Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 <silence>
Speaker 1 00:00:02 Welcome to Failed Architecture Breeze Blocks where our editors share their thoughts on works in progress, urgent matters, and current happenings in architecture and spatial politics. My name is Charlie klas, an editor on failed Architecture's Netherlands team. When the geek economy hits cities across the world in the early 2010s gig, companies promised flexible working hours to their contractors and on-demand ease to their customers. In reality, the companies and their algorithms have induced a monumental change in patterns of work and consumption. Recomposing commercial districts in pursuit of more efficient last mile delivery and Invisiblizing, deeply exploitative and often criminally underpaid labor practices inhibit. To understand this new form of algorithmic management, researcher Callum K took a job writing for Deliveroo, a food delivery startup, founded in the UK in 2013 by Will Shu and Greg Ky, which has since become one of the most prominent new gig companies.
Speaker 1 00:01:00 Writing For Delivery is also the title of a book that Callum wrote about his experiences and the subject of this two-part Breeze blog interview. This conversation involves a discussion of the worker's inquiry methodology and class composition analysis that inspired Callum's research, both of which draw on a remarkable history, stretching all the way back to an obscure 1880 essay written by an equally obscure German philosopher. But first we start with Callum offering a stirring description of what it's actually like to ride for delivery, a job which forces its workers into a relationship with the city that is by equal turns both dangerous and exhilarating.
Speaker 1 00:01:41 It might be nice to talk about what it's doing to people's bodies. I, I suppose there was this part where you were talking about it in very specific detail about the way that the delivery process occurs, at least in the hands of the, of the rider. There's a certain unpredictability about whether or not you wanna take a, a job. And then also there's, as you keep doing it, a repetitive process of learning the city and learning its, uh, mysteries in a sense, it's shortcuts, it's it's obstacles as well. And, um, I don't know. I just thought it was one, one of my really favorite bits of the book was where you talked about it in terms of I remember Crazy Taxi, the video. Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:02:21 It is crazy. Taxi. Yeah. <laugh>. Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:02:23 <laugh>. Um, yeah, no, please. Uh, I don't know. Um, if you want to just, uh, yeah. Talk through the process.
Speaker 2 00:02:30 Yeah, for sure. Well, I mean, so in a shift you'd, you'd go out of an evening and be like, okay, you'd probably have a number in your head. I wanna do this many deliveries. I wanna make this kind of money. I've got these kind of hours to work. You'd go out often. I mean, when I was working, you'd go out and it'd be freezing cold <laugh>, she'd go out and want to start working straight away. But usually because you're heading out at like five or six, it's a little bit before demand has really picked up. You don't wanna miss any of the initial surge, right? So you head out a little early and it's freezing cold and you start to get cold 'cause you've just sat around and you sit at the bench, you chat with people. You hope that you've got enough battery in your lights and your phone because you've, in my case, I've been working all day and I'd only just been back at the flat for 20 minutes or something and come out again.
Speaker 2 00:03:13 You're probably quite hungry. And then suddenly you start getting notifications, right? And you have the app up and you just swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe. You stick it on your bike and then bang, you're like, okay, I'm off to this restaurant. Once you're at that restaurant, at the time, this is now changed. It was only after I collected the order, I'd be told where I was going. And the whole time, you're trying to go as fast as you can. You're trying to save as much time as possible, but you're also trying not to exhaust yourself because you need to be keeping working for, so for a dinner shift, I'd be like, I wanna work three or four hours, right? So if I sprint everywhere, I'm gonna be too knackered to work for the whole time. So I need to hit the maximum consistent intensity I'm gonna be able to maintain for that whole period.
Speaker 2 00:03:50 And there are these periods of very frustrating waiting where like, you suddenly go from being very, very fast to the restaurant and then bang, you're waiting inside and you've got 10 minutes 'cause the burger isn't ready and you're just sat there for 10 minutes unpaid. So it's this constant acceleration deceleration, the constant search for spare seconds that you can pick up because this is the major impact of the peace wage, right? It's that you are doing the work intensification yourself. You are forcing yourself to go faster. Then there's these like wild spikes and dips in adrenaline as you come very close to buses and taxis and you, you're flying up a hill, you're flying down a hill, someone tries to start a fight with you, you, uh, get very angry because you're not making any money, or you're like, oh my God, I'm making really good money.
