The UK’s Longest Gig Economy Strike

In 2015, GeoPost/DPDgroup, an international subsidiary of La Poste, gave €22 million in funding to new start-up Stuart. GeoPost/DPDgroup would go on to take full control of Stuart in 2017 but in the interim years set up a number of companies in France, Spain, and the UK. Records show that the UK’s Stuart subsidiary, Stuart Delivery Limited, was incorporated on September 23, 2015.

Stuart Delivery Limited provides textbook gig economy work — “independent contractors” delivering food (and other goods) to customers, with orders mediated via a platform. Since incorporation, the UK subsidiary has grown significantly. The most recently available data shows that revenue more than doubled in 2020 alone. Stuart compensated their CEO Damien Bon generously for his services, handing the magnate a 964 percent pay rise — an almost 2 million pound pay increase.

Meanwhile, couriers contracted through Stuart Delivery received a unilateral 24 percent cut to their base rate, down from £4.50 to £3.40. The Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB), which represents couriers at Stuart Delivery, claims this represents a loss of around £700 a month. The company refutes this, claiming that new “multipliers,” that is, increases to the rate that couriers can charge for their service based on demand, will more than offset any lost earnings.

In response to these attacks on their wages, IWGB and its members launched a strike on December 6, 2021. The industrial action, still ongoing, is the longest in UK gig economy history and has spread to numerous cities across the North of England.

While public pressure has intensified and MPs have thrown their weight behind the couriers’ cause, Stuart is still refusing to engage with the IWGB. Their CEO is reported to have told MPs that he believes the couriers’ tactics are wrong. The company remains steadfast in its refusal to reverse the cuts to couriers’ pay. On the other hand, couriers’ strategic (not blanket) withdrawal of their labor, with different approaches in different cities, means that they are prepared to fight this out for the long haul.

A Quintessentially Neoliberal Tale

Take a step back from the specific details of this fight and you are left with what is ultimately a very familiar story: a multinational company that uses borders and different regulatory regimes to exploit workers and make a quick buck. In this case, the chain starts with La Poste, which is 100 percent owned by the French state, goes through GeoPost/DPDgroup, and ends up at Stuart Delivery Limited.

While employment through La Poste in France is mostly unionized, Stuart couriers in the UK are classified as “independent contractors” and have no access to basic employment rights — sick pay, holiday pay, minimum wage, and other benefits. In their 2020 corporate social responsibility report, La Poste claim that their “working method is based on intense social dialogue, including negotiation, information and consultation, to ensure that everyone is involved . . . at all levels of the organization.” Evidently these practices do not extend to all of the workers whose labor enriches the company.

Ensuring this division of labor across borders, to the benefit of capital, has long been one of the aims of neoliberal politicians and theorists. In a 1939 paper, Friedrich Hayek posited that citizens of different countries would be unwilling to tolerate economic pain for the benefit of international workers.

“Is it likely that the French peasant will be willing to pay more for his fertilizer to help the British chemical industry?” he asked. As Quinn Slobodian writes in his book Globalists, the neoliberal dream was always about building “a world where the global economy was safely protected from the demands of redistributive equality and social justice.” Moving beyond the confines of nation states, which had at their disposal limited but effective mechanisms for disciplining capitalists, allowed businesses to carry out exploitation without being held accountable.

And yet, in 2017, France became the first country in the world to legislate for extraterritorial environmental, labor, and human rights abuses. A seemingly internationalist rebuke to the demands of capital. France’s Duty of Vigilance law mandates that large French firms (such as La Poste) develop and implement a vigilance plan for abuses along their supply chain. Failure to do so allows victims to pursue civil litigation in the courts.

But the law is not often a worker’s friend, especially in modern Britain. Despite repeated defeats at employment tribunals, where judgements have stated Stuart Delivery couriers are in fact workers, and not self-employed, the company continues to pursue a business model based on bogus self-employment. This, of course, is perfectly legal and is essentially encouraged by the UK’s laissez-faire approach to labor market regulation.

This Conservative government generally has no idea about the conditions of the bogusly self-employed, nor does it have any intention to remedy injustices such as those seen at Stuart through regulation. The much-hyped Employment Bill, aimed at supposedly tackling some of these problems, has at this stage been delayed for years.

Because Stuart is not technically doing anything illegal, La Poste can continue to plead its innocence. With the UK’s regulatory environment (or lack thereof) as a shield, parent companies remain “safely protected from the demands of redistributive equality.”

So, what is to be done? French postal workers at CGT FAPT (one of the unions involved in collective bargaining with La Poste) have stated their support for the strike, telling the Gig Economy Project that La Poste’s model of “Uberizing” conditions remains a threat to workers across all of the company’s subsidiaries. Sud-PTT reps (a union known for its combative and internationalist stance) have also stated their support, telling Jacobin “any strike is worth supporting but a strike in the postal sector, and more specifically in Stuart, is of special interest for us.”

The IWGB and allied unions in the UK are currently working to pressure La Poste through international channels, such as UNI Global Union, which aims to “build power” across borders in the postal sector. Alex Marshall, current president of the IWGB union, told Jacobin that “when the companies you are up against are multinational corporations, it is only right that they are met by the massive scale of solidarity we have seen from workers and unions across the world.”

What this movement of resistance shows is that tackling corporate malfeasance cannot stop at the borders of the nation-state. It is not, as Hayek proposed, that French workers (or those elsewhere) do not care about their international counterparts. Rather, they often lack effective channels to air these grievances. Creating these remains a key challenge for the Left.