Sheffield couriers lead pay fight

Submitted by AWL on 11 January, 2022 - 3:33 Author: Editorial
Sheffield couriers

On Monday 10 January, food delivery drivers in Sheffield working for Stuart Delivery (a contractor serving JustEat) resumed their strike action. Organised in the IWGB union, Sheffield couriers struck for three weeks in December 2021, breaking records with the longest-ever industrial action in the so-called “gig economy” in the UK. Strikes spread to Chesterfield, Blackpool, Huddersfield and Sunderland.

Having given their employer a fortnight to respond to their demands, the Sheffield drivers have resumed their action with a number of large and well-respected picket lines at McDonald’s restaurants across the city.

The Sheffield drivers’ tactic is to stop deliveries on JustEat (Stuart’s client) from McDonald’s, their largest customer, while allowing workers to continue earning elsewhere. Estimates of the value of lost business at McDonald’s so far range from £220,000 to £1 million in Sheffield alone.

Stuart couriers are striking against a pay cut. Stuart has slashed the base rate of pay per delivery on jobs under 2.5 miles from £4.50 to £3.40. Drivers in cities where this new pay structure has been in place for a few months report losses of around £100-£150 a week. On top of chiselling away payments for returning cancelled orders and paid waiting time, over the last two years Stuart has implemented changes that have turned them from the best-paying employer in the sector into “just another UberEats”, as one disgusted courier put it.

Stuart claims that because they are now paying a mileage bonus on top of the base rate, most drivers should not experience a drop in their earnings. But drivers point out that even were this true, it would be damning: “pay staying the same” is another way of saying “pay cut”. Because of Stuart’s model of phoney self-employment, drivers are obliged to cover the costs of running and insuring their vehicles (including special food delivery insurance); and they get no sick pay, holiday or pension. With 2022 set to see big increases in the cost of living, stagnating wages are not acceptable. That’s why the union is demanding £6-per-delivery base rate plus mileage, across the board — a rate which Stuart already pays car couriers in London.

At the end of December 2021, student activists organised an action at JustEat headquarters in London, bringing together students from campuses around the UK. In Sheffield, the Student Solidarity Group has been central to organising support for drivers’ picket lines.

In the first week of 2022, Stuart management organised meetings with drivers in Sheffield and Blackpool, two centres of the strike. They hand-picked drivers to come to an invite-only “focus group”, whose location was only revealed by text message at 10pm before a 9am start. When union members and their supporters turned up to the venue in Sheffield (the Jurys Inn) with signs reading “Negotiate Don’t Manipulate”, “Why Meet in Secret?” and “Let Drivers Choose Their Reps”, the Stuart executive exited via the fire escape citing fears over “safety”, cancelling the meeting with a panicky text message.

The meeting was eventually reconvened, but crashed by elected leaders of the local IWGB branch. Even the hand-picked drivers sternly cautioned Stuart that they had to improve pay. Stuart has promised to propose changes by 14 January. In the meantime, Sheffield drivers have restarted their action, and strike meetings are being convened in Blackpool, Chesterfield and Sunderland, ready to pile on more pressure ahead of the 14 January deadline.

As of the morning of 11 January, Stuart has announced an overhaul of the system for drivers uploading their renewed insurance policies. This has been a longstanding demand of the union and was raised alongside pay in this strike, in a letter sent by IWGB couriers in December. Possibly this means that the company intends to offer crumbs in order to sap strike momentum over pay.

This strike is historic. It is the longest, biggest, and best-organised piece of direct action to take place in the so-called UK gig economy. In recent years various groups of couriers in one city or another have organised short stoppages in protest at disrespectful treatment, violence, or low pay. But Sheffield drivers have been able to take their action to the next level because since summer 2019 they have been patiently building a formal union organisation, with the help of activists from Workers’ Liberty.

The IWGB union now has nearly 100 members in Sheffield, making it one of the chief bastions of gig economy organising in the UK. The sophistication that workers have developed in Sheffield, with regular planning meetings, a strike fund, elected leaders, and connection to the wider Labour and socialist movement locally and nationally, allowed their action to sustain long enough to spread nationwide, creating a crisis for a major gig economy platform. This level of formal organisation has also allowed drivers to build links across many different national groups and communities.

The union’s materials are distributed in three languages (English, Arabic and Tigrinya), reflecting the diversity of the workforce in Sheffield, which is no longer a barrier to solidarity.

If it is successful, this strike could be an opening wedge in a broader drive to organise and civilise the “gig economy” across the UK. Many drivers in Sheffield ask on picket lines: “when are we going to do UberEats?”.

The kind of activity that has gone into creating this strike and this union, with socialist activists drawing the broader community and labour movement into supporting organising drives in unorganised sectors, is a model that should be replicated elsewhere, as part of an urgent, society-wide push to organise the unorganised and rebuild the power of the working class.

• Couriers’ strike fund
• Send a letter to Stuart from here

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