Deliveroo is the future
Every day thousands of Deliveroo riders scurry around Britain’s streets. I am one of those Roos.
Every day thousands of Deliveroo riders, or ‘Roos,’ scurry around Britain’s streets on bicycles and scooters to bring us burritos, ramen, roast dinners, craft beer, Belgian waffles, and whatever else your stomach desires.
I am one of those Roos. I’ve been doing it for more than a year and it’s one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. During every shift, you’re going to different restaurants, talking to a variety of people. You’re cycling dozens of miles a day, which keeps you fit and increases your life expectancy, assuming you manage to avoid a collision with a HGV. The best part is it’s entirely up to you when you work. You can put in twelve hours a day, seven days a week, then go on a three month holiday — all without having to ask anyone’s permission.
There are downsides, though. Much of the equipment Deliveroo riders are given is substandard, which often results in accidents or near-misses. I once had a box full of Vietnamese food go flying off the back of my bike after a connecting bolt snapped. This could have posed a major problem if I’d been on a busy road instead of in a deserted park. Another incident involving a faulty phone holster led to my mobile being run over by, not one, but two double-decker buses. Miraculously, only the screen and the camera were damaged, but the emotional trauma lingers to this day.
Speaking of trauma, confrontations with aggressive motorists are inevitable. One particularly heated exchange took place after I was almost run over by a man who pulled out of his driveway without looking. He was furious, believing that I was going the wrong way down a one-way street. I tried to explain to him that, on this particular road, the one-way rule did not apply to cyclists. However, explaining the intricacies of contra-flow traffic systems is not easy when you find yourself confronted with someone threatening to ‘break your neck.’
Deliveroo is constantly in the news, one of the manifestations of a much derided gig economy. The most prominent controversy is whether Roos should be given benefits like holiday pay and sick pay. Currently the company gets away with not offering these kinds of benefits because it classes Roos as self-employed contractors rather than employees.
Some nights the demand for takeaways will be higher than others. On slower nights you can see packs of bored-looking Deliveroo riders loitering on street corners, waiting for their next order. It’s pretty much how The Wire would have looked if all the characters had stopped selling drugs, and opted to hawk gourmet burgers and katsu curries instead.
It’s usually during these periods of downtime when I am approached by concerned citizens, tapping me on the shoulder and asking about my working conditions. They’ve invariably seen something about Deliveroo on the news the night before and want to speak to a real-life victim of gig economy exploitation. I almost feel bad telling them that I’m pretty happy with the way things are.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe in workers rights, industrial action, the whole shebang. I boycott my local cinema, the Hackney Picturehouse, because they refuse to pay their staff the London Living Wage. But Deliveroo is a different type of business.
More traditional employers offer regular hours and pay, with some prospect of career progression. Deliveroo, on the other hand, offers its employees ultimate flexibility. Many Roos (though admittedly not all) are students or work other jobs, and value that flexibility above all else.
This is where I feel public discourse is missing the point. Innovators like Deliveroo are expected to mould their business models to fit our economic system — a system which says everyone should work five days a week, and by doing so earn enough to sustain themselves in an absurdly expensive world. Perhaps it would make more sense to change our economy to fit the Deliveroo model.
The phenomenon of ‘underemployment’ — people who have jobs but are unable to work enough hours to constitute ‘full-time’ work — is on the rise. In a world where we accept extortionate living costs as the norm, underemployment is a problem. But if the cost of living was brought under control, we could embrace underemployment.
I envisage a world where everyone works half as many hours but pays far less for basic needs such as shelter, food, and transport.
In her excellent Ted Talk, renegade economist Kate Raworth calls for an end to the dominance of market forces and an increased reliance on what she calls ‘the commons.’
In the past, not everything was privately owned and controlled. There were public plots of land where anyone could grow their own food. People used to get their drinking water straight out of rivers. While that latter part doesn’t sound ideal in a contemporary context — especially if you’ve ever found yourself submerged in the Thames — surely our current system of paying for all of our food and water represents a step backwards, rather than forwards?
I propose we take the same attitude towards food which we take towards health care and create a national food service that provides three meals a day to anyone who wants them. If the government can afford to spend a billion pounds on the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, it can manage to whip us up a few lasagnes from time to time.
Revolutionising the housing system might be a bit more tricky, but more publicly-owned housing with strict caps on rent would be a step in the right direction. Simply put, the state should be directly providing the necessities that people need to live, leaving the private sector to cater (quite literally in Deliveroo’s case) for luxury goods and services.
Diego is from Spain and has been rooing in London since November 2016. He’s happy with the wages he receives from Deliveroo but thinks that overstaffing means there are increasingly fewer orders to go around. “It’s ok, I’m happy with the payment but we are too many people, I think.”
Higor moved to London from Brazil two months ago. He usually roos six hours a day for around £40, which he thinks is fair. His biggest concern seems to be the cost of living in the capital. “The housing is very expensive, the transport is very expensive.” Diego agrees. He rents a room for £500, which he says could get him an entire flat in front of the beach in his home town of Barcelona. “For me it’s crazy. But it’s London — I can’t change it.”
Maybe we can change it.
If we stop letting the free market dictate the cost of living, £40 a day might start looking like a genuine living wage. This may sound like Marxist hyperbole, but companies like Deliveroo would still be able to prosper. People will always want treats like takeaways, regardless of how much free food is on offer. Who knows — if our rent was cheaper, maybe we’d all eat out a little more often?
Another option is we simply handing out money. Finland is currently trialling a scheme called universal basic income, handing out cash to citizens to help with the cost of living. Vice News recently interviewed a Finnish man who used to spend his time jumping through administrative hoops in search of employment. Juha Järvinen now spends his days adorned in a top hat and multi-coloured suit, crafting shamanic drums and wooden trapezes in his living room, while his children frolic around bizarrely shaped pieces of homemade furniture.
The wares of this charmingly low-rent Willy Wonka may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but they’ve certainly made the world a little bit more weird and wonderful.
Imagine if we were all unshackled from the burden of labouring just to survive. We could volunteer in charity shops, paint pictures, or make Youtube videos about tax avoidance or deforestation in the Amazon. We could enrich our society, in defiance of a status quo that says, ‘if you aren’t getting paid for something, it’s not worth doing.’
If we start questioning some basic assumptions about what ‘working’ should look like, there’s no limit to just how rich we could all be.
Photos by Oscar Ward (Twitter: @OscarGWard)
