Migrant Labour in the Gig Economy The Intersection of Migrant Labour, Platform Capitalism, and Resistance

3 Research Context and Methods

The research findings presented in this chapter focus on migrant labour in the context of platform work in the United Kingdom. This focus is part of a broader research programme developed in the frame of the ERC project SHARE—Seizing the Hybrid Areas of work by Representing self-Employment, conducted by a multidisciplinary research team.¹

The case study was conducted with members of the IWGB, one of the most relevant unions within the UK’s labour landscape focusing on the representation of migrant workers, including those engaged in the gig economy. With its main headquarters in London, at the time of the fieldwork, the IWGB comprised ten branches, representing a diverse spectrum of professions, including but not limited to cleaners, security guards, couriers, care workers, university staff, private hire drivers, charity workers, cycling instructors, yoga instructors, game developers, and logistics workers.

Access to the organisation and the spaces of collaboration were negotiated with members occupying various hierarchical positions within the union. Research endeavours were characterised by an immersive ethnographic approach, conducted mainly in London in two phases. The first ran between March and August 2019, and the second one was planned in 2020 but then postponed to July–December 2021 due to Covid-19 restrictions. Our participatory involvement extended beyond mere observation, encompassing engagement in public forums, internal coordination meetings, demonstrations, pickets, and other public events, thus facilitating both formal and informal interviews. The data collection process was enriched by an extensive collection of relevant documents, ranging from internal communications to publicly disseminated reports, press releases and official statements, all of which enriched our comprehension of the organisational position and dynamics. The interaction during the fieldwork was conducted mainly in English and occasionally in Spanish and Italian. A meticulous transcription (and, when necessary, translation) of field notes and interviews ensured continuous collaboration within the research team. Digitally transcribed texts were regularly uploaded to a remote server, fostering collective analysis.

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¹ This chapter is part of the SHARE project, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 715950).

Employing an inductive approach, our data analysis centred on thematic analysis (Boyatzis, 1998) utilising Atlas.ti 24 software. Iterative examination of textual corpora aimed at identifying recurrent themes, thereby shedding light on the processes of collective organising of migrant and British BAME platform workers. The coding process underwent continual refinement to effectively address our research inquiries, enriching an analysis strategy aligned with principles of collective reflexivity in qualitative organisational research (Gilmore & Kenny, 2015; Schwartz-Shea & Yanow, 2012).

4 Inside the Union

Engaging with Migrant Workers

Organising of migrant workers originated with the very birth of the IWGB union. From the beginning, IWGB organised Latin American precarious cleaners, then extended its offer of representation to other low-paid migrant workers. A bottom-up approach to migrant workers’ collective organising shaped its activities since it began, gaining experience and skills that have constituted the union’s strengths over time, allowing it to expand its reach to other precarious workers, both migrant and non-migrant, in the gig economy and beyond.

Despite the experience accumulated over the years, which allowed the union to consolidate knowledge and practices, at the time of the fieldwork, the obstacles and barriers in organising migrant workers were still present. As the union’s BAME officer claimed:

So, my kind of stance on it is that the labour movement altogether in the UK has routinelyfailed minority ethnic workers and labourers… IWGB was made as a splitfrom Unison because they weren’t willing to organise the Latin American working at the university. This is very much at the heart of what IWGB was. A lot ofthe other unions have just completelyfailed on this front. And so, you know, my kind ofrole in this small institution is to make sure that we stay on target as we kind ofgrow. You don’t lose that part of what we’re doing because like the work itselfis very, very hard. It’s not easy, especially with the language barrier. I feel like lots of our activists do not speak English and others who’ve been mismanaging that, but it’s something that has to be overcome in order to make the whole thing happen.

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The narrative of the origins is a well-known story shared both by the historical representatives of IWGB, who directly experienced the events in the year following its creation, and by the new union representatives who recounted with precision and pride how the union in which they carry out their activities came into being. This is the case of the trade unionist quoted below, who coordinated all branches of the union. Indeed, during the interview, he emphasised the importance of maintaining the same orientation adopted from the beginning.

When we started it was just cleaners and harder outsourced workers in University London sites. These people were unsatisfied about the work done by Unite and Unison and they were fighting for their rights… Unions are used to have their proper procedures in place to look after migrant workers especially and thefinal point with Unison came when IWGB officials, or let’s say people who would become IWGB, were about winning elections… They declared the elections void, so these people said that was the end with Unison and they decided to join that really recently created union, the IWGB that had comefrom a very similar background. They started running campaigns through IWGB, a big one was the campaign of‘tres cosas’.

