Author: CourierCollective

Check out this video from the Alter Summit couriers conference last week in Brussels where Justice4Couriers members were in attendance alongside our international friends! Solidarity!

This was Helsinki yesterday and from now on, the weather gets worse. We couriers work outside and we can handle the weather. But we need break spaces to change, warm up, eat and go to the toilet.

Foodora kicked their couriers out into the cold just before the winter a year ago. As the weather gets worse, the risk of getting sick or into an accident increases, but Foodora couriers have no insurances or sick leave. That is irresponsible of Foodora.

We were happy to present our campaign at the Varjokirjamessut 2018 Shadow Book Fair Rauhanasema this afternoon alongside friends and supporters!

Dear Foodora Management,

We are writing to let you know that we are disappointed we have not received a response to the 5 demands we issued in our previous correspondence on 6th September 2018 and are now considering how to move forward with our campaign. As campaign members, we feel the need to move the struggle to the next level and will call for a boycott of the company from 5th November 2018 onwards.

A number of newspaper articles and publications in favour of the campaign are due for release in the coming weeks and we are gathering a significant audience for our materials. We believe the boycott will gain public support and have an adverse effect on the company’s trading. Furthermore, we would like to inform yourselves that we are in close collaboration with PAM union. We have held meetings with PAM representatives and their legal team to discuss all possible forms of action we can collectively take against the company for its treatment of ‘freelancer’ workers. SAK representatives are also concerned about the working conditions of ‘freelance’ employees at Foodora Finland Oy and their lawyers have publicly commented that new legislation should be introduced to protect workers from ‘false freelancer’ contracts.

We again send our request for a face-to-face meeting with representatives of the company to discuss our concerns. A number of current Foodora employees are actively involved in the campaign and can represent the organisation alongside an independent negotiator. We believe that successful negotiations between workers and the company will lead to improvements for all parties and ensure a successful future for the company in Finland. We strongly contend that a better cared for workforce will provide a more motivated and efficient service for the company.

As winter fast approaches couriers are still left out on the streets with a cut to their pay, no communal space, no accident insurance and rapidly deteriorating weather conditions, we are genuinely concerned about the welfare of these couriers.

Our goal is to enter in to discussions about working conditions with yourselves and, as you have been unresponsive to our previous emails, we feel we need to bring our campaign to the next level.

Yours Sincerely,
Foodora Vastuuseen

Helsinki couriers, both old school and newgen, took part on the Ilmastomarssi – #NytOnPakko toimia climate march to demand meaningful Climate Action.

Climate change is not mitigated by individual consumer choices, but it requires systemic and structural changes. This does not mean that we as individuals should not act, but that we need to organize and to act collectively.

Reducing emissions from transport is one of the ways to mitigate the effects of climate change. This can be achieved by increasing the use of bicycles in private and public transport and logistics. Couriers can transport surprisingly large loads quickly, efficiently and ecologically and are thus part of the solution. We work, and want to continue to work, for ecologically sustainable urban transport.

• 

• 

• 

• 

MP and leader of the Left Alliance Li Anderson supports our campaign.

“I warmly support the Foodora couriers in their struggle for better working conditions. Their demands for a decent minimum wage, transparent shift allocation, work insurance and break spaces are self-evident to those who are employed, but these do not always cover the workers classed as “entrepreneurs” in the platform economy.

In my opinion, Foodora should recognize its couriers as employees as this would automatically solve many of the other demands.”

• 

My name is Ibai and I worked for Foodora Finland for almost two years. My relationship with Foodora began as a Rider on late-2016 with a freelance-based agreement and in mid-2017 I became a Rider Captain with an employment contract up until I switched to another job at the end of last month.

I want to start by expressing that I have a bittersweet taste towards the ongoing Foodora campaign. On one hand, it hurts me deep to realize how a company to which I am grateful and to which I only wish the best must be taking a hit with the campaign. After all, It provided me a way to make a living by biking around, which is something I really like, and I made a few good Friends in the journey, many of which are still working in Foodora. On the other hand, I am very happy because the deteriorating working conditions of “false freelance” messengers are finally becoming a matter of public concern that will need to be addressed.

Even though the working conditions of the freelance messengers have never been pink at the pink company, their progressive deterioration has been more than evident over the past years. Moreover, the recent payment model restructuration has decreased the salaries of the freelancers, leaving especially the car drivers on a precarious situation that goes beyond the limit of what is morally acceptable.

Foodora Finland started running some couple of years before my involvement on the company. It all started as a locally managed start up with a Finnish CEO. All the messengers, which were named as Riders, had permanent employment contracts. These messengers enjoyed the working benefits bound by any employment contract, such as occupational insurance and health care, holiday- and sick leave-pay or double Sunday pay, as well as many other profession specific benefits such as km allowance, parking benefits, Rider Space with a Bike Maintenance Hub and Equipment Storage Facilities (including bikes, personal items an company equipment), bike and phone maintenance fees or a compensation model for other work specific equipment such as gloves, lights or winter tires.