Speaker 2 00:04:31 I need to make up for that terrible day last week, and I need to do as many orders as possible. So it's like, it's quite a rollercoaster. The guys who do it all the time must find a way to calm down. But I found myself very emotionally stressed by the whole labor process. And what though, there were these moments of like intense enjoyment. Like I, I loved learning the city. It's one of really the best parts of it's for start being on your bike. I love riding my bike. But, um, it was, it was getting to know like where I am at what time and what happens and seeing all the little back alleys and being like, oh, I want to get across the city this way. I can do it this way and be so much faster than Google Maps or whatever, right? Like beating Google Maps became quite an enjoyable thing.
Speaker 2 00:05:07 So the labor processes in a sense, under informed overstressed very fast, then sometimes very slow, then very fast. Again, very variable. And like I I'd say in the book, there were a couple of occasions where I, I got in like full-on screaming matches with people, which is very much, I'm quite a quite chilled person. And um, there's that occasion, the guy who came along the bottle, um, bottle of cider, who like tried to start a fight with me from a van, which is like, I swear to got a hundred percent true that he just like lent out a van and screamed at me in the face, your mom's a cunt <laugh>. And then I was like, oh, fucking your mom's a cunt. And it's like, bizarre. But that was the kinda emotional state you're in. You were like so amped. And I think that, yeah, that whole process, the whole experience of work, you're right on the edge because there's no security, right?
Speaker 2 00:05:52 It is precarious in a very, it's precarious in like an employment sense, but it's also kind of emotionally precarious because you don't know if your time's gonna be wasted. You dunno how valued you are, you dunno how much you're gonna make. So that double use of precarity is, I think, quite emotionally true. It's just, it's, it's shit. And when you have a bad shift, you feel like awful. When, when there's no orders, you're just, why the hell am I here? What am I doing? I remember I did one Uber each shift where I made two pounds an hour and I, I tried to work for four hours on a Sunday, and I did like three deliveries, four deliveries. And it was, it was just pointless. It was like, what, what, what am I doing? Why am I doing this <laugh>? And it can have a really intense impact.
Speaker 2 00:06:28 So I think we underestimate people who've worked most of their life in relatively stable salary jobs, how time can feel when you are like, your time can either be valuable or not. And there is this like constant variability in what your wage rate is. And I suspect that a lot of riders get very desensitized to it over time. Certainly that would be my impression from working with people and talking to people. But it's easy to overlook the fact that that's actually a deeply unpleasant aspect of the work, and particularly the health and safety stuff. I mean, I think it should be illegal for anyone to pay peace rates to people who work on the road, because fundamentally the faster they go, the more money they make. You're already paying them probably below minimum wage after costs. So they need to go really fast to and make decent money.
Speaker 2 00:07:09 So basically you're incentivizing people to helter skelter around a city taking all sorts of risks, mixing it up with taxis and buses and all the rest of it just so that people can get their dinner faster. I mean, I mean, there's many elements of the delivery model that are morally reprehensible, right? But I really do wonder how well shoe the delivery boss sleeps at night knowing that that payment system, that's what it does, right? That's the point of it. That's the whole, that you can't understand it from any other, like that's the point is to make you go fast so that you work really, really hard and you deliver food quickly, but the cost is huge.
Speaker 1 00:07:41 The, um, thing you said about the like excitement, but also the danger of it all. And talking about here as well, the fact that like, it does encourage risk taking. To what extent do you think it, it does turn you into, in a sense, an appendage of the algorithm or, you know, of the, of the app? I dunno if I got the right, no,
Speaker 2 00:08:00 No, no. That's an appendage of the machine is what Mark says in capital. You got it. Perfect. Yeah. <laugh>, it's, it's the relate. I mean, I guess the Marx reference gives it away, but I do think it's, it's a structural relationship where living labor becomes just the, the moving bit on the end of dead labor, right? Or like the feeling bit on the end of dead labor. There are these huge constructions of capital that are basically funded by previous generations of labor that then just like flap us around like the moving bits on the end. And, and this is the nature of, of alienation in a fundamental sense, right? You are turned from someone who has goals and objectives and uh, feelings into, for them just a piece of u uh, unit five, right? Like a bit of a commodity that's been bought and that now has to be controlled in such a way that it produces value.