The campaign cited by the interviewee refers to the claims made by a group of Latin American migrant workers in 2012, but which had a direct precedent in the wild strikes initiated in 2011 by the workers themselves without the permission of the union to which they belonged. The campaign demanded three things recognised as basic rights for workers: paid sick leave, paid annual leave, and pensions. In the narrative of IWGB members, this campaign was obstructed by Unison—the reason why, as the interviewee recounted, migrant workers decided to join IWGB, a union created only one year earlier. The experience of that campaign shaped the union’s attitude and types of interactions with migrant workers and strategies to support their collective demands. The experience gained from the success of the ‘tres cosas’ campaign was then extended to other workers, such as private security guards, to the inclusion of platform workers:

Normally I’m in charge of organising cleaners—outsourced migrant cleaners were one of the main group of workers that created IWGB in London—and security guards as well. We have two branches. One is called

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Cleaners ofFacilities branch; the other one is called Security Guards branch. So, my job is to organise them in their workplaces and then try to see what problems today they have and see ifwe can make them members ofthe union. Depending on what is the issues, if they say collectively, maybe launching a campaign to improve the pay and conditions of work. Sometimes many… normally most of these people that we represent, they are migrant workers who are on precarious conditions ofemployment. So that’s what we do.

The experience gained in traditional areas of precarious work proved to be fundamental in defining the set of skills and practices that, to a large extent, spilled over into the context of platform work. Indeed, the difficulties and opportunities experienced returned in new forms and combinations. In the beginning, it was not simply a matter of skills and practices, but of building and maintaining a certain reputation combined with the ability to make the effectiveness of mobilisations visible. Moreover, as another unionist and rider met during the fieldwork claimed, interlocution with workers started from extremely distant perspectives. The ability to listen to their claims requires time, energy, and a significant capacity to adopt the workers’ point of view to include their perspective in a collective bargaining framework that the union can adopt.

This is something I really want to challenge as a union. I think is really fundamental: it is about personal agency. I work full-time, like, but I want the agency to not work when I want. And recently we’ve had a campaign with the cargo drivers. Some of these guys working, were working like 15 hours a day, six days a week, but they still want free log in. And you can’t like… Ifeel like to a degree, okay, it seems like a fiction. It seems like they are wrong… At some point you’ve got to be like, you’ve got to hear what they’re saying. They just want those hours per week to be their choice when they stop working. And Ifeel like, okay, we could try and… You know, you can make the argument that actually, this is ridiculous, and you should have more formalised employment. At the same time, you got to listen to…

In the words of the interviewee, therefore, the union should make constant efforts to consider workers’ voices, especially in labour contexts with a significant migrant and BAME component. The expectations, trajectories, and claims of workers may in fact be quite different from those that a traditional trade union might act for, considering the needs of its standard members. In this case, the meaning of not wanting to be hired as an employee—linked to the ambiguity of digital labour platforms in requesting documents, income maximisation, and the flexibility of having multiple jobs—needs to be analysed not only in the framework of standard employment to which a series of rights are granted, but also considering the alternative strategies of migrant and BAME workers, which may be linked to life trajectories that do not overlap with those of standard employees represented by traditional trade unions.

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The first meeting with platform workers showed the complex dynamics that underpinned the process of collective organising of migrant workers. As the unionist interviewee recounted, the first contact opened a phase of dialogue aimed at finding common points of coordination and action:

Our general secretary was who started first organising cleaners when he was a student. But couriers we had no absolute idea […] Couriers came to us and they said, “we have seen what you have done with cleaners and we have seen the high-profile campaigns you have organised and please can you do the same for us?” And I think they have really evolved with the support of IWGB, trying to design actions trying to be eye-catching because they can make a big difference. But when they came to us, we have essentially asked few basic questions: how many people you have, who is interested, and we usually ask for a dozen people […], what were the main issues in their workplace, and we focused on one or two issues and we heavily campaigned those. With couriers we played that playbook and tried to be as ambitious as possible as well being focused on what workers wanted really to achieve because I think it’s why we stand out along the times in the union movement because ofour willingness to respond to radical requests and that’s the thing on what couriers were interested in.

A window of opportunity thus opened thanks to the initiative of the food-delivery workers themselves, in search of a trustworthy interlocutor able to listen and interpret emerging needs, which were not entirely codified. It is for this reason that in this first phase of their activities of collective organising, collecting, analysing and understanding demands for claims were the basis for defining the first strategic actions capable of orienting the energies of the protest, concentrating on issues widely shared by workers. The testimony reported here by an IWGB unionist also underlines the need to assess the existence of a minimum number of workers interested in playing an active role in organising protest actions. On the one hand, this aspect granted the union the possibility of developing a solid dialogue with a group of workers that could act as an intermediary with the wider ethnic groups of workers potentially interested in supporting protest actions and awareness-raising campaigns. On the other hand, it guaranteed the possibility of actively supporting a group of workers by sharing practices and tools for a collective struggle that in a medium-term perspective could become an autonomously manageable heritage:

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They said, “we are all just very vulnerable, not treated really well, there is a lot of bullying in the work”, so we look at those issues and we wanted to meet that challenge although we haven’t addressed all the issues in the courier industry. Something’s changed since they joined us because we have got the pay rises, we have managed to get victories in legal cases, and we have managed to get union recognition that is quite out oforder in courier industry. There are therefore some paths really typified on how we build an early campaign and now they are expanding on different branches and some ofthem are becoming national as in the case ofDeliveroo workers and Stuart too, that is another food-delivery company, 10% owned by a French company.

