Words and Images by Glyn Owen. Saturday 9th January, 2021
Marc Jelly describes what it has often been like to work as a courier over the last 9 months: “It was hard — it really was. You’re out in the streets, you’re out in the cold — restaurants making you stay outside waiting for your order. And it could be raining and hailing — obviously, we live in Wales, we don’t really have the best of weather on a good day.”
Throughout Coronavirus pandemic, couriers have worked continuously, delivering food and goods to people stuck at home. In doing so, they’ve helped keep us all safe.
But these workers have not only had to contend with the already precarious and often low paid nature of their jobs, they were thrown into Covid with barely any protection.
“We’ve worked throughout the pandemic with little to no PPE from employers,” says Marc. “Uber provided some maxforce sanitizers, but then they had four or five weeks shipping.”
In November last year, many workers decided it was time to get organised, and they set up the first courier branch of IWGB in Wales: IWGB Couriers Cymru. Marc Jelly is now the branch chair and with fellow activists, has quickly set about trying to improve life for workers.
The current destabilisation of the UK’s labour market is forcing many facing a loss of earnings to supplement their income, if not replace entirely. The surge in demand for delivery services has triggered a proliferation in app-based delivery work. With employment opportunities so few and far-between, particularly for young and migrant workers, having immediate access to income and a flexible work schedule is driving more and more people to join hundreds of thousands in Britain already in this type of work.IWGB Couriers Cymru members. Photo, Glyn OwenIWGB Couriers Cymru members. Photo, Glyn Owen
Despite significant financial gains over the Covid period, many platform companies continue to operate at a loss. Their strategy is not to generate profit immediately, but instead to outlast market competitors until the sector becomes a monopoly. This model relies on grinding infrastructure costs to the bare minimum, which is passed on to workers through precarious working conditions. The bogus self-employment status of couriers allows platform companies to navigate around employer obligations, such as providing holiday pay and sick pay. During a global pandemic this has had obvious consequences, by putting delivery workers in the impossible position of having to choose between protecting their health, or earning a living.
While platform companies insist that workers are content with the trade off between flexibility for security, many people are critical of industry practices that have prompted prominent Greek economist, Yanis Varoufakis, to brand this type of system as ‘Techno feudalism’.
The financial boost that platform companies have received due to the pandemic have been significant. London-based company Deliveroo recently posted their annual financial data showing an operating profit for the first time in the final half of the year in the majority of the regions where it operates.
The IWGB (Independent Workers of Great Britain) is a union that was set up in 2012 for the purpose of supporting gig economy and insecure workers. During that time it has led various high-profile campaigns, achieving victories for workers through direct action and strategic litigation in sectors where mainstream unions have appeared to be less effective.
One of the more prolific sectors of the gig economy where the IWGB has been organising within is amongst app-based workers through the IWGB Couriers and Logistics branch, which launched in 2015. This sector is considered to be notoriously difficult to organise within due to the fragmentation of the workforce, while for some workers fears that union activity could cause disruption to their precarious livelihood also plays a role in discouraging union participation.
Platform companies have also been pushing back against worker organising, such as in 2018 when Deliveroo cynically altered their terms and conditions to exploit a loophole in the law to deny delivery riders in north London worker-status and the right to collective bargaining representation by the IWGB.
However, over five years the IWGB Couriers and Logistics branch has built a strong network of riders throughout the country, with several local branches now active. Recent ongoing strikes and boycotts have been organised by courier branches in York, Sheffield, Wolverhampton and Nottingham against unjust terminations of Deliveroo riders and poor treatment of riders by restaurants. The ongoing agitation by delivery workers now appears to be contributing to a shift in culture for platform companies, as seen by the recent announcement from Just Eat that it plans to introduce hourly pay, pension contributions, holiday pay, sick pay and maternity or paternity pay for its couriers.
Despite being in its infancy, IWGB Couriers Cymru has already been improving conditions for delivery riders in areas of the country.
“There’re plenty of people that actually want the same things that us; fighting for better pay, better respect for workers within the businesses that we deliver for. And obviously, we want to ideally take on the bigger bosses and get a fair process — and make it better for everyone, really,” says branch chair, Marc Jelly.
