplaces, relationships, and societies. Companies like Uber, Amazon, and Facebook are capturing vital sectors of the economy such as transportation and phenomena like search and social networking. All of us who rely on the Internet have virtually no control over the platforms that affect and inform us on a daily basis.

Platform Capitalism

The power held by these principal platform owners has allowed them to reorganize life and work to their benefit and that of their shareholders. “Free” services often come at the cost of our valuable personal information, with little recourse for users who value their privacy.

The paid work that people execute on digital platforms like Uber or Freelancer allows owners to challenge hard-won gains by 20th-century labor struggles: workers are reclassified as “independent contractors” and thus denied rights such as minimum wage protections, unemployment benefits, and collective bargaining. Platform executives argue that they are merely technology (not labor) companies; that they are intermediaries who have no responsibility for the workers who use their sites. The plush pockets of venture capitalists behind “sharing economy” apps allow them to lobby governments around the world to make room for their “innovative” practices, despite well-substantiated adverse long-term effects on workers, users, the environment and communities. At the same time, in the gaps and hollows of the digital economy, a new model follows a significantly different ethical and financial logic.

Platform Cooperativism

Platform cooperativism is a growing international movement that builds a fairer future of work. It’s about social justice and the bottom line. Rooted in democratic ownership,co-op members, technologists, unionists, and freelancers create a concrete near-future alternative to the extractive sharing economy.

Making good on the early promise of the Web to decentralize the power of apps, protocols, and websites, platform co-ops allow households with low and volatile income to benefit from the shift of labor markets to the Internet. Steering clear of the belief in one-click fixes of social problems, the model is poised to vitalize people-centered innovation by joining the rich heritage and values of co-ops with emerging Internet technologies.

Ecosystem

Countless platform co-ops and initiatives supporting them have developed rapidly over the past two years. This ecosystem challenges the practices of the “sharing economy” and the often misogynist ‘win at all costs’ culture of Silicon Valley. The cooperative platform ecosystem ranges from alternative financing models, labor brokerages for nurses, massage therapists, and cleaners, to cooperatively owned online marketplaces, and data-protection platforms for patients.

Rather than posing as the solution for the quick defeat of the extractive investor-owned model, successful platform co-ops have already and continue to make a meaningful difference in the lives of those who participate in them. It is a project that people can work on in their lifetime. Uber drivers are organizing in co-ops, designing their own taxi apps. Photographers are offering their work for fair prices on a platform where they’re in charge, and journalists are crowdfunding news portals co-owned by their readers. New decentralized networks are enabling people to share their data with each other without relying on a corporate cloud.

Examples

Here are some examples: Up & Go offers professional home services like house cleaning, (and soon childcare and dog walking) by those who are looking for assistance with laborers from local worker-owned cooperatives. Unlike extractive home-services platforms which take up to 30% of workers’ income, Up & Go charges only the 5% it needs to maintain the platform.

Similarly, the 25% fee that corporate ride-hail (taxi) platforms extract from drivers has led some drivers to create cooperative platforms across Europe and the United States. Cotabo (Bologna, Italy), ATX Coop Taxi(Austin, TX), Green Taxi Cooperative (Denver, CO), The People’s Ride (Grand Rapids, MI), and Yellow Cab Cooperative (San Francisco, CA), among others, have each provided their worker-owners the dignity of a living wage by developing their own taxi apps.

MiData, a Swiss “health data cooperative,” has created a data-exchange which will securely host member-users’ medical records. By integrating this traditional health data with emerging data streams from FitBit devices and personal genomic services, MiData aims to out-compete private, for-profit data brokers and ultimately return the control and monetization of personal data to those who generate it.

As some open-source projects find it hard to pay a dedicated development team, the funding platform Gratipayprovides a free subscription-based patronage infrastructure for developers of such ventures. Gratipay provides credit-card transactions at-cost, subtracting only the processing fees from users’ subscriptions. Tools like Gratipay are at the core of the platform cooperativism ecosystem; they expedite the work of other projects.

Join Us

The Internet can be owned and governed differently. The experiments now already underway show that a global ecosystem of cooperatives and unions, in collaboration with movements such as Free and Open Source Software, can stand against the concentration of wealth and the insecurity of workers that yields Silicon Valley’s winner-takes-all economy. The “sharing economy” is more vulnerable than it appears. New alliances in support of the cooperative platform economy are gaining momentum. They include: “rebel cities,” inventive organizations, policy makers, incubators, experimenters, researchers, educators, and community-builders at the grassroots level. Co-shape our work. Support our network. Get involved.

Photo by Kit4na

The post Platform Coops: an infographic connecting cooperatives with the digital economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.