Working With Delivery Platforms to Harass Migrants
In Britain, hotels hosting refugees have become a target of anti-immigration rallies. Keir Starmer’s government is pandering to the protests — announcing a partnership with delivery app firms to identify asylum seekers working as riders.
A Deliveroo courier delivering food in London on June 1, 2025. (Mike Kemp / In Pictures via Getty Images)
Almost exactly a year since the riots that saw lynch mobs attempting to set fire to hotels accommodating migrants and refugees, the British government has decided to set loose another lawless mob onto blameless asylum seekers: food-delivery platforms.
The government announced that the accommodation data of asylum seekers will be shared with Deliveroo, Uber Eats, and Just Eat, supposedly so that these companies can detect “patterns of misuse” on their platforms. The BBC reports that they will use the hotel data to identify “an account spending a lot of time near one of the hotels” — that is, to try and catch asylum seekers working in food delivery without authorization.
Officially, this is an attempt to clean up the labor market in the food delivery sector. Unofficially, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is throwing red meat to the racists who appear to be geared-up for another summer of anti-migrant violence. Just a day before the asylum hotel data-sharing initiative was announced, more than a thousand people protested outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Essex, to the northeast of London, with two people arrested for violent disorder.
Rather than standing up to the rising tide of racism, Starmer has sought to stir the pot. This May, he mimicked 1960s hard-right Tory Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” rhetoric by describing Britain as an “island of strangers.” Starmer, who apparently fears a return of last year’s riots, wants to be seen to be doing something, anything, to clamp down on that great scourge of the British worker: asylum seekers, by definition the people with least power.
The true motivation for this ploy is to get a story that plays well for the government in the right-wing press. Yet the doom-loop of anti-migrant hysteria is not the only way to do politics in Britain in 2025. Starmer will not be interested, but if he really did want to get to the roots of the country’s social and economic problems, rather than chase cheap headlines, one place to start would be to confront the real problems in the gig economy.
Marked by a complete absence of workers’ rights, algorithmically determined labor exploitation, and endemic precarity, the gig economy is a symbol of what four decades of neoliberalism has done to the working class, fostering the sort of cauldron of despair and fragmentation in which racism always thrives. Rather than teaming up with the same companies that are reaping the spoils of that exploitation, the government could establish employment protections and support collective bargaining — ensuring decent work and ending the black market in the gig economy in one fell swoop.
Subletting and Solutions
Undocumented workers typically work in the food delivery via a practice called “subletting” — a widespread phenomenon in Britain and many European countries today. When a worker wants to work while keeping their identity hidden, they can access another person’s registered app account. In return, the worker pays the account holder a percentage of their earnings, typically between 30 and 50 percent.
As well as being a serious violation of asylum seekers’ privacy, it doesn’t take much thought to realize that sharing the data on where they are located with these companies is a bogus solution to subletting. To avoid surveillance by the platforms, the only thing a worker using a subletted account would have to do is to log out and switch off their phone when they are near their accommodation. Given the lengths undocumented workers go to access subletted work, the government’s new ploy will be the least of their worries.
Of course, Starmer’s government insists that this is just part of a package of measures introduced to clamp down on “illegal working” in the food-delivery sector. Other measures include increasing the use of facial ID checks, despite the fact that Microsoft, the main software producer, has admitted that the checks are racially biased and faulty. The government is also stepping up racially profiled stop and search, which costs vast sums of public money for very little return.
The one thing the government is not doing is cracking down on the companies that are benefiting from exploiting undocumented workers’ labor. The platforms are breaking the law, but you wouldn’t know that by the way they are treated as “partners” by the government in tackling subletting, rather than beneficiaries of the practice. If the government said it would issue five- or six-figure fines on the platforms every time a worker was found to be working without papers, the practice of subletting would soon come to an end.
By far the most fruitful strategy for erasing subletting would be to establish employment protections in the food-delivery sector. If the platforms had to employ their riders, they would have to pay them an hourly wage, rather than piece rates for each trip, and also be liable for health-and-safety protection, holiday and sick pay, social security, and so forth. Food delivery companies would soon start paying very close attention to who their real employees were.
Why? Because they’d have an interest in providing each worker with the necessary equipment and training needed to do the job safely. They’d also want to maximize the working day of each worker, carefully organizing their delivery schedules and ensuring they have a human supervisor to communicate with in case of problems.
In other words, the platforms would have to take an interest in their workers. This could bring an end to the dystopian algorithmic-management practices that dominate the industry currently, whereby platforms have mountains of data relating to labor productivity and customer satisfaction, while knowing absolutely nothing about their employees’ welfare.