IWGBCC’s initial achievement came from a confrontation with a KFC restaurant in Pontypool. Following incidents of long waiting times for rider pick-ups, as well as inadequate safety measures relating to Covid, the branch took to social media — a tactic the union has found to be particularly effective in encouraging companies into taking action. On the back of the grievances being more in the public eye, a dialog was opened between the KFC’s management and the union branch. This resulted in the restaurant agreeing to work closer with riders and the union. Marc now hopes this will set a precedent for further outlets in Wales cooperating directly with couriers:
“That’s basically a massive thing, because it’s probably the only branch around Wales that agreed to do this,” explains Marc. “So it’s a massive, massive thing that management are keen to actually work with a union. They’re listening to us — they’ve changed things already that we’ve spoken about in the meetings. And so it’s great to have them on board. It’d be great to obviously go then and speak to other franchises of KFC around Wales that can actually say, ‘Well, okay, they’re working with them, and maybe we can work with you.’
“If other KFC’s and other branches and franchises, whether it’s KFC, McDonalds, [or] Subway, and they see that one branch is already working with them; the couriers are happy; the staff are happy; there’s no issues; there’s no complaining; there’s no mass waiting times, and everyone’s kind of getting on with everything, and it’s creating a system that works, then, hopefully next door is going to follow suit.”
A major battleground for the IWGB during the pandemic has been their fight for workers not classed as employees to be provided with PPE. This ultimately led to a judicial review, when in November it was ruled that the government failed to properly implement EU health and safety directives and must now extend health and safety protections to gig economy and precarious workers.
“Within [the] Wales branch we took on one of the suppliers here and we won for PPE. It’s kind of a low key one, and people kind of overlook it and think, ‘Oh, okay it’s a bit of sanitizer and a bit of blue roll’. But that makes a difference to us. We’re out there seeing potentially hundreds of people a day and risking our lives and we’re not really getting the justified pay for it either. A lot of us are working 12 to 14 hour shifts sometimes. And the pay isn’t all that good. Don’t get me wrong, we enjoy the job. It’s nice to go into different places. It’s nice to see different people. But then obviously you think, well, we deserve the right pay, the good conditions and same as everybody else gets.”
In response to the recognition of delivery workers as ‘key workers’ during the pandemic, the IWGB launched the ‘Clapped and Scrapped’ campaign at the beginning of November to highlight the poor conditions couriers continue to work under. Despite working on the ‘front line’, they received no hazard pay from platform companies and there has also been inadequate financial support for riders who could not work on the basis of health reasons.
Some riders I spoke with said that if anything they have been earning less during the pandemic, despite the increased demand, as thousands of new couriers have been brought in to ensure that higher demand for deliveries is met.
“You need to sit down with the boss,” one rider in Cardiff told me, “with people that have been doing the job for over three years. Because the change over the last two years — it’s fucking ridiculous. You can go out there every day and you’ll see 30 new riders, because they [companies] know they can flood the market with riders.”
“For them [companies] it doesn’t matter if there are 40 riders or 20 riders,” another rider in Cardiff explains. “At the end of the day, they’re still getting the same money so they might as well just have 40 riders to ensure that every job will get completed.”
“We were labelled heroes by Deliveroo,” continues Marc, “and then the way they rewarded us was by onboarding an extra 15,000 people to join the network. So instead of going, ‘you guys are heroes, here’s a pay rise,’ or ‘here’s a bonus,’ instead — nope, ‘we’re going to lower fees’, ‘we’re going to onboard 15,000 people on the network’, where there isn’t really enough work as it is. Although, don’t get me wrong, the work has increased slightly throughout the pandemic, but overall, the more riders there are you’re in the same predicament. Ultimately, you are going to be earning less.”
As well as bringing attention to being undervalued for the work that couriers have done throughout Covid, one of the main focuses of the ‘Clapped and Scrapped’ campaign has been to challenge platform companies on unfair terminations of their platform accounts, which in the majority of cases delivery workers are unable to appeal.
In November, a cross-party group of over 60 MPs signed an Early Day Motion that had been put forward by MPs from Labour’s Socialist Campaign Group calling for a fair terminations process for app-based workers.
MP for Cynon Valley and member of Labour’s Socialist Campaign Group, Beth Winter, who was a signatory on the EDM, told me why she thought the motion was needed.
