The number of universities cutting jobs and slashing courses has long passed 50, with many more tightening belts to gastric-band levels. This week alone has seen the creation of the UK’s first “Super-University”: which, in its blending of cash-strapped Kent with Greenwich, is surely more marketing than Marvel. And worse will probably follow. As the Office for Students found, 42.7% of English institutions are forecast to end 2025-6 in deficit, while the once-reliable cash-cow of overseas students has soured too. Non-UK entrants fell by 7.7% in 2024-5, some 9% below what universities themselves had forecast.

As an hourly lecturer working at an English university, these struggles are deeply personal. Never heard of us? No, of course not — we “Hourlies” are the best-kept secret in the gig economy. Our precarious positions are scarcely mentioned in glossy prospectuses, and we tend not to be invited to take the stage come graduation day, for fear new graduates might cringe at the sight of our tattered, custard-stained gowns. Or, perhaps, it’s because vice chancellors are scared we’ll scream out the grim truth: that we earn less than the average Deliveroo driver, yet are regularly relied upon for over a quarter of all higher-education teaching.

What happened? I’m frequently asked that by ashen-faced boomers, whose comprehension of all things university seems to have stopped at caps, gowns, brandy in wingbacks, and seminars thick with cig smoke.

Suggested reading

Don’t let grifters kill the university

By Mary Harrington

Is it, perhaps, that these once-great halls of knowledge have, in recent years, been reduced to mere political beach balls, palmed back and forth by warring sides — one saying that everybody should sack off academia and become a plumber instead, the other that every child who shows an aptitude for plumbing should study it to degree level?

Or is it simply that the veil has finally dropped: that Britain’s universities have been flogging impossible debts to unwitting young people, all while degrading the working conditions of their lowest-paid workers? Well, it’s not for this anonymous writer to judge. Of course, I already have. I just cannot say so publicly, for fear, to misquote Scrooge, of “losing my situation”. Either way, take my cowardice as some evidence of the malign power structures now dominating these degraded institutions.

And degraded they are. A Deliveroo driver can make around £29,120 a year. Factor in our own student debts, and training costs to lecture in the first place, and that doesn’t stack up well against my own meager £21,000, especially when you consider that so-called “substantive” lecturers — a weird, widely used term somehow implying we’re in-substantial — earn considerably more, for doing, in my place at least, close to the exact same job. Yes, the driver’s figure is full-time and mine is not: but that is rather the point. Our hours are capped, our summers unpaid, and part-time is not quite part-time if the University is shut half the year. We can’t earn more even if we wanted to, making the unregulated subterranea of a Deliveroo driver seem, at least through our current lens of desperation, somewhat appealing.

Yet if there are perhaps 90,000 of us Hourlies — representing some 36% of all part-time academic staff — no one can say quite how much teaching we actually do deliver: tacitly suggesting that someone would rather it went uncounted. Back in 2018, when the UCU asked institutions to disclose the proportion of teaching hours delivered by hourly-paid staff, almost 100 failed to answer: 36 ignored the request outright, while 60 said that they either did not hold the information, or that digging it out would take too long.

Almost a decade on — and a decade that has, incidentally, run parallel to the rise of the gig economy — we Hourlies have only been leaned upon harder, often way above our job descriptions. I myself am designing curriculums; consulting on course structures; and dealing with pastoral care — all on top of teaching. Now, I’m sure senior management jobs are difficult too. But it’s worth noting here that a vice chancellor earns roughly 12 times what I do, and around six times what a “substantive” lecturer does. It surely begs the question: is it that their talent is so preternatural, so once-in-an-eon, that such a pay-gap is justified in times of fiscal ruin? Or that the ship is sinking and they’re going for the gold? Despite heavy deficits, meanwhile, and with students forever complaining about a lack of contact hours, my institution lately introduced yet another tier of bureaucratic middle management, only adding to its teetering, top-heavy structure.

