“It’s not ‘just me’.”
Shaf, a courier based in London, speaks to The Invisible Worker about working for Deliveroo, Uber and Peddles during the height of the Covid-19 crisis.
Words: Cat Gough
“It’s just — you’re out all day, and there’s nothing going on — you know, you feel down.” Shaf’s voice falters. The courier is speaking to me on his phone, pacing around the East End of London, wheeling his bike by his side. Normally, Shaf wouldn’t have time for a call like this: he’d be on the way to his next delivery — part of a relentless relay — bolting between food outlets, glass fronted offices and flats around the city. Shaf is one of the capital’s fleet of food couriers. You might catch sight of him gracefully weaving through static traffic, zipping around all ends of the city, trying to make the next drop off. But that would be in ‘normal’ times, before the shutters went down on London’s food industry, and his working hours were decimated. Shaf would usually be working for six or seven hours, but today, it’s dead; only a few small restaurants are open for delivery.
For the few jobs he does find every day, crossing the city has become almost surreal for Shaf. It’s the desolate emptiness of the streets, the pronounced sound of birdsong in the most unexpected places, the hastily boarded up shopfronts, with bodged “we’ll be back soon” notes sellotaped onto their windows. Not many places Shaf would normally pick up from have stayed open throughout the pandemic. For couriers who are paid ‘per drop’, only for deliveries made, not the time they clock in and out, this means a crippling reduction in take home pay. “I’m only working two hours sometimes.” Shaf says. “Basically, at the moment, everything has just stopped.” It’s been like this for weeks, and Shaf’s capacity to subsist is waning. “I’ve got a phone bill to pay, I’ve got home broadband to pay, and a bunch of other stuff that I want to pay, but I can’t, there’s no money coming into the bank.”
In around 2016, Shaf took his first courier shifts. Having worked for years in supermarket chains, he became frustrated with how keen his bosses were to infuse even the most junior staff members with corporate principles, but at the same time, were equally reluctant to offer their key workers regular hours and a stable wage. Shaf wanted to regain some agency, and job security. Something “which they couldn’t offer,” he told me. So he quit, and turned to the relatively lucrative gig economy. His first weeks as a courier saw him making money very quickly. “I used to work like twelve hours every day for six days a week. I used to work a lot, and I used to make a lot of money.” For the first time in his working life, the energy he channelled into his work was equating with enough money to keep him afloat, and to put some savings aside.
This was a temporary kind of stability. Over the past few years, gig economy platforms have repeatedly reformed pay structures for their workers. Shaf recalls that when he first heard about pay changes, there was no space for negotiation, it came more like an edict. “They basically said ‘look, we’re changing the rates, here’s what’s going to happen’, and done, that’s it.” Since then, couriers have seen noticeably lower wages, and they’ve felt a deeper sense of precarity.
Despite collective action, roving demonstrations and strikes, this approach of reforming pay structures for workers became commonplace on other gig economy platforms too. Since 2016, all new Deliveroo workers began being paid on a per-drop-only basis. If there are no orders, workers earn no money. There’s no basic salary for workers being present on the street, signed in and ready to take orders. Over the past few months, with the majority of the nation’s restaurants closed and orders thin on the ground, couriers have seen punishingly low wages. Those without savings have been plunged into poverty.
“I’ve got myself into this mess.” Shaf tells me. He sees this “mess” as a result of a bad decision on his part: it’s something he believes he is personally culpable for. “The fact is that employed people have a lot more of a safety net. Those that are self-employed are basically thrown out in the streets. You survive or you don’t.” He’s behind on a few of his bills by a few months now, and companies he owes are starting to call his mobile to remind him, asking when he will pay.
Shaf is reluctant to take any benefits from the government. Jobseekers’ Allowance, he says, is nothing much more than an administrative nightmare: “the government have taken apart the benefits system. It’s just not very efficient.” But it’s more than not having the energy to deal with governmental bureaucracy, it’s his political grounding, and his anarchic sensibilities, that mean he refuses to engage with a state support system. He defines himself as being anti-government; he’s learned, from a young age, not to trust those in power. He’s seen time and again that it’s just easier to rely on himself. Shaf has always put some cash aside, which has been keeping him going during the pandemic. But he says it’s “when it comes to what you actually need a card for, that it gets a bit sticky…I’m kind of thinking, where do I go, or…what do I do?”.
Shaf has found himself, in this moment of crisis, turning to an arm of civil society which has long neglected precarious workers like him. Since the pandemic started, it’s been his union — the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain — that has given Shaf the greatest sense of solidarity, and direct support. Counting outsourced security guards, cleaners and foster care workers amongst those they represent, the IWBG is relatively new, but they have become a trusted and popular union amongst low-paid, precarious, migrant workers. Those who the traditional, established unions have so often overlooked. For Shaf, he’s starting to see more and more, that it’s not “just me”. There’s a collective of people like him who are facing the same precarity, who are politically and socially engaged, and are ready to fight for their rights, and he’s starting to see that it’s them he can lean on. Particularly, in times like these.
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