REAL LIVES Gig economy A GIG FOR
Low pay, long hours, no rights. The gig economy is set to snowball. We investigate
In the gig economy – also known as the ‘collaborative’ or ‘sharing’ economy – you don’t go to music shows. You don’t share, nor do you collaborate. You offer a service through a faceless, disembodied middleman, often for less than the minimum wage.
Deliveroo is one such middleman in the gig economy – it’s a tech company that’s developed a phone app and pays cyclists to deliver food to customers from any restaurant – at the tap of a button on their smartphones.
The cyclists, or Roos as they’re called, get paid £1 per delivery plus tips as well as an hourly rate of £7 an hour, 20 pence less than the minimum – perfectly legal because Roos aren’t technically workers; they’re self-employed suppliers.
Before Jay*, 22, became a Roo, he was a university student. He’d finished in the summer and – down to his last £20 on his student overdraft, nearly £1,500 in the red – Jay realised he needed a job, and needed one fast.
“Deliveroo got back to me fastest,” he said. “I applied on a Sunday, had my interview on a Tuesday, first shift was Thursday and I got paid the next Monday. “Really the only qualifications are owning
a phone and a bike, and knowing how to ride it.”
Jay is among the millions of Britons in this so-called gig economy, valued at £7bn and expected to massively expand to £140bn by 2025. But those who actually work in it are getting a vanishingly small slice of the pie.
Unite member Stefano Fella, Labour Research Department
researcher,
attributes this explosive growth of the gig economy to what’s going on in the wider economy now.
“You’ve got record numbers of people in work, but many are under-employed and have given up on regular, full-time jobs,” he explained. “There’s much less scope for a job for life. So there’s a demand for jobs in the gig economy because it fills in the gaps.”
It has filled in the gaps for Jay, who has another part-time job at a bookshop, but still he says the work is hard and he only just scrapes by.
And it’s not just students or recent graduates who’ve been recruited into the gig economy – Deliveroo’s army of couriers comprises parents trying to support children too.
18 uniteWORKS Autumn 2016
“I know one guy with two kids who works six days a week from 8 to 5 in a warehouse, cycles home, eats something quickly, then logs on to both Deliveroo and UberEats [another food delivery service] from 6.30 till 9.30 pm. He only has one morning off each week.”
One of Jay’s other colleagues got run off the road by teenagers in scooters, dragged into a bush and held at knife point.
“He didn’t have cash so they just took his phone,” he explained. “He had to borrow one of ours to call up rider support to finish his shift. He never came back afterwards. If you don’t have a phone you can’t work.”
Tech companies such as Deliveroo operate a business model
that
makes millions by cutting traditional employment costs, Fellas explains.
As none of the Roos are technically employees, the company has no need to offer sick pay, holiday pay or other entitlements. And they slash overhead costs by, for example, requiring Roos to provide their own equipment.
“It’s a win-win for the company in this case,” Fella said.
LIFE?
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