The general cultural disregard for gig workers rubs off on us too. Some months back, a senior program manager, a professor, greeted me by saying: “Got yourself a full-time job yet?” Though meant half-jokingly, it struck me as somewhat tone-deaf when you consider the pay and power disparity between us, let alone the fact that the road to promotion, with or without a PhD, no longer really exists. The fumes we were living off — fumes of a once-respected profession — have now totally evaporated.

All this is heightened by the job’s seasonality. Unlike the Deliveroo driver’s incessant pedaling come rain or shine, we Hourlies are hemmed into short, money-making windows before lengthy stretches of unpaid “vacation” or ever-extended study leave, which even students are starting to see as a waste of their heady loans. In practice, the consequences here can be absurd. One close colleague — a fine tutor with a PhD — is regularly maxing out credit cards just to pay the rent. Come the long, dry summers, they take shifts in a coffee shop to make ends meet.

Bottlenecked periods of potential teaching hours turns the whole thing into a feeding frenzy come term time. It’s a stark contrast with our Deliveroo comrades, whose working culture is fairly linear: order comes in on the app; restaurant prepares and dispatches; driver delivers. In the working culture of the hourly lecturer, however, this process is far more convoluted, leaving ample scope for machinations.

Almost all of my hours are dictated by individual line managers, whose preferences, timetables, and yes, personal taste — bias, both conscious and unconscious — play a significant part in who gets work and when. For these reasons, cronyism abounds: I know at least two colleagues whose partners or relatives were employed shortly after they were. Naturally, paranoia and conspiracy are rife. At times, my place can feel more like The Sopranos than Stanford.

Superiors must be, on some level, aware that they’ve got us up against a wall. I’ve therefore learned that it’s prudent to forgo any kind of professional critique, dissent or healthy debate for fear of putting noses out of joint. Much of my time, I’ve noticed, is spent stunting my own intellectual instincts to avoid embarrassing some bewildered superior, overworked and as fearful as the rest of us of being ousted come the next cull. It increasingly feels, anyway, that what modern universities really want from their staff is not curiosity or dynamism or enthusiasm —  but to act as wadding for a holey timetable. After this, it’s pretense they’re after, followed by submission, just as I imagine Deliveroo drivers are hardly encouraged to question the culinary skill of the kebab house they’re collecting from. For both driver and lecturer, it’s a case of turn up, pick up, fuck off.

Suggested reading

The Great Dumb-Down is here

By Paul Sagar

So, might anything change? Sadly, in my experience, Britain’s universities — left to fester in stale pipe-smoke and hubris for decades now — still seem to be concerned only with status games and paychecks.

On the humiliations go. A while back, a colleague, at the start of the year, opened their laptop to find their hours had been decimated overnight, their financial security annihilated in a single click of the calendar. The word in the staff canteen was that the cut had been timed to land weeks before the beginning of term. Naturally, if they’d been informed any earlier, said colleague may well have had time to source work elsewhere. Yet with two weeks to go, they were once again up against a wall, with nowhere else to turn. Then, just recently, the same exact thing happened to me. Cue a frantic few days spent clawing back hours from gatekeepers, in what’s now become a yearly ritual of self-preservation. And though redundancies of full-time staff are, of course, happening — with some predicting around 10,000 job cuts a year if trends persist — it’s us Hourlies who’ll be the first to go, becoming, as the grim jargon would have it, “financial shock absorbers”.

Are there any alternatives? One solution — which dovetails well with the rise of AI in the education sector  — would be to return to the values of communication, intellectual curiosity, and pastoral presence in higher education: as opposed to seeing higher education as mere content delivery. And don’t take this old crone’s word for it: it’s what I hear from my students daily. What they want are challenging, engaging tutors, not calcified ones who’ve barely left their desk in decades. There’s even a world where a different kind of Hourly could provide just that, not least given most of us juggle regular jobs alongside our teaching commitments. Just please respect our contribution, secure our roles, or else pay us more. After all, even Deliveroo gives you a chance to tip the driver.