“Throughout the Covid pandemic couriers and private hire workers have been working extremely hard providing invaluable services to people and organisations,” she said. “Yet they are subject to some of the most precarious and exploitative working practices, low pay and unsafe working environments. This is totally unacceptable and must be challenged.”
She says she fully supports the courier industry’s Covid-19 ten demands because they will secure proper working conditions that protect the physical and financial well-being, safety and security of staff.
“Trade Unions play an essential role in empowering workers…I very much welcome and support the establishment of the first IWGB couriers branch in Wales,” she says, before signing off with : “Unity is Strength. Solidarity!”
Andrei B, who lives in Cwmbran, decided to become a member with IWGB after a short period of working as a courier in the Newport area. After losing his job in hospitality due to the pandemic, the father of two began delivering for Uber Eats, but was put in financial difficulty because he found it impossible to communicate with the company.
“You are sending them messages, but they always send you generic replies,” says Andrei. “It’s very difficult to engage with them. So at that point, I said, okay, enough is enough. I’ll get the union involved, because it is a joke.
What should have been a simple and straightforward process of switching bank accounts on the delivery app, resulted in Andrei being unable to access several weeks worth of earnings.
Following IWGBCC bringing attention to the situation through twitter, Uber Eats began to engage more adequately, but still failed to resolve the problem.
“They are totally, totally 100% concerned about their image and how they look to the public, but they don’t care what is going on in the background,” thinks Andrei. “Now I’m convinced — I know for sure for them, we are just numbers — we are nothing more than numbers.”
The matter was then escalated by IWGBCC to the main IWGB Couriers and Logistics branch who took on the case, and the five-week ordeal was able to be resolved within a matter of days.
“In this five weeks, I’ve heard of many, many riders in my situation. I’ve even got Twitter messages, private messages, saying ‘yeah, I’m in the same boat for three weeks waiting’, says Andrei. “We even discovered a few cases in the union but they didn’t say anything because they didn’t want to be a burden. So I think there are a lot more riders in my situation. That’s why I don’t want to let it go just like that. ‘Okay, my account is sorted, fine.’ No. I know that there are a lot more riders out there. They are in the same boat as I was. I want to work to fix this. So that no one goes through the same process.”
Recently, a worker-run initiative called the Workers Observatory has been set up in Edinburgh with support from Scottich Trades Union Congress (STUC) so that people in the gig economy and other precarious work can discuss the many challenges facing them and to come up with actions to improve working conditions.
General Secretary of Wales Trades Union Congress (WTUC), Shavanah Taj, is hopeful that similar initiatives can be repeated here in Wales:
“I think that the work that’s going on in Scotland is really interesting. I think that they’ve been much better than other parts of the UK where we’ve got affiliates to the TUC organising those workers. I’m working quite closely with colleagues in the STUC to see how that plays out, and whether we can emulate some of some of their successes.”
What this trend hopefully points towards is more union involvement with gig economy workers from mainstream unions, and a greater amount of cooperation between different unions and workers during a time of mass economic turbulence in Britain.
“You’ve got the BMA and you’ve got the RCN, neither one of those are affiliated to the TUC, but we have got a cooperation agreement between us,” continues Shavanah. “….so I think that it is really important for trade unions to have some kind of cooperation between them, they may have the internal differences, they may have they’re redlines, but I think particularly at a time of crisis, we’ve got to be in a space where we can work together. “
Many other worker actions have also been taking place recently in Wales, such as by Taxi drivers who are being supported by Unite Wales to launch a campaign calling for the Welsh government to provide better financial support for the Welsh taxi trade. Nurses have also been campaigning for a 15% pay rise across the UK, which saw hundreds of nurses turn out in Swansea, Bridgend, Cardiff and Merthyr to take part in demonstrations in July, in actions that were supported by multiple unions.
“We had all of our political representatives, saying key workers are really important; all the drivers; people who work in warehouses — they are extremely important,” continues Shavanah.
“All of these Amazon workers, all of these people are really important to keeping our economy going, and whilst the rest of us are working from home, we’re being furloughed, these are the people who carried on working, but what protections and what measures have been implemented or introduced? Where’s their Christmas gift? I can’t see one. So I would say that the only way that things are going to change is by more workers joining trade unions. For us as a trade union movement, we need to be ready too.”
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