Foodora Finland was really pink back then, but it was not without fault: the blackhole of this business model was that the remuneration model of Riders was poorly designed. The Riders were exclusively paid on an hourly pay basis, without a delivery bonus that would incentive them to do the orders. This led to an uncommitted workforce that was unwilling to embrace the increasing amount of hourly orders of a company in expansion. The Finnish direction was therefore forced to change to a remuneration model that would incentive new messengers to do orders, and they chose a formula that combined an hourly rate with a delivery bonus. However, instead of changing the remuneration model only, they also chose to make another change; to switch from a regular employment contract to a freelance-based agreement.

Therefore, a company that once started exclusively with employed messengers switched to offer freelance-based agreements to all the newcomers. This was a major move that can only be interpreted as the beginning of the end, since it opened the gate for further deteriorating working conditions on the unregulated far west market of employment relationships that are flag shipped by these false freelance agreements. This game-changing move was executed during times when Foodora Finland was starting to transition from a locally managed “cool&pink” startup to becoming part of a multinational corporation. Nevertheless, the Finnish management on an attempt of being loyal to their original code of offering a fair workforce, committed to maintain many past benefits such as the Rider Space with its Bike Maintenance Hub and Equipment Storage Facilities.

Once the they got rid of the Finnish CEO the integration of Foodora Finland into the multinational corporation was complete. Decisions were no longer taken in the Headquarters of Helsinki, but Foodora Nordics personnel in Stockholm, who at the same time respond to orders coming from Berlin. At this point the deterioration of the working conditions really started to pick up. The employment contracts off all the Dispatchers in Finland were terminated first, outsourcing this workforce to Berlin. Later on, the few employee messengers of the company (Riders with original contract and Rider Captains) were forbidden to work on Sundays, a change that effectively meant a pay cut.

They also started to gradually dismantle the Rider Space: they took away the Equipment Storage facilities first to later on remove the Rider Space with its Bike Maintenance Facilities, leaving the messengers without shelter on winter. Somewhere along the way they also deteriorated their shift allocation system by setting a maximum of 25h/week limit, introducing the Batch System, or making it more difficult to cancel or swap shifts. The flexibility that they always promised that the freelancers were legally entitled to was now severely compromised. They also changed their language to reflect that their messengers were no longer employees but “business partners”, starting to refer them as Delivery Partners instead of Riders.

Nevertheless, the most severe and scariest cut to messengers’ working conditions is the last one. The freelance Delivery Partners were forced to sign a new agreement if they wanted to be able to take shifts in the future and the only thing that was changed of the previous agreement was the compensation model. Sadly, the compensation model was changed downwards.

Bike riders were to get 20 cents more for every completed order, but their new hourly pay was one euro less for Monday to Saturday and a further one euro less on Sundays. Considering that the average order per hour in Finland is less than 2.5 orders/h, the math is pretty straightforward: Delivery Partners now get 0.5€ less on Monday to Saturday and 1.5€ less on Sundays. In what car drivers refer, their pay-cut has even been bigger. Even if their delivery bonus also increased by 20 cents and hourly pay was only decreased by one euro on Sundays, they removed the KM allowance and the parking benefits, which have a huge negative impact in their monthly income.

The scariest part of it all is that there is nothing stopping Foodora to further deteriorate the working conditions of their freelance workforce. Tomorrow they could force their Delivery Partners to sign a new pay cutting agreement since there is nothing stopping them. Many of their freelancers are desperate to work at any cost since they perceive to have little chance to better employment elsewhere. Moreover, Foodora management seems to have little to no remorse every time they deteriorate the working conditions of their freelancers; they seem to have no humanity or empathy whatsoever but tons of indifference to “compensate”. Most importantly though, there is no collective agreement for this profession, neither there seems to be a jurisdiction stopping Foodora from offering freelance agreements to a workforce that on practice operates under conventional employment conditions and not as independent contractors as they claim.

I want to finish by expressing that I wish and hope that the problem of deteriorating working conditions in Foodora will be addressed. I also want to show my willingness to help to try and find a solution as an independent agent that could play as an intermediary to help build bridges between the campaign members and the company management. Finally, I want the society and the decision makers to realize that that this is a problem that goes well beyond the pink company, a matter of legal deregulation that, if not addressed, companies will keep taking advantage since they are born to make money after all.

Today we approached Foodora restaurants to ask for their support and deliver Bread and Roses! We had some great conversations with restaurant staff and managers! As service sector workers we are all in this together #justice4couriers

• 

• 

The phone rings and an eerie voice mimicking a woman says: “Your shift is about to start, please log in and make sure you are in your designated starting area.”

This automatic reminder to promptly start the riding shift was for me the most tangible reminder that couriers working for Foodora and similar “platform economy” companies work under the control of algorithms. While getting a call from a robot urging to start your shift is uncanny, the algorithms control the couriers’ work in more subtle, and more important, ways.

Dispatching, namely the assignment of orders to couriers is done automatically at Foodora. Through the application that the couriers use to receive orders, the algorithm tracks the couriers’ location, average speed, how quickly the courier delivers the food and how much time they spend at the customer. Based on an unknown weighing of these factors, the algorithm assigns a specific order to a given courier.