The Italians I worked with could not fly home and the Brits could not leave London. So after their final shift, they did the thing that made sense to them: they gathered around a table in the basement, ate, drank, and made Christmas at work feel like home. I stayed apart but smuggled home food that would otherwise rot: black truffles from Piemonte, bollito misto, quails, and agnolotti pasta. The state had banned communion, but my family made their own judgment about how to stay safe and stay human.

The pandemic was only one of the challenges I’ve had to deal with over 15 years in the hospitality industry. I’ve had newborns in cardiac arrest, gas explosions, attacks from drug-addicts, literal princesses, cellars full of feces, a rumored terrorist attack — and then, most heartbreaking of all, the closure of my beloved restaurant in Peckham last Christmas. It’s a fate that many small business owners have faced this year too: see the surprise closures of Claude Bosi at Bibendum, or Norman’s in Archway, or the hugely acclaimed Black Axe Mangal nose-to-tail Turkish in Islington, which will live on in some form but will no longer be a walk-in restaurant.

Why be a restaurateur? Some chefs get hooked on the Masterchef fantasy, dreaming of godhood under a toque blanche. For others, the  long hours are fueled by the promise that eventually the world will recognize their genius. It wasn’t like that for me: I was genuinely inspired by my experiences during the pandemic and surprised by how much I loved my customers and being at the heart of a community.

Suggested reading

How restaurants ate themselves

By Tanya Gold

During the pandemic, I was working in a finance role in the basement of someone else’s Italian restaurant in Soho. I became both furlough administrator and bicycle courier, keeping it on life-support. I was drinking far too many double negronis, but it was also the most fulfilling time in my career so far. Some customers used the deliveries as a chance for conversation from a safe distance. Formerly lazy colleagues worked with purpose. It was this experience that inspired me to go it alone and build something personal that reflected my fifteen years of experience.

I figured there were enough gingham-clothed bistros and skin-contact wine bars around, and I could contribute something different: an affordable fusion restaurant that celebrated the collision of the two food cultures that had shaped me: British and Italian. I called it Café Britaly and opened it up in Spring 2024. My center dish, a carbonara with cream and a fried egg on top, infuriated Italian social media (“che schifo”). But the critics didn’t mind: Jimi Famurewa called it a “rib-squeezing hug of pure comfort” and Marina O’Loughlin found it “entirely cheering” experience. It was often fully booked; the prosecco laced with Cornish limoncello was flowing; but I soon learned that I had little control over my restaurant. It was the Government that called the shots.

No one who set up a restaurant in the aftermath of the pandemic would ever have imagined that it would be easy. However, this was manageable compared to the Government intervention that really came for the hospitality sector — which was Rachel Reeves’s inaugural budget of 2024. If you’ve wondered why that restaurant you loved down your road shut down — despite great reviews, despite being full most of the time — that fateful budget probably has something to do with it.

Customers had already slowed their spending since Keir Starmer’s election that summer. Later data would confirm that this slump had started before the Budget — but the Budget was the final straw. It made staff even more expensive — I would have to fire a quarter of my workers — and forced me to reduce our running costs. Colleagues around the country were making similar choices: more than half of all job losses since the 2024 Budget have come from the hospitality sector.

But I knew that my restaurant couldn’t survive with so few staff. It was another two months before I could accept this. But, then, on 22 December last year, I did it. I made all of my staff redundant; I sold the lease; I announced the closure on TikTok, and my delivery was so bad that people thought it was a parody. One of the saddest days of my life turned into a viral video. Soon, the closures would accelerate elsewhere.

It wasn’t just Reeves who closed me down, though she played her part. It was 25 years of bad policy. The steady increase in the minimum wage has generally been applauded as a sign that the Government is doing something about inequality — but it has significant adverse effects, not least for the young, the inexperienced and the generally worse-off, who have become too expensive to hire. The logical thing to do would be to raise the price of dishes. But customers, squeezed themselves, are reluctant to pay more and so we restaurateurs usually find a way around the expense through discretionary service charges. The one cost that every restaurateur is trained to obsess over, staff costs, becomes harder and harder to control.

