Plan C on the Logistics Strike of the Precarious Food Delivery Workers

Podcast via https://www.mixcloud.com/PlanCLondon/logistics-strike/

Presentations and participation from:​ ​Precarious (dis)Connections (Bologna, Italy), Plan C (UK), IWGB – Couriers Branch/Deliveroo Workers (Brighton, UK), IWW Union (Bristol, UK), SI COBAS Union (Italy)

Description

By Plan C:

"After the spontaneous struggles that exploded in Deliveroo and UberEats in London over the summer, lots of attention has been paid to conflict in the ‘gig economy’.

The ‘gig economy’ in the UK is relatively small employing about 3% of the workforce, but it could potentially have importance beyond its size. Moreover, the ‘gig economy’ is becoming a site of tensions and struggles across borders. ‘Algorithmic management’, the use of big data to predict demand and allocate resources using automated systems and processes, reveals new forms of organisation of labour that manage exploitation and are likely to spread. Over the next few years it will increasingly reorganize the labor process that creates and imposes on to low wage, migrant and precarious sectors of the workforce.

As a result, there is a chance for lessons to be learnt in struggles against companies like Deliveroo, Foodora and Amazon that can be circulated on a transnational level.

One the one hand, if we continue to learn how to take ‘unorganisable’ working conditions and turn them into a source of power, we could generate the basis for much larger struggles. On the other hand, we need to increase our common understanding of the role that the ‘gig economy’ plays in the wider logistical reorganization of production. As TSS we recognise logistics as a critical site of struggle for a strike that wants to be social and transnational. We also recognised and discussed in previous meetings the diversity of conditions inside logistics." (https://www.weareplanc.org/blog/assembling-the-strike-recordings-from-the-tss-assembly/)