At what price? Labour politics and calculative power struggles in on-demand food delivery

Notes

1. This number was communicated by the General Manager of Deliveroo's German market during a closed multi-stakeholder workshop on fair work in Berlin's gig economy, held on May 27, 2019.

2. See https://roocommunity.com/distance-based-fees/.

3. This article focuses on wage calculability rather than wage transparency, given that the latter generally pertains to situations in which workers receiving a fixed salary or hourly wage seek information about wages offered by competing employers or to other employees within the same firm (e.g. to guard against wage discrimination - see Estlund, 2014). In contrast, wage calculability becomes pertinent in situations where workers receive manipulated (i.e. dynamically priced) piece-rate wages, preventing them from estimating how much they will earn at the end of the day.

4. While struggles to counter calculative asymmetries are also fundamentally about gig workers' data rights, given that such asymmetries are predicated on platform-governed data extraction and monopolisation, the riders I engaged with did not understand their efforts through this lens. Although they did collect delivery data that served as input for their improvised calculative activities, these activities were narrowly geared toward uncovering and reproducing the ‘formula’ behind Deliveroo's distance-based fees system and were not connected to a critical data rights strategy. For a reflection on data extraction as a critical site of capital accumulation and labour organising, see Van Doorn and Badger, 2020.

5. See e.g. the #PayUp campaign led by the worker organisation Working Washington: https://payup.wtf/.

6. For an explanation of this term and its origins, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickwrap.

7. E.g. the food delivery platform DoorDash includes a ‘desirability’ factor into its calculation of order prices, taking into account the number of times an order has been rejected by previous couriers. https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/22/20828742/doordash-tipping-policy-change-drivers-earning-more-money.

8. “Jaako” is a pseudonym. All Deliveroo couriers interviewed for this study gave their informed consent in advance of the interview and all personally identifiable information has been removed from the resulting transcripts. A total of 30 couriers participated in interviews during the fieldwork in Berlin, which took place between October 2018 and June 2019. Couriers were recruited on the street, in restaurants (while waiting for an order) and online via WhatsApp groups. Interviews took place in public locations. Interviews were semi-structured and open-ended, lasting anywhere between 50 and 140 minutes. Couriers were offered a €15 gift card as compensation for their time.

9. According to my observations, Berlin's Deliveroo drivers are usually first- or second-generation immigrant men with a Turkish, Indian or Pakistani background. They tend to be older than riders, who are commonly in their mid-twenties and most frequently hail from Eastern and Southern European countries (in addition to a Latin American contingent). During my fieldwork I experienced a deep division between riders and drivers, which is a topic beyond the scope of the current analysis but something I hope to return to in future publications.