When I got my first job at a local pub back in 2008, I was only 17 years old. Some things were tough: like learning how to deal with drunk men four times my age or a colleague calling me an “assless little boy”. But still, it was a start. I was paid £4.60 an hour (the legal rate for 18-year-olds) which, this coming spring, will be up to £8. But that modest increase will soon be hiked up to the over-21s rate of £12.71 — an eye-watering 276% increase. Over the same period, inflation has been only 164%.

I would have liked that extra cash, but I certainly wouldn’t have deserved it: I lacked the experience. Each rise in the minimum wage is celebrated as an act of compassion — but everyone knows that when prices increase, demand reduces. This means business owners will stop taking risks on giving someone their first job.

Like many in hospitality, I’ve supplemented minimum wage with tips. But here, restaurants often skirt the law. First, as Michel Roux Jr once admitted, many establishments treated tips as revenue. And second, some restaurants (including one billionaire-owned chain I used to work for), use “fixed deductions” to allocate tips against the entire wage bill. Customers were wrong to think tips went in full to the team. Theresa May closed this loophole, but by then, restaurants were too reliant on it: it’s still rare for tips to reach the pockets of ordinary staff. Recently Gaucho’s troncmaster said this out loud, admitting that waiters would get a cut in their service charge payments, which would instead go to head office staff. After a public outcry they denied this. Still, I’ve heard of lots of other companies that still use this method.

It’s also increasingly difficult for employers to navigate our obligations to protect staff. You’ll probably have seen the signs saying “we do not tolerate abuse of our staff” (as if all customers are endemic harassers). The so-called “banter ban” (Clause 20 of the new Employment Rights Bill) says that employers must take “all reasonable steps” to protect staff with protected characteristics, like transgenderism or race. But how this plays out in practice is another matter. Once, a waiter asked me to remove customers for racism. It was because he’d heard them say the word “black” — though he didn’t know what they were discussing. My decision not to remove them was overruled by the senior manager, and they were denied food, made to pay for unfinished drinks, and kicked out.

What is the natural response to all these rising costs and obligations? To look for labor that is cheap, flexible, and willing to help a business stay afloat by bending the rules. That is why illegal working is rife in the industry. Restaurants know that enforcement is sporadic. Udaya, an Indian restaurant in East Ham, was found to have seven staff with no right to work, yet its local MP, Sir Steven Timms — now a Labour minister — intervened to say the breach was not deliberate. When well-connected places are let off, it becomes clear that the rules do not apply equally.

Some restaurants even pay staff in food, not money. Others, such as the notorious Royal China group, absorb repeated large fines as a cost of doing business. Yet enforcement is often so lax as to be meaningless. When immigration officers visited a restaurant I worked in during the 2010s, they checked only the kitchen porters, asked us to email the remaining documents, and left. We never heard from them again. The honest operator who tries to follow the rules carries the full weight of compliance. The dishonest one carries on.

Shabana Mahmood has promised tougher action, but her approach is to push more responsibility onto employers, tightening the checks we must carry out and increasing the penalties for getting it wrong. For large chains this is manageable. For small restaurants, it is another demand on time, money, and attention. And so the gap between big and small, or the honest and the scoundrels, only widens.

Faced with rising wages, tight margins, and heavy legal duties, many restaurants are now turning to the one option that avoids the entire regulatory structure: self-employment. The model is simple. If an individual working at your restaurant is not an employee but a contractor, you don’t have to worry about employment law, minimum wage, sick pay, holiday pay, tribunals, or the rest. You don’t even have to check the IDs of agency staff. Literally anyone can now work for a dodgy agency that will be phoenixed whenever it runs into trouble — and the restaurant is under no obligation to discover their right-to-work status.

