Labouring for the bare minimum

On the exploitative extraction of people by delivery apps

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Imagine how evil you’d have to be to gamify life. To rank your workers and see if they’re deserving of health insurance, depending on the supposed quality and quantity of work. To offer your workers perks such as the “ability to book the following week’s shifts in advance” or personal loans. To offer health insurance as a benefit to be earned and not as a right.

This is from Varsha Bansal’s reporting for Rest of World on Swiggy, the Indian food delivery company that’s changing health insurance cover for workers who don’t meet arbitrary quotas, which have been set, of course, by the company itself. The company divides workers into three categories that change weekly: members in the gold category receive health insurance for themselves and their family, those in the silver receive health insurance for themselves, and those in the bronze receive insurance only in case of accidents. So the incentivisation of work depends on health, and the incentivisation of health on work, while tech app companies uphold¹ the hierarchy and perceived value of lives based on the dehumanisation of labour.

In Sweetness and Power, Sidney Mintz writes about how sugar was used to wield power and how colonial centres grew through exploitative extraction. Even 40 years after the book was published, this concept seems to be going strong, as delivery apps steadily drive towards profit through their own variant of exploitative extraction. And I find it pertinent always, like other writers before and after me, to come back to Mintz’s words, that labourers are reduced to commodities. But these companies refuse to even consider the people who work for them as human beings.

The covid-19 crisis was a reminder of that: those who have limited opportunities and no cultural capital have to settle for the lowest wages while “performing the most vital services”, as Michelle Meagher wrote for Vittles. That their powerlessness has time and again been exploited for the convenience of a privileged few.

Earlier this year, the New York Times published a piece about a Facebook page that chronicles the deaths of bike-riding workers who deliver food in NYC. The title of the piece is harrowing: Food delivery workers, overlooked in life, are honoured in death. It is harrowing because it is true. Jacobin published a piece last year detailing brutal working conditions: in one instance, a full-time delivery driver was urged by his company to deliver food even after he was hit by a car while on the job. For these workers, the hours are long, the pay is dire, and there is no job security. Neither is there any access to toilets, which is, as always, more of a hurdle for women than men. Delivery drivers who approach restaurants to use their toilets are simply denied entry. As a result, women tend to hold it in. Now that it’s also summer, gig workers have to deal with searing heat (in India, it can go up to 40-45°C) that seems to become harsher and harsher with each increasing year.

There is no doubt that the company’s treatment of its delivery workers is abysmal, disgusting, and unethical. But in what seems to be a cruel joke, a few days back the same company announced a policy, through its human resources officer, supporting its corporate employees with pet care and adoption. The announcement, which many speculate is on the course for an IPO, reads that the company has been “committed to fostering a culture of inclusivity and support” for their “employees”.

Which employees are they talking about? Because it is common knowledge by now that food delivery workers (and drivers for other app companies) around the world lack employee status, benefits, rights, and protections they deserve. They are “independent contractors”, “delivery partners”, “delivery riders”, “delivery drivers”… Basically anything but actual employees, whose vulnerability is employed to push them into insecure conditions, into facing harassment, and discrimination. So Swiggy’s example in fact, should not be seen in isolation, but rather as a systemic failing.

Whatever the transformations in the global food system, it is labour that is mobilised — while often compromising safety — at various points in the supply chain. And for this mobilisation to work, supply chains depend on the ideologies of difference: those of gender, ethnicity, citizenship, religion, and caste, for example. Delivery apps have capitalised on this, not by creating a new underclass (or oppressed caste) but by maintaining the already established status quo — those at the bottom, like the delivery drivers, are treated as replaceable and disposable (hence the fight for health insurance), and those at the top, like the corporates, are praised as innovative and geniuses (the privilege accorded only to them and their pets).

Anna Tsing, who wrote a comprehensive paper on supply chain capitalism, used the concept of figuration to show how difference is mobilised within supply chains, how outsourcing the grind to third parties while reducing costs becomes a repeated trope in management, and how there is a global standardisation where the yawning gap between the rich and the poor stretches to the point of no return. In the end, it becomes about cutting labour costs and disciplining the workforce (aka exploitation), even as the company is hailed as a triumph of post-industrial economy. The workers are left to fend for themselves — whether it’s paying for their own medical care or maintaining their vehicles — while the app companies benefit on “mafia margins” as John Oliver described recently.

My point is that work that is skilled is almost exclusively taken for granted and considered — no, rendered — invisible, and is also the locus of negotiation between labour and capital. As consumers and willing participants in the precarity of supply chains, it will do us² no good to ignore this labour while also profitting from it. To pass through life without interrogating these so-called notions of progress, to accept commodities and privileges as they are instead of questioning dystopian policies that endanger the most vital and vulnerable lives, or to disregard the fact that the delivery person handing our food has zero worker rights is reifying the failures of a capitalistic set-up that rewards indifference. A better thing to do would be to care deeply — for each other, about what we consume and why — which goes against the rationale of capitalism. It is vital to remember that our convenience costs someone else, likely those delivering our food as well as small restaurants.

Everyone deserves the dignity of labour and life, moreso the harried food delivery riders who work without equitable pay but prop up the morally defunct tech platforms who devise literal hunger games to justify the former’s life. I’ll end with what Meagher wrote: “Restaurants, and the jobs which surround them, have always been a way out of poverty, especially for immigrants - if they are to survive then we need to look at how those lowest in the chain are treated.” 

Further reading (and watching)

• Jonathan Nunn on our relationship with delivery apps and Callum Cant on the lives of delivery workers.

• John Oliver on food delivery apps.

• Simiran Lalvani and Bhavani Seetharaman on the risks that delivery drivers took during covid-19.

• The illusion of freedom vs the tyranny of gig work by Saumya Kalia.

• Tips from Riders RooVolt and Fair Work on how to support delivery drivers.

• If you have more links to share, more points to add please do!

1. I say upholds and not creates because because this is built upon an already existing system of caste and class.

2. I’m always including myself here; the main point of my all my newsletters is to first and foremost confront myself.