Speaker 1 00:08:49 I wanted to say about that as well, like the description at the beginning of this. Is it Wilshu or is it just a manager who's being surrounded by
Speaker 2 00:08:56 Oh, it's Dan Warn Dan. Warn Dan
Speaker 1 00:08:58 Horne. That's it. Um, it, it is funny, the, it's a very striking moment of suddenly being faced with the consequence, the like human consequences of what would seem like to kind of bring things a bit full circle, the, the seamless cloud-like nature of, of the way that the platform apps sort of present themselves as this kind of like smooth surface. And then there are these moments where suddenly the, the bodies are sort of piling up in front of them, you know, and it's,
Speaker 2 00:09:27 And this happens all the time with platforms like they run away from, so Stewart obviously the longest running strike in the gig economy had been going on for ages. And um, Stewart set up like a feedback meeting where they wanted to meet with individual workers in Sheffield. And instead a lot of them turned up with their union representatives and said, we wanna talk to you with our union, right? Like, we wanna talk together to you. And they ran away, right? Like there is this thing where like the actual existence of these workers is always quite an unpleasant shock, I think to certain kinds of platform managers that, that really, they want to, they want 'em to remain dots on the map. They don't want them to have physical representation. And this is one of the interesting things about, you could say, one of the more subjective elements of platform labor protest is that it is hypervisible, right?
Speaker 2 00:10:10 That the thing it does is people get together in huge convoys and like roll through the city. Like in Sao Paulo, there was one of these that was like a thousand workers strong that went across a major central bridge. And like you see pictures of it, it's incredible. They do the same thing in Athens. They're not platform workers per se, but the Athens careers, right? These huge protests. And it reminds me a bit of like the demand that comes up again and again in like U V W organizing for justice, right? Or for like Dignity Justice, these kind of words. There is a, there is a, an extent to which platform worker protest is about representing that we are real, we exist, we, we are not dots, we are not like we refuse to be that and together we are powerful. There's like a reclaiming of that experience of being on the street and like traveling together as a powerful experience.
Speaker 2 00:10:50 And it becomes like a festival procession rather than a boring strike rally. And people are like yelling and lighting flares and shouting and all the rest of it. So I think there is that kind of carnivalesque element of the protest is a direct reaction to the fact that that's really what they don't want you to do, right? You are manifesting yourself in a way, like, it reminds me of the French manifest ion demonstration. It's like you are, you are showing that you are real and in person in a way that the app seems to sometimes deny. Maybe just
Speaker 1 00:11:20 Moving on to something else, um, the book starts with this outline of the workers inquiry method that you used in your research. I was just wondering if you could explain what this method involves and a little bit about its history for
Speaker 2 00:11:36 Sure. The term workers inquiry, we actually, we take it from Marks directly, marks in 1880 wrote a, a survey for French workers. It was 101 questions long, incredibly lengthy <laugh>. I don't think we'd ever get away with sending that out now as, as academics. But 101 questions long survey that, that covered everything from like, what is the price of the goods you need to survive in your town to how big is the factory you work at? How many workers are employed there? What kinda machinery is used? Is there a history of strike action? And this survey basically has kind of two goals within it, right? First of all, mark says in the absence of factory inspectors reports, which is what he drew on for the writing of capital, in order to understand the state of industry in France, we need workers to self-report on what's going on in their location.
Speaker 2 00:12:20 So there was a, a kind of a fundamental scientific need for more information to describe the state French industry and to understand what conditions workers were facing. And so he wanted, uh, kind of an auto description, a direct self investigation of what was going on, and he wanted workers to reach out and kind of tell him what was happening. There was also at the same time, a lot of these questions are written in a way that they kind of provoke increasingly more militant responses as it goes on. There's almost a didactic purpose as well as a, an informational purpose whereby people's narratives about their own lives and their own work are one of the most effective ways of communicating about the reality of capitalism, right? Like if you want people to understand what is life like under this system, what's life like for other people?