This has created a two-tier system. On one side are workers who know their rights and are on the books. On the other side are the self-employed and agency staff who live outside the protections that all good liberals claim to cherish. Occasionally, the situation is spun as small-business owners having the freedom to set their own agenda. In reality, it’s just a big wheeze to control costs — the Deliverooification of employment.

And there is another option when labor becomes too costly, too complex, or too risky. Just get rid of the human element. Replace troublesome humans with quick service terminals, QR codes, and phone apps. Instead of going to your local sandwich shop and talking to a nice young person behind the counter, you can order a turkey sandwich on your screen at home. It’s efficient. It’s cheap. It’s the absolute antithesis of what just about everyone who works in hospitality cherishes about the industry. And of course, it means there will be fewer places run by people who really care about food, culture, customers, communities.

If the Government won’t make Britain a better place to start a restaurant, then fewer normal people will be able to set up restaurants. Only the big beasts with big pockets, the law breakers, and the established players will survive.

I still dream of a second Café Britaly. But this time, it would have to be smaller, serving coffees and sandwiches and staffed by only me. Recently, I looked at a tiny backstreet location and felt hopeful. Then the agent told me it would cost £60,000 a year, and that extinguished any hope. It will apparently become a dog hairdresser.

So, instead of chasing pennies and provocative pasta dishes, this year I will be feeding the homeless at Christmas. I have made an alcohol-free tiramisu, based on a recipe by Russell Norman, the man behind Polpo, a much-loved but troubled restaurateur. I remembered him as I folded the mascarpone into the eggs. The volunteers at the kitchen are a hodge-podge of young and old, confident cooks and hesitant ones, people who are loved and people carrying their own pain.

In hospitality I’ve seen people pushed to breaking point: friends have committed suicide, become addicted to booze or drugs, or else have lost everything. The guests are the same, only in different circumstances. Many of the people eating in soup kitchens this Christmas began their slide into homelessness when they fell out of work. Serving them tiramisú makes something very clear. Whether it is at a restaurant, a pub, a cafe, or a church hall, hospitality is when we come together to be comforted by others.

At Christmas, especially, that matters. Staff drag themselves to work on hangovers, volunteers ladle their carefully prepared soups, and strangers sit shoulder to shoulder popping crackers in jolly neighborhood brasseries. The people who provide hospitality are becoming increasingly expensive, but they are also the entire point. One day we may wake up and wonder where all the humans went. For convenience, we will reach for our phone, and order another meal, to be delivered tepid and sweating inside a plastic box. The only human contact will be a mumbled confirmation code exchanged with a courier who barely speaks your language.

Put simply, the bugman is slang for a default, normie consumer, who imbibes uncritically the great narratives of today’s power structures: the kind of person who mistakes the basic bitch hedonism that Western society offers in abundance for a source of deep meaning.

Accordingly, the bugman enjoys Netflix and Deliveroo; Marvel franchises and Blue Apron. The bugman probably thought The Last Jedi was pretty cool for its feminist messages. It is an article of faith for him that Beyoncé is a queen who slays. In fact, the bugman’s opinions are so tediously orthodox they can be widely shared on social media without any fear of payback.

More from this author

How knitters got knotted in a purity spiral

By Gavin Haynes

The bugman’s original etymology (and entomology) refers to how he lives in a kind of honeycomb of similarly indistinct humans — a block of flats, say, probably in a major metropolis. But in recent years, the bugman has taken on another origin story. It can now mean ‘he who would gladly eat the bugs’. A global citizen, primed for the coming age of deep ecology proposed by XR and Greta, in which cows are banned, and protein is dispensed from reconstituted insect matter with far lower carbon footprints.

It’s the future in which we no longer own cars but merely rent space in self-driving taxis; the one in which we have to apply for our annual flight credits from the National Carbon Register. In its most extreme version, it’s the world of pod people — where the joyous citizen takes on the awesome planet-saving responsibility of limiting his housing to the necessary few square metres of dormitory space. After all, the bugman is instinctively a globalist, deeply trustful of international institutions, and their high-level plans for his future.