The long process of negotiation and organisation of activities promoted by the independent union in coordination with migrant and BAME workers thus generated in the medium term a process of structuring and consolidation that, as mentioned above, allowed for the progressive settlement of specific branches in the areas of the country where the practices of protest-claims were developed. Indeed, if the starting point was the city of London, where the food-delivery platforms began their activities and where a significant number of workers were concentrated due to the size of the urban area, over the years other cities, such as Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool, and York, became the sites of experimentation of collective forms of organising food-delivery workers’ claims and actions.

Recruiting Migrant Workers as Unionists

Along with the continuous attempts at dialogue and support of spontaneous protests raised among migrant and BAME platform workers, another equally important element for inclusive paths within the union was the capacity to foster forms of legitimacy and protagonism creating spaces of recognition for migrant workers who then became union representatives, facilitating the involvement of other workers with the same origins. This was the case, for example, with a Brazilian rider who, after responding to a call promoted by the union, was selected to become a reference organiser for the Latin American community.

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I did the application for the job, so they called me… made the interview. That was it. But, before, never had any contact. Ofcourse, I saw them, in the news or I saw them in some protests but was never really attractive enough for me to chase them.

The case presented above was part of a long-term strategy in structuring the organising activities promoted by the union with the support of specific projects for large-scale campaigns such as the one promoted by the International Transport Federation (ITF), which allowed the IWGB to cover part of the costs for new union positions. The presence of different migrant communities from many countries represented at the same time a great opportunity and a significant element of complexity, as reported in the interview with a young Italian unionist who for a couple of years contacted and organised several groups of food-delivery workers with migrant backgrounds in London, at a time when digital labour platforms were consolidating their market:

Organising riders in London is very complicated; there are migrants from many different countries with very different backgrounds, e.g. North Africa, Brazil, India, Bangladesh. Between these groups there are a bit of differences due to language barriers… theygenerally don’t understand each other, therefore they don’t speak to each other. Moreover, the variousforms of mistrust in our society are also reproduced within these communities even if they are marginalised communities. There are however dynamics of exclusion or fractures that, for example, involve undocumented migrants. We as unionists must be aware of and take into account these fractures when we try to organise migrants. Sometimes it happens that a Black Caribbean British uses the same stereotypes as a white racist against Brazilians because he is a little more English than the others, while otherfractures occur in other groups with respect to religious orientation. We have to look at these barriers, trying to deconstruct them, but it is not a job that can be done right away; that is why we initially look at homogeneousgroups by migrant background, trying to find so-called natural community leaders.

Identifying natural community leaders therefore represented the first step in organising food-delivery riders with a migrant background, creating the possibility of building a shared path where frictions within the group could develop over different ideas with respect to shared goals, but without the further challenges caused by linguistic misunderstandings, negative stereotypes, or ethnic prejudices.

One of the strategies adopted was to focus attention on the specific dynamics taking place in the workplaces of people approaching the union.

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It was at this level that opportunities for representation could develop and the reasons for collective organising could take root. The union’s strategy therefore consisted of seizing these opportunities and supporting central figures for mobilisation who could become reference persons for the union itself, acting as collectors of claims and referents for workers involved in campaigns and protests.

I was personally a member ofIWGB, since 2018–19, since I started this self-employed thing, because I have always been member of a union since I’m working here in the UK. So, when I became a self-employed, I became an IWGB member. I was a silent member, being a union member, but not spoke a lot. […] For the last two years, I was just a silent member. Then what happened? To now, when we are struggling there, yeah, I was really involved in the protest since the beginning and now I’m the reference union rep for the protest: The company’s bad behaviour has harmed me directly and I am now openlyfightingfor my rights. We already had a meeting with Ryde when Ryde took over. So, Stuart was workingfine but theygot this new company called Ryde. Yeah, this is a brand-new company. We never heard about it or something. And onlyfew people knew the guy, who was very close to the managers. This is what happened: they send us an email on the day when they started saying ‘there is this new company is going to come for a trial. This will have a minimal effect ofyour deliveries’ and all that thing. I said ‘okay’, but what they said was not true and our deliveries decreased significantly despite they promised the equivalent of 40 working hours per week.