Speaker 2 00:13:02 To what degree emotions, which I perceive to be purely personal, actually collective class expressions, all these kind of issues, then narratives are a really, really effective way of doing this. So the workers inquiry tradition kind of starts with Marx in 1880 and then continues variously through other currents. You have the Johnson Forest tendency in the US that a group of, uh, dissident Trotskyists who kind of give up on being Trotskyists move to Detroit and start organizing with car workers there. Uh, C l R James is part of that tendency, and they do really incredible work around the, the car plants and writing narratives of what it's like to work in a factory. And there's one of those that's called the American worker, which becomes incredibly influential in France and Italy, where actually in France, it's first translated by a group of people who go onto found something called Socialism Barbri, which is a kind of a dissident, uh, Marxist group again there.
Speaker 2 00:13:48 And they do the same kind of thing at Reno Plants, right? They're looking in conditions of production there. And then also in Italy, uh, it, it becomes very influential in a group we call the ISTs or the apparatus, which are essentially a group of, uh, Italian Marxists who perceive that there is a new industrial reality that workers in the, for instance, the, the Fiat mea Fiori plant in Rin, these workers are somehow more militant than previously, but perhaps in a different way, right? Like when a deal gets announced between the unions and management that they don't like, they riot and they attack the union's offices, right? So there's this kind of disconnect that they're very interested in, like, what's producing this? And you know, they come up with a whole series of things around migration from the south and the creation of new industrial processes and so on and so forth.
Speaker 2 00:14:31 But essentially that tradition carries on up to notes from below and, and ourselves presently and, and organizations like Viewpoint in the US and others. And we are really interested as the notes from Below Collective. I mean, I, I helped found notes from Below a few years ago now, and, um, our real intuition was that work has continued to change very rapidly, particularly, you know, we've gone through, gone through this huge wave of de-industrialization that smashed the British workers movement and then the creation of progressively more and more kinds of new workplaces. And myself, um, Jamie Woodcock and a few others were very interested in what was the new reality facing the British working class, particularly after 2008. Because with 2008, you saw the acceleration of a whole series of longstanding economic trends that really intensified. And there was a kind of a renewed capitalist assault on the working class that, that, for instance, things like precarity, right?
Speaker 2 00:15:19 Like precarity is now fundamentally the norm of the British economy, non-union service workers, the norm of the British economy. A lot of those trends took off in the period directly after 2008. And, you know, the repression of real wages, all that kinda stuff that, that's really that initial period and it goes alongside the remodeling of the state through austerity. So all of which is to say that the works inquiry is fundamentally a method that's interested in investigating work from the work as point of view that's fundamentally partisan that that says, you know, we're not just investigating this because we're abstractly interested in the sociological reality of modern society. No. Instead it's a, it's fundamentally a form of militant inquiry, a way of understanding the world. So as to change it, it often uses methods which are very sensitive. It basically, a lot of sociological methods slightly turned on their heads.
Speaker 2 00:16:03 So for instance, uh, writing for Deliveroo is really an ethnography. Jamie Woodcox working the phones is also likewise an ethnography. But in my PhD we also did semi-structured interviews. We did some group interviews that turned into a Marks reading group with workers that are weather spoons. Like there's all kinds of different ways you can do this. The ultimate goal is always to solicit information about the balance of forces in the workplace that can be useful to workers. And even when, like nowadays, I, I'm an academic, I conduct all my kind of works inquiry stuff from the outside per se. There's this attempt to give ownership and control to workers themselves and, and notes and below we still by and large publish more workers than we do academics, which I think is a, one of the, um, the great advantages. I I also think there is a degree to which, like this was a submerge history of what working class movements have always done, having to understand the workplace, whether it's done under the name of workers inquiry or not.
Speaker 2 00:16:55 I mean, Mao is doing stuff like this where he goes and investigates the peasant movement in who now and starts like traveling around. And that's no particular endorsement of Mao in, in any particularly direct way. But just to say that if one wants to act on the world, one needs to understand it, and workers inquiry is this ongoing current. So I think workers inquiry by participating it we're recovering a sub current or subhi history of what it meant to be a militant in the 19th and 20th centuries. Because often this stuff was the bread and butter of how you went and organized organization requires knowledge, it requires research. You can't really do one without the other.
Speaker 1 00:17:27 So you, you've established workers' inquiry pretty firmly by this point. Um, I suppose, yeah, the, the next question I had was about this approach. You used to interpret your findings, uh, class composition analysis, which is this very geographical, various spatial approach. Maybe you could explain what classical composition analysis is by way of the specific class composition of delivery.