And what about undocumented workers? In Spain, as well as introducing employment rights for riders, left-wing labor minister Yolanda Díaz is pursuing a regularization campaign in the sector so that people who have been working for platforms for years are able to secure citizenship. That way, thousands currently working in black-market conditions will work for the same pay as any other worker — improving everyone’s bargaining power. These workers will also start paying income tax like any other worker, boosting the public coffers.
The Platform Lobby and Corporate Power
In announcing the new data-sharing policy, Starmer said that he wanted to “ensure fairness for British people.” But what’s fair about delivering £60 steaks to City of London traders for less than £10 an hour (before the costs they pay)? That was the reality that one journalist at the Independent found when he shadowed a Deliveroo rider around for a day.
Deliveroo, a British-founded food-delivery platform recently bought by US giant DoorDash, claimed last year that it would pay at least a fee equivalent to the hourly minimum wage for each delivery. Still, one investigation discovered that riders were regularly earning well below that amount. And these poverty wages are the earnings of those who are working on the platform legally.
There’s a good reason why Starmer would rather link arms with the platform bosses against their workers rather than establish employment protections that would hurt the platforms’ own bottom-line. Long before Labour returned to government in July 2024, the platform lobby had gotten its teeth into the party. The lobby’s first major victory came a year before the general election, when Labour scrapped policy to create a “single status” of worker. The pledge, which had only been introduced in 2021, would have ended the so-called “limb-b” status that Uber drivers currently operate under, instead giving them full employee rights.
Deliveroo would go on to change its rules so it could make donations to political parties. The company secured influence with think tanks and unions close to Labour, with one Labour MP warning that: “The evidence of the growing engagement with and influence of companies such as Deliveroo is deeply concerning to many in the party and the movement.” Just days after Labour came to power, Will Shu, the company’s CEO and a former City of London banker, was drinking champagne at a reception for business leaders at 10 Downing Street talking about how “we just want our voice heard, that’s all.”
The fact that the company abruptly left Spain after the government changed the labor code to require platforms in the food-delivery sector to employ their riders suggests that Shu expects more from his lobbying than just to be listened to. Indeed, Shu has also played down the potential impact of the European Union’s Platform Work Directive, which established a legal presumption of employment in the platform economy and has to be implemented by all twenty-seven member states by the end of 2026. His reason for this confidence? In France, the company’s largest market in the EU, Emmanuel Macron’s government was aligned with the platform lobby.
In reality, the situation in France is a lot more complicated than Shu would have you believe. Deliveroo corporate executives in the country have faced suspended prison sentences and major fines from the Paris Criminal Court for “concealed work.” While Macron’s shaky government has resisted employee rights in the gig economy, the country’s courts have found that riders are “bogus self-employed.” When the Platform Work Directive is implemented, it will be a tug-of-war between the judicial and presidential arms of the state, presuming Macron is still in power by then.
The continent-wide picture suggests that Britain is increasingly isolated on platform workers’ rights. The Starmer government’s Employment Rights Bill has nothing to say about the platform economy, despite the fact that on some estimates it now makes up almost 15 percent of all work nationwide. What’s for certain is that catching a few asylum seekers who are subletting accounts is not going to change the working conditions in the gig economy one iota.
Solidarity
In the absence of a change in direction from the British government, workers will have to rely on organizing efforts from below to make progress in the food-delivery sector.
Alex Marshall, a former food delivery courier and president of the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB), which organizes riders, responded to Starmer’s announcement by stating: “While Gaza starves, the [National Health Service] crumbles and billionaires hoard wealth — Starmer’s priority is scapegoating migrants and fueling far-right hate.
“Migrant workers graft for a pittance building the businesses Britain runs on. We’ll keep building a united movement — against Enoch Powellism!”
On Valentine’s Day in February 2024, a massive grassroots-organized strike across the UK and Ireland, native and migrant workers together, rocked the food-delivery platforms. Customers tweeted that they couldn’t make orders. Deliveroo had to post a “We’ll be back to normal soon” message. With riders organizing pickets of popular restaurants, videos showed uncollected orders piling up. To break the strike, the platforms started offering rates for deliveries higher than riders had ever seen before.
It’s that solidarity between food-delivery workers — understanding their common interests as workers and knowing that they will never earn decent pay from the platforms if they are divided — which can overcome the racism and hatred that Starmer is happy to stoke. Blaming asylum seekers for workers’ problems will get us nowhere. Only by challenging the powerful can workers improve their situation. Class unity and solidarity is always the most effective way to get the powerful to listen.