The interviewee, who was of Pakistani origin, played a strategic role from the very first days of the protest, acting as a contact person for IWGB (then becoming the leader of the protest), explaining the reasons for the discontent and the misbehaviour of the company which, after an initial promise to improve working conditions offering a substantial increase of the daily deliveries per worker, decided instead to reduce the assignments to some of them, thus significantly reducing their earnings expectations. All this happened through a change ofthe company in charge ofsupplying the labour, without any kind of transparent process of information and involvement of the workers. This case, discussed in more detail in the following section, is extremely representative of IWGB’s ability to seize the misconduct of digital labour platforms as an opportunity for active involvement of the migrant and BAME workers in union activities.

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5 Beyond the Union

IWGB’s activities largely revolved around specific campaigns focused on emblematic cases of ethnic discrimination and misconduct involving migrant and British BAME workers in the context of platform work. During the fieldwork, we had the opportunity to directly follow the protests against Ocado Zoom, a company focused on developing automated technologies for logistics management. To test new technologies, the company developed an experimental food-delivery service that had as its centrepiece the warehouse showroom where the new technologies were on display for potential customers from all over the world.

As one of the protagonists of the protest told us in a long interview, the company enticed self-employed workers, predominantly of Pakistani and Bengali origin, who were contracted exclusively through service providers Ryde and Stuart, to invest in electric or hybrid vehicles.

They wanted to use only polluted free vehicles, zero carbon miles and all that things, which is obviously not true because after that public campaign, after they made their advertisement and all that thing, what they’ve done, they promised that they were going to give us 40 hour per week, which is a full time in the UK, 40 hours per week guaranteed, if we switch our cars to the green. So, most of us bought this car using our own expenses. I had money in savings, and I sold my other car. And mix it up. And I bought this car with my money safe for my house. I want to buy my house, I’m going to get the mortgage, so that was my money, but I thought, OK, I can own this money back within a year, ifthey guarantee me 40 hours money every week. And now I am messed up because my plan was to buy a house next year or end of this year. Now I’m totally messed up. I have this car. I can’t do anything with this car. Like, how can I own money now? I don’t have a job, they literally made us all jobless. They offered me £10.85 an hour, minimum London wage, if I had applied to one more company they chose to manage the fleet. As self-employed, I was earning like £15 an hour. Even sometime more.

Promises of a substantial increase in delivery orders, equivalent to 40 working hours per week, were made as part of a ‘green transition’ initiative. However, shortly after these workers had invested their savings in environmentally friendly vehicles, the new management, succeeding the previous one, abruptly dismantled the plan. Most delivery orders were redirected to couriers using diesel cars and motorbikes, rendering the investments futile. To make matters worse, the company implemented a fire-and-rehire tactic to cut costs under the new contract, subsequently reducing payment per delivery. The perception of having been misled and the mockery of being in the position of earning less than in the previous period, together with the company’s refusal to acknowledge its mistakes, led to a campaign to denounce such situations of discrimination. This situation was even more unbearable because the company was playing on ethnic divisions to prevent workers from uniting.

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On 30 September 2021, a protest against this misbehaviour took place in West London near Acton Town. It formed part of a broader coordinated effort to condemn the jeopardisation of jobs held by BAME key workers. Commencing at the Ocado Zoom showroom-warehouse, which had previously been the starting point for couriers, the demonstration saw workers, IWGB members, and activists marching through the area. Public speeches were delivered by workers, activists, and various supporters, including the founder of the Nocado campaign and the local MP for Ealing Central. This protest not only addressed the grievances of Ocado Zoom workers but also provided a political platform for an alliance between IWGB and the Archway and Tufnell community in London. This coalition managed to oppose Ocado’s plans to construct a 24/7 depot near Yerbury Primary School, raising concerns over urban development regulations and the adverse effects of increased pollution and noise on the local area.

During the demonstration, a spokesperson for the Nocado campaign highlighted the exploitative practices of the digital labour platform, its failure to uphold ethical standards regarding worker treatment, and its disregard for environmental concerns. The collaboration between IWGB and the Nocado campaign remained steadfast in the subsequent months, with both organisations offering mutual support in their respective initiatives. Additionally, a message from Black Lives Matter London, expressing solidarity with the workers’ struggle against Ocado, was read aloud during the protest:

[…] We can’t be with you in person, but we are with you in spirit. We have a message we want to send to all workers. We want to make you know that we all stand in complete solidarity with you in your struggle against Ocado and we look upon your action here today with admiration and respect. We also have a message for Ocado bosses if they didn’t know already, we want to make our position crystal clear: we are sick of sick treatments ofblack and brown workers on the hands ofOcado and we completely reject that political gesturing. It is absurd that Ocado pretends to be an ethical brand to be committed in equality and diversity. You cannot be selectively anti-racist. That’s not how it works […].

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