Speaker 2 00:17:52 Yeah, that sounds good. So class composition is in essence the object of investigation when you're doing work's inquiry, what you're trying to find out is how is the class composed here? So the first thing to say is that class composition, it's a set of possible parameters. Fundamentally under this mode of production, there are certain classes that exist in certain relationships, right? So there are bosses, there are workers, there's the capital relation, there's all this stuff that Mark sets out in capital volume one, the point of class composition isn't really to like change any of that, or it's certainly not to change any of that. It's rather to interpret what that means in a specific circumstance. So like how do these big picture forces, how do these big picture social relations become fundamentally embodied in one particular workplace context? And what implications that have for how we organize and, and how we act in that context.
Speaker 2 00:18:39 So we talk about, for instance, that the technical composition of the class, right? We talk about three parts, really the technical composition of the class is the first one. So this would be in production, what machinery is being used, what technology is being used, how does the labor process work? Is it cooperative or is it kind of siloized? Are workers formally employed or are they, uh, self-employed? All the kind of questions that are actually profoundly similar to what Marx was asking back in his questionnaire in 1880, right? A lot of detail about how production is organized and how a group of workers is turned into like a working class involved in a labor process that produces value for capital. Then we also talk about social composition. So this is one of the moves that Notes and Blow made us to kind of increase the emphasis placed on social composition, which is to say that like workers don't just appear at the gates of the workplace each day and then work and then disappear again, right?
Speaker 2 00:19:26 There is a whole life that exists outside of that, which can have profound implications for the balance of forces between classes. So for instance, when a worker leaves work, are they kind of chased down by immigration enforcement at their home address? Or is there a network of food cooperatives that allows them to live at below subsistence wages? One of my favorite examples of this is South Africa, the Golden Diamond mines used to be basically worked on by people who came from the interior of Africa who migrated specifically for working those mines, and they're able to reproduce their labor power at costs far below the cost of subsistence in South Africa. So basically they could get paid incredibly low wages, then go home, and those wages would be worth a lot more. So that created over time the specific relationship between races and, and workers and bosses that led to the apartheid system, right?
Speaker 2 00:20:13 Like this idea that you had to have an external cheap source of labor that couldn't be fully integrated. Then political composition kinda emerges out of the other two. It's like, okay, so given that the labor process is set up this way, given that society is set up in this way, how are workers reacting and what are they doing? So we look for instance at forms of whenever informal, localized small scale resistance tips over into collective organization, that's what we're really interested in. So this is both like the formal stuff of trade unions and political parties, but it's also about whatever form of self-organization emerges. You know, like if 10 workers refuse to do a job to the point that that job stops being done and, and instead that problem is resolved in a different way, you know, that would, that would be a form of organization that we're interested in.
Speaker 2 00:20:57 Fundamentally, the object of investigation here is working class self-organization. It's not official politics, right? So yeah, the, the p in political composition is very much a small p. So what does this mean in Deliveroo? Well, I mean, in the first instance when you're looking at the technical composition of delivery, you see also kind of fact factors jump out at you. One of the major ones is algorithmic management. Right? Now algorithmic management is the term we use to describe more or less the management of workers by relatively complex computer programs that can do things that you would expect a human manager to do normally. So for instance, distributing work tasks or supervising task completion or monitoring how fast you're working, all these kind of things. So algorithmic management isn't just part of the gig economy or the platform economy, but it is a big part of what makes that possible.
Speaker 2 00:21:44 It's kind of the automation of supervision in a way, right? It's like, so historically delivery work, you'd have a human dispatcher on the phone being like, okay, you've just done this delivery, now you need to get to this restaurant and do this delivery. And they would literally be telling you job by job what you should be going and doing instead, that's them replaced by this kind of automated supervisor who does the job instead. So that, that's one of the key factors of the technical composition. In terms of social composition, you might well talk about migration, right? I think it, what's really fascinating often is the fact that a lot of the bulk of work done in these platforms is done by people who are part of the, for, for once of a better term, like the urban surplus population. Like these are people who've been excluded from the labor market because of irregular migration status, racial discrimination, caring responsibilities, a whole number of things that push them outta the standard labor market.
