Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy by Callum Cant

Author:Callum Cant
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781509535521
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2019-11-10T16:00:00+00:00

Gender

The workforce at Deliveroo was overwhelmingly male. The ratio of male to female workers in Brighton must have been something like 15:1, judging on observation alone. For those few women, participation in our informal workplace culture could be difficult. One of the very few female workers in the city once came to the zone centre and was immediately hit on by a couple of teenage male workers. Understandably, she avoided the square from then on.

Within a bounded workplace, women would have three choices: either you fight back, put up with it, or move on. The struggle of women over the centuries who made the hard decision and went for the first of these options has been a colossal force for equality and justice. As well as the formal history of the fight for suffrage, there is a deeper history of working-class women’s struggle against oppression within their own class, as well as against patriarchal bosses, politicians, and institutions. You only have to read the accounts written by British sociologists in the 1970s and 1980s about the collective culture of women on the shop floor to see that this struggle has a long history.7 However, within a decentralized and unbounded workforce where women were in the tiny minority, there was another option on the table: just avoid other workers. That option proved to be the most attractive for many women workers, thereby maintaining a gender dynamic which carried through to our later organization. The zone centres were our main recruiting hubs. If female workers began to avoid them, then we were unlikely to recruit them to a WhatsApp chat, and if they weren’t on our WhatsApp chats, then we couldn’t communicate with them. These chats themselves were also very male-dominated, and sometimes played host to sexist ideas.8

So, it’s not a surprise that our union meetings were almost exclusively male. The dynamics of gender within the workforce at Deliveroo are a textbook example of the mechanics of class composition theory. The collective failure of male workers to always deal with female workers with respect (social composition) combined with a decentralized labour process (technical composition) to produce a form of worker self-organization which failed to represent the workforce in its entirety and was weaker for it (political composition). It’s hard to know much more about the experience of women workers specifically, as a result. Were there womenonly WhatsApp groups? Did women workers develop specific organizing methods to combat sexual harassment? I didn’t know, and still don’t know. In other cities, women played a much greater role in their union branches. The London IWGB couriers’ branch was led by women, and women also played an important part in the later development of organization in Glasgow and Southampton. The dynamics that applied in Brighton were not universal – but they were the only dynamics I experienced.

Deliveroo workers in Brighton ended up in the job out of a combination of positive choice and negative economic pressure. They often knew that, if they left, they might struggle

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