An app to unionize the gig economy

Envisioning an app that creates a decentralised Union for freelance employees of Uber, Deliveroo and co.

As a consumer I’m a big fan of the gig economy. Uber helped me get my newborn home from hospital, I eat way too much takeaway since discovering Deliveroo, Handy helps me keep my house clean and in a bind, I once used TaskRabbit to run a time-sensitive errand.

There is a dark side to the gig economy though: The side of the person selling their labour. A few weeks ago the Sunday Times Magazine had a long article on the gig economy which opens with Joseph McDonald, who was hit by a car when riding his bike for PostMates, an online delivery service. When he followed procedure and let PostMates know he’d been injured the response wasn’t what he had expected. He would lose the $15/hour rate he usually earned by doing at least one gig per hour because he had skipped a job. Because he was in hospital.

Workers in the gig economy don’t get paid holidays, minimum wage, health insurance, a pension, expenses, overtime or redundancy pay. And they certainly don’t organise into unions to bargain for pay.

That’s where “Union – the app” could come in.

Once you’ve signed up for Union and picked an employer you work for, you can immediately chat with others who work for the same company. Everyone pays a small monthly fee which can later be used for financial aid during strike actions, also suggested and voted on via the app. The monthly fee is waived for a few months if you sign up a friend, thus encouraging members to sign up new ones.

This would give gig economy workers the power of collective bargaining via a distributed, self-organising Union. Did Uber just lower the percentage it pays out to drivers? Open the app, propose a strike and have the community vote on it. Hit by a car and Deliveroo won’t help? Strike!

Thanks to the economic crash the number of self-employed workers in Britain is 700,000 higher than it was in 2008, a higher proportion of the total workforce than in any other of the G7 group of the seven richest nations.

The gig economy is one of the greatest tech and business innovations of recent times and it promises to make the consumer’s life a whole lot easier. This shouldn’t be mutually exclusive to those who work in it getting a decent deal and having the benefits employees in other industries enjoy. The gig economy could be just as powerful for workers as it is for consumers.

Someone should go ahead and launch Union – the app.