Speaker 2 00:22:32 And they're kind of absorbed by the gig economy, by platforms like Deliveroo. And they form the core of that workforce that does the vast majority of the work. 'cause this is often the only way they have to access a wage. So in particular here, we might think about the role of the hostile environment. A lot of people who work for Deliveroo are renting accounts of people who have the right to work but do not themselves have the right to work. So if you're in a regular migrant and you are renting an account, you say you are getting six pounds, eight pounds an hour, you're gonna be shelling out a reasonable amount of that to the person who actually owns the account and you'll take the rest home yourself. But here you can see how the border regime that makes migrants vulnerable if they don't have a particular status drives down wages, right?
Speaker 2 00:23:10 'cause it drives down what people are willing to accept. It makes them vulnerable to hyper exploitation. There's a, a French theorist called Emanuel Tere who talks very persuasively about how this kind of stuff is like outsourcing to the global south, but without actually geographically moving production, right? You just bring the global south to you, you bring the externality inside it, it goes back to that apartheid example a bit, I think. And then finally, in terms of political composition, well, I mean we see that over and over again, workers kick off in this context. So the, there's the leads index of platform labor protest, which is really, really interesting. A global tracker of protest instance. And you basically see over time this huge ramping up from about 2017 of platform worker protest that comes basically out of nowhere's a really, really pronounced phenomena that we've now seen.
Speaker 2 00:23:53 You know, if you were to track this globally, there were strikes in the u a e the other day, right? <laugh>, like there aren't wildcat strikes in the u a e, but delivery workers, platform workers have been striking there. I remember back in 2017, like I said, I just finished my master's, um, and I'm sitting there in the most boring office job in the world, like one of the real, like brain dead. So you can feel your brain leaking out your ears, that kind of job. And whilst I was sat there 2017, the gig economy is obviously spreading. I'm interested in work, I'm interested in strike action, I'm interested in all this kind of things. And to that point, we hadn't really seen large scale action and then bang out of nowhere in London, we see a really big, well organized strike by both Uber Eats and delivery workers.
Speaker 2 00:24:33 And I say at the start of the book, I rang up a trade unionist I know, and I was like, what's going on? He was on the ground and I was like, this looks crazy. I'm seeing all these videos and stuff like, what, what's happening? And he just said to me, oh, I don't really know <laugh>. Like, this is quite confusing to me. I'm not really sure. And to me that was like, wow. I mean, we thought these workers were disempowered. We thought they didn't have much capacity to self-organize. We didn't think they were gonna, you know, fight for better wages. And yet here they are, you know, there's 500 workers, they've surrounded their boss and they're screaming at him to demand better wages. You know, that's not how industrial relations happens in the UK most of the time. These are big, effective wildcat strikes, clearly led by migrant workers, clearly very militant.
Speaker 2 00:25:11 They're exerting a lot of workplace leverage and they've come out of absolutely nowhere and no one can understands how that happened, right? So from that point onwards, I was like, well, I, I really, really, really want to understand how that process happened, um, because it's potentially remarkable. And I think there is both significance for it as we now talk about, uh, probably 4.4 million gig workers in the UK platform workers in the uk. So a lot of people who work part of full-time on platforms, that's about 15% of the labor market for context. So both, this is an expanding sector that is gonna net in more and more people and we need to understand it. But also when we were talking about algorithmic management, that is categorically spreading, right? And it's spreading really, really fast. Now, I've been saying this for years, like back in 2019 when we first launched the book, I was like, algorithm management, it's spreading.
Speaker 2 00:25:56 And people were like, eh, is it? And then now after the pandemic, it's like profoundly clear. Zoom for instance has a, a fa a facility built into it to monitor workers' zoom calls and rate their effectiveness on Zoom calls if they're doing pitches for sales, right? Like this kind of stuff is coming not only to Amazon warehouses, but also to white collar workers. So I was really interested in seeing this management technology in, in one of its earlier iterations and starting to think through what possibilities offered workers and, and how we could fight back against some of the more negative implications of it.
Speaker 1 00:26:27 That concludes the first part of this two part breeze block. In the next episode, we discuss what lasting impact gig companies have had on the urban fabric and explore the dissonance that has developed between the tech vision of seamless disembodied convenience and the exploitative labor process embodied in the experiences of gig workers themselves, whose capacity for resistance against all lots is truly inspiring.