The dispatcher, who distributes orders, plays probably the single most important part in a courier’s job. The courier plans their own routes, but the dispatcher gives the orders, sets the pace and provides the information the courier needs to do their job. No matter how fast a courier rides or how well they navigate the city, if dispatching does not work, nothing works. Conversely, when dispatchers and couriers work well together and communicate with each other, they deliver orders quickly and efficiently. When the dispatcher is a courier themselves, this cooperation usually works best, because the dispatcher knows what can be expected from a cyclist, how the weather, the load and distance affects the courier.

Foodora has human dispatchers, who oversee couriers in a given city. However, in the working process designed by Foodora, human dispatchers ideally don’t interact with couriers, who should get their orders automatically. Presumably as a cost-saving measure, Foodora centralized its dispatching to Berlin and the dispatchers overseeing say Helsinki know nothing about the city. Thus the dispatchers are not able to help couriers in problem cases and sometimes the results are just plain bizarre, for example when by mistake an order has registered to a restaurant that is in fact closed and the courier tries to tell disbelieving dispatchers in Berlin that the cannot pick it up, because… well, the restaurant is closed.

The biggest problem however is one of transparency. The provisions paid for the order form a substantial part of the couriers’ income at Foodora, and because of this, those who get more orders earn more. The courier however does not know how and why the algorithm distributes the orders to one courier instead of another. Apparently, the algorithm distributes orders to couriers it deems “effective”. I have seen a situation when a fast courier came exhausted with less than ten minutes of their shift remaining to the office where couriers, who had just started their shifts sat waiting for orders. Then a new order came and algorithm assigned it to the fast courier. Why, nobody knows, but in Foodora’s automatic system, re-dispatching is not done.

Similarly, the algorithm classes Foodora’s couriers into four “batches”, or groups, based on their performance (as judged by the algorithm). Shifts are made available in steps to these batches so that the first batch, with the “best” couriers, get first pick from all the shifts, then the next and those in the last batch pick any shifts that might be left. How a courier gets shifts obviously directly affects their income. If one can do only a limited amount of hours, one also earns less. Along with this direct effect, how much and how well one works affects also one’s position in the “batch” and the possibility to get shifts in the future.

In short, the algorithms directly control the couriers’ work and their income, but in ways the courier can only guess. Even if the courier was adept in reading the code and reverse-engineering the applications, the systems are proprietary and not made known to the courier.

Automatic dispatching may be well-grounded in a situation with many couriers, constantly incoming and fast-paced orders. Algorithms, like any technologies, have particular affordances that may encourage particular types practices, but they do not determine them. On the contrary, the algorithms do what they are designed to and within social relations of production that are formed based on human decisions. When non-transparent algorithms are combined with hierarchical and unequal forms of labor as now in the “platform economy”, workers are adversely affected. Similarly, when decisions directly affecting the worker are automated, the actual hierarchy within the workplace is obfuscated and unequal power relations are masked as technical properties of the applications.

This needs however not to be so. Instead of making workers compete with one another over shifts and orders, the applications could be designed to enable greater co-operation between couriers themselves and between couriers and dispatchers. Instead of masking unequal power relations within the companies, the applications, like any other tools, could be designed to foster truly equal forms of labor. We have to change not the applications, but the social relations behind them. And that is what couriers throughout Europe are now doing and we hope precarious workers in other sectors will join us.

Tuomas Tammisto, Helsinki bike courier & postdoc researcher, former Foodora courier & RC

Our Bread and Roses event prompted feedback, which asked about the event’s linkage to the struggles of the feminist movement. The feminist movement has used the Bread and Roses symbolism in various historical struggles for women’s rights. The writer of the feedback asks in what way our event is connected to the struggles of the women’s rights movement and why we have not explicated the linkage. We thank the writer for their support and for their important observation. Hence we want to clarify our stance and use of the feminist symbolism.

We have deliberately chosen to use the Breade and Roses theme in our campaign, because we are not only demanding better pay (“bread”) as well as appreciation and better working conditions (“roses”), but also in order to emphasize that many of the couriers are women (as is typical for underpaid service work), non-binary or belonging to a minority. It is true, that most the couriers are men, but many of them are in an othered position for example, because they have not Finnish citizenship or are not entitled to Finnish social security. With the feminist theme we want to highlight the linkages between different struggles and the need for co-operation and alliances between these. In precarious work, where most of the workers are in a very vulnerable position as they work without any security, intersectional differences become even more pronounced.

The links to the struggles of the feminist movement shows also in the way we operate: the problems of courier work have not been addressed by anybody else, so we have done it by ourselves from the beginning. In our campaign work, we have attempted to achieve equality between all actors, listened to every participant and tried to give every interested person a chance to contribute in a way that suits them best. We have sought to emphasize that experiences are personal and embodied in contrast to talk that is detached from actors.

Our campaign to reverse pay cuts and improve working conditions of precarious couriers and car drivers can be truly successful only in combination with other struggles for equality, because we represent a diverse group of people and want to be acknowledged as such.