Which brings us neatly to an international institution, and its high-level plan for our future. It takes us into the heart of a conspiracy that isn’t, but a tendency that most certainly is. It is in the spaces between this non-existent conspiracy and the thriving tendency that a new war to control meaning is now raging.

More from this author

Don't dismiss the Trump brigade

By Gavin Haynes

In June of this year, the World Economic Forum hosted a video seminar called The Great Reset, to promote a book, also called The Great Reset. It was a crushingly tedious time for all concerned. Bookended with the mitherings of Prince Charles, the event mainly involved a panel of worthies — who all had that NGO tan that comes from endlessly staring at discussion documents about third world poverty from a luxurious Alpine apartment — sharing their thoughts on ‘sustainability’, ‘green jobs’ and ‘the global south’.

Their Great Reset, as unveiled in their seminar, proposes a generational shifting of the track-lines of our economic development. It calls for de-carbonising, with the help of massive government stimulus; it wants an internationalist approach that clamps down on tax-dodging companies, paid for by new taxes on the wealthy. Lame, perhaps. But on the face of it, hardly sinister.

The stronger thesis of The Great Reset was best stated by the former Vatican ambassador to the US, Archbishop Carlo Vagano, who in November of this year wrote an open letter to President Trump:

Mr. President, I imagine that you are already aware that in some countries the Great Reset will be activated between the end of this year and the first trimester of 2021. For this purpose, further lockdowns are planned, which will be officially justified by a supposed second and third wave of the pandemic. You are well aware of the means that have been deployed to sow panic and legitimize draconian limitations on individual liberties, artfully provoking a world-wide economic crisis. In the intentions of its architects, this crisis will serve to make the recourse of nations to the Great Reset irreversible, thereby giving the final blow to a world whose existence and very memory they want to completely cancel. 

This is the Great Reset as it now exists within the conspiracy world: the premise that life as we knew it is being flattened so as to be re-forged into the bugman’s paradise — with special emphasis on Covid-19 being essentially fake, or at least wildly overstated.

More from this author

Are the conspiracy cranks a little bit right?

By Gavin Haynes

Clearly, these two Great Resets — the lame version and the conspiracy version — are very different propositions. Yet there is also a sense in which they talk to each other, feed off each other. Above all, each provides an excellent strawman for the opposing team to attack.

Take the case of Justin Trudeau, who became a viral sensation in Great Reset (lame version) circles in September, when he used his speech to the UN General Assembly to talk about using Covid to pursue more of the politics he already enjoys:

“Building back better means getting support to the most vulnerable while maintaining our momentum on reaching the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development”

Agenda 2030, often spoken of in the same breath as the Great Reset, is the UN’s “sustainable development goals”, a long list of platitudes about the environment and inequality of such aching tedium that it makes The Great Reset (lame version) look like The 120 Days Of Sodom.

In the moment, Trudeau was saying no more than what the Trudeaus of this world tend to say. But then, the beauty of the Great Reset is that it has become a framework for connecting the dots between all the world’s Trudeaus and their mandarin class. These are all the people Steve Bannon used to call The Party Of Davos. And in the battle to define what comes after the Jahr Null of Covid, so far, it’s this Davos crowd and these ideas that are winning every skirmish.

For the very online Right, it hasn’t escaped notice that, whether it’s voiced by Biden, Trudeau or Johnson, ‘building back better’ always seems to mean pinning the individual under the state, in service of an open-ended, easily-redefined ‘common good’. Boris Johnson’s great green reset is one of the more curious cases in point: a moment where a leader went over the heads of his working class, northern balance of power, to play to a gallery of internationalists. The Prime Minister has bet our future on untested heat pump technology and expensive electric cars.

Of course, Klaus Schwab’s annual talking shop is hardly the only organisation vying to turn the crisis towards their agenda. The problem, it seems, was that they were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off; the title was just too good, too on-the-nose, to be ignored. The Great Reset was accidental over-sell, but only in the way that lighting striking the highest conductive point is ‘accidental’. By November, when the phrase really took off, societal disquiet was already rumbling, looking for an obvious point-of-contact with reality. Suddenly, a vague unease had a name.

