By Mick Brooks, Ealing Southall CLP, personal capacity
A Deliveroo driver, part of the gig economy, has been stabbed to death in London. Jeremy Corbyn commented at the scene, “They are vulnerable. They’re often on zero-hours’ contracts yet the food they are carrying is insured. So the delivery driver is less valuable than the food they are carrying.”
The gig economy is sometimes called ‘the sharing economy’. That sounds nice. In the case of Uber the story goes something like this. A driver is going somewhere in a car with empty seats. Someone else might want to get to the same place. With the wonder of new technology Uber can match them up and put them in touch with one another.
The tale is false from beginning to end. Uber claims it is not a taxi company – it is just a website with attached apps. Their drivers are ‘partners’, not employees. This is handy for Uber as they don’t have to give sick pay or holiday pay. Information Technology, which could be a boon to us all, is being used to super-exploit workers.
Marx begins his discussion of machinery by quoting John Stuart Mill who says in his Principles of Political Economy, “It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.” Marx comments, “That is, however, by no means the aim of the application of machinery under capitalism.” The same is true of new technology in the twenty-first century.
Approaching five million in the gig economy
There are now reckoned to be 4.7 million in the gig economy. Workers in the gig economy are not really self-employed. Some have to wear a uniform and clock in. They are under the hammer. We have seen a proliferation of zero-hours’ contracts, bogus ‘self-employment’ as at Uber and people deemed to be employed by an agency when they are working for firms like Sports Direct.
This trend to casualise employment and the conditions of labour has been given a massive impetus by the capitalist crisis of 2008, which made workers redundant, forcing them to look for work anywhere and reduced labour’s powers of resistance to the bosses. Workers in the gig economy are supposed to enjoy the freedom of ‘flexibility’. As Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom is a word for nothing left to lose.”
Apart from those who work on the streets, such as Deliveroo and Uber Eats cyclists and motor cycle delivery workers, there are people who sell their labour power via apps on their mobile phones. Apart from the IT, how does this differ from the charge-hand pointing and shouting, “You, you and you. Everyone else go home,” to the desperate casual workers on building sites and on the docks in the bad old days?
The boss of a gig economy firm is not really an algorithm. Someone is making a lot of money out of making labour precarious and poorly paid. The two founders of Uber, Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp, are now billionaires.
The creation of a ‘precariat’ as Guy Standing calls it, is not entirely a new phenomenon. Marx wrote of a ‘relative surplus population’ or ‘industrial reserve army’ created by the accumulation of capital with similar insecurity of employment.
Drivers threatened with being de-listed
During the golden age of capitalism after the Second World War full employment strengthened the hand of organised labour and we achieved full-time relatively well pad secure conditions for millions of workers, at least in the advanced capitalist countries. Those days are long gone.
We use Uber, as an example of ‘platform capitalism’.
Uber has a particularly rapacious bunch of bosses. The money they get is never enough. Unions say that drivers in Britain earn as little as £5 per hour, way below the minimum wage, which is now going up to £8.72. Drivers have to work up to 30 hours before breaking even. They are constantly spied on. That’s what new technology can do for the bosses. Passengers are urged to rate the drivers. If you don’t get a high enough rating you will be delisted.
Drivers have to accept 90% of fares on offer, whatever their personal circumstances. Otherwise Uber will just deactivate them. Uber has the whip hand. In fact their drivers are being turned into serfs.
Uber can raise the commission charged on their drivers at will. CEO Brent Callinicos was asked, “You’ve got happy employees, you’ve got happy customers, you’ve got happy shareholders. Why are you going to risk that and push the employees’ salary down 5%? Callinicos replied, “Because we can.”
Uber uses dirty tricks to eliminate rivals. In 2014 the firm made and then cancelled 5,560 fake requests for rides in order to mess up a competitor in the USA. Whenever Uber arrives in a new city the firm tries to challenge the existing regulations on taxi firms to their advantage and give the regulators the run-around. For instance, regulators running a city’s transport will naturally try to ensure that disabled passengers are adequately catered for. Uber will argue it’s not their problem, (“We’re just a platform”) and try to foist the burden of obeying the rules on to other taxi companies.
Gig economy is just the worst of capitalism
The Communist Manifesto declared in 1848, “In proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work extracted in a given time, or by increased speed of the machinery etc.” IT is a mechanism for the more effective extraction of surplus value from the working class in the twenty-first century.
Likewise, the class struggle goes on, however hard the fight may be. In May last year Uber drivers went on strike in Britain, the USA, Australia and Brazil. Strikers unfurled a banner at their London HQ with the slogan, “Billions to Bosses, Poverty Pay for Drivers.”
So really the gig economy is just the worst of capitalism.
January 7, 2020
