Is the gig economy fair?

Gig work is on the up. Whether you’re a hairdresser or a courier, casual work is now the remit of Silicon Valley, where traditional employment structures are discarded in favour of apps and algorithms.

For some, it is an attractive additional income stream. One Friday night, Deliveroo cyclist Callum, 23, is locking his bike up outside Wagamama on the Triangle. He has no complaints: he likes the exercise and the flexibility, which fits around his other part-time work in the media.

Callum relishes the flexibility and the exercise of working for Deliveroo

But Deliveroo workers – or self-styled “Roos” – are a community divided. For those without the safety net of a different income stream, the gig economy is a precarious form of employment, often inadequate in terms of pay and protection. There are people who work seven day weeks and still can’t make rent. It’s a growing issue in Bristol.

Tonia Novitz, a professor of labour law at Bristol University, first started looking at gig economy issues when she was asked to advise on a BBC investigation around practices involving “self-employed” Amazon delivery drivers in 2016. The drivers were not only working potentially illegally long hours, jeopardising both their health and safety and that of the public, but were often paid well below the national minimum wage without employment rights such as holiday pay and sick pay. Her conclusion – that those drivers should be classed as employees – appeared in a BBC InsideOut documentary.

From there, she began to investigate how best to regulate this new world of work. Around the same time, the government commissioned the Taylor Review to do the same. But the review did not go far enough, according to her analysis and that of other Bristol University labour lawyers.

“It would be wonderful to have a piece of legislation that simply says these people count as workers and they get default rights,” says Tonia. “But instead we’re seeing very complex legal changes being proposed that we’re concerned will not quite have the same effect.”

Instead of recognising that gig workers are employees, not self-employed, legislation in the UK has been a piecemeal process which falls short given the huge growth of gig work. There have been legal cases claiming workers’ rights for Hermes couriers and Uber drivers, and also concerning Deliveroo workers trying to get statutory recognition of the Independent Workers Union of GB (IWGB), established in 2012 in the hope of bringing gig workers together to lobby for better working conditions. This is especially important given that many gig workers are often unable to speak to any human in the management structure of the multinational businesses they work under. However, the union is not yet statutorily recognised on the basis that Deliveroo workers are not real workers.

Why? Because Roo Foods Ltd, which owns Deliveroo, made a subtle amendment to their contract of employment by inserting what’s called a substitution clause, which means you can provide someone other than yourself to carry out the work you are contracted to do. To support this, they found a few workers to confirm they used the clause. That was all it took to class workers as self-employed rather than properly protected employees.

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These grievances are far from limited to Deliveroo alone. Across the gig economy, workers are deemed to be self-employed, stripping them of the basic employment rights that cause unwanted friction in the fast paced, tech fuelled gig market. This creates a cycle of dependency where people work more for ever diminishing returns once costs are taken into account. Worse, gig workers find training for more secure employment an impossibility as they take more and more gig work on to survive.

It is a different story on the West Coast of the US. Last year, California’s Assembly Bill 5 ruled platform workers are not self-employed but normal employees, a revolutionary decision for hundreds of thousands of workers.

In the UK, such decisive legislative action remains a distant dream, despite Deliveroo drivers in Bristol protesting many times last year by collectively logging off the app over pay cuts and working conditions.

Romero is one of many Brazilian Deliveroo drivers operating in Bristol. He’s been in the city for three years and plans to spend a further two here before returning to Pernambuco to open up a shop or bar with his savings. He works twelve hours a day, seven days a week and yet is dismissive of the protests. If they do not want the work, he asks, why do they take it?

Romero does not agree with the protests against Deliveroo, but then his hourly salary here is much higher than in his native Brazil

Waldeir, another Brazilian Deliveroo driver, believes he knows why. “A lot of Brazilians come here. One pound is five reais so you can save money especially if you don’t have insurance.”

Ricardo Buendia, a doctorate student at Bristol University studying collective bargaining in the gig economy, also thinks the exchange rate is the main attraction. Deliveroo might not pay much in a British context, he says, but the pay is still much better in their home countries.

There is also the low barrier of entry to gig work, Tonia says. In recent years, the growing negative sentiment towards migrants as the result of factors like the Brexit vote may be forcing migrant workers towards gig work even if they are here lawfully, because there is no interview process.

People are also opting for gig work simply because there is worse work out there. Ahmed, a 38-year-old Deliveroo driver waiting in McDonalds, has done fifty and sixty hour weeks in warehouses under intense pressure to work hard. In comparison, Deliveroo is luxurious. It also works for him because he is part of an ever more globalised world – living between Bristol and Sweden means he needs a job that is easy to pick up whenever.

Waldeir is less positive about working for the delivery company. Bristol is becoming a “mini-London”, he says, in terms of attacks on drivers and motorbike and cycle theft. On top of this, he has battled pay cuts, the increasing number of delivery drivers and longer deliveries.

“When I started work in Bristol three years ago there were forty drivers, now I think there are one thousand. And before you just drove two miles around the city centre, now you are paid less to drive five miles away.”

Waldeir went to the strikes last year but does not plan to go again. “Every time you lose a day and nothing happens to the problem. Deliveroo is too good because I can do my time. In the mornings I stay with my baby and today I’m stopping work at 2am. It’s like heaven and hell.

“I am trying to go to Brazil and visit my father. To save some money and to pay my bills I need to work seven days a week.”

What needs to change, then? “They need to pay more, I think the first thing is that. And stop the illegal guys, that is the big problem here. I think for every ten guys, seven are illegal. Every guy who is legal here complains about the same things but the illegals are happy,” he explains, as they take home more due to not paying taxes or insurance.

Taken from a video of an alleged Deliveroo driver’s motorbike on fire. Drivers feel that Bristol is becoming more dangerous for them as time goes on

At midnight that same night, Waldeir sends Bristol24/7 a video of a stolen motorbike on fire in Fishponds, although the footage cannot be verified. He was studying law when he left his degree and moved to Bristol with his wife and son to work for Deliveroo. He is disillusioned by the lack of community between the Brazilians who work tirelessly here to save money, and saddened by his earnings and his working conditions. Was the move worth it? “Não valeu a pena,” he replies in Portuguese. No, it wasn’t worth it.

Photos by Marta Nellija Broka.

Read more: Bristol’s Deliveroo staff demand better working conditions