More from this author

The obscure mysticism of Steve Bannon

By Gavin Haynes

But at the same time, both sides also refuse to concede that the term has multiple meanings. For the WEF and its allies, any opposition to their policies must therefore come from wackos. This kind of queasy duality is a standard part of the modern playbook. By 2017, the term ‘alt-Right’ had come to mean both ‘card-carrying Neo-Nazi’ and ‘young people slightly to the right of Douglas Carswell who own a modem’. In debate, the distinction was deliberately elided to de-platform and defame. Ever more, the term ‘climate denier’ performs a similar function.

On the other side of the fence, those who deal in the fantasies can deploy their own motte and bailey. They point to the WEF’s actual plan as a safe harbour in reality — a stout Christmas tree of genuine fact, on which they can then hang their madder baubles. As one YouTube commenter beneath the WEF video had it: “When we warned of a reset, we’re [sic] were called conspiracists. Now what idiots?”

Between them lies the real argument, unloved and untackled. The crisis has already put down several waymarkers towards a world few of us signed up for: from the steamrollering of mom-’n’-pops in favour of Amazon, to the truly cashless society, to credit scores based on your Google history to the oft-floated ‘vaccine passport’. The bugman is always figurative: a kind of platonic ideal pointing towards the dangers of a technocratic 2020s. To take it literally is always to miss the point.

The WEF case rests precisely on explaining why we won’t end up in that future. But tackling the unease fuelling The Great Reset’s wide spectrum of critics would also mean addressing the sentiment underlying both strands of opposition: that however buttery the buzzwords, human beings are rightly suspicious of those who make abstruse high-level plans for their ‘welfare’. Especially if they’re designed by pointy-heads from Davos with no skin in the game — whether they come bearing a thought, a plan, a scheme, or an outright conspiracy.

Amazon warehouse workers are called ‘Associates’. When they are dismissed they are not sacked, fired or made redundant, but instead ‘released’. Budding Uber drivers are greeted during their ‘onboarding’ (hiring) by a hipster in jeans and t-shirt who talks in the language of a ubiquitous ‘hustle porn’ Instagram post that fetishises excessive overworking. Deliveroo couriers are referred to patronisingly as ‘Roos’ by management.

More from this author

Why we can't ignore the working-class identity crisis

By James Bloodworth

John Steinbeck said that socialism never took root in the United States because the American dream encouraged the poor to consider themselves not as a downtrodden proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Gig employers appear to be attempting to pull a similar trick on their employees – sorry, ‘partners’. “We’re here to make money. If your wheels aren’t turning, you aren’t earning”, I was told by an enthusiastic Uber employee when I drove for the company back in 2017.

I worked as a cab driver – or as an ‘entrepreneur’, if you are to believe Uber’s rhetoric – for around three months while researching my book Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain. I also interviewed my fellow drivers as well as couriers who worked for gig employers such as Deliveroo and CitySprint.

One thing that became strikingly apparent was the vast chasm between the rhetoric espoused by companies and the reality endured by those who worked for them. Despite being categorised as self-employed contractors – and as a consequence losing the right to sick pay, annual leave and the minimum wage – Uber tightly controlled much of what we did on the job. “You can’t pick and choose which jobs you do,” we were told during our induction.

There were even restrictions on the subjects we were allowed to talk about with the passengers in the back of the car. Politics, religion and sport were strictly off-limits. If an Uber driver’s customer service rating fell below 4.7 stars, they would be summoned into Uber’s headquarters for a dressing down and potentially ‘deactivated’ – another euphemism for losing your job.

We were induced to take up the job with Uber on the alluring basis of autonomy. “Always wanted to be your own boss and set your own times? This is your chance!” reads the marketing on Uber’s website. And there were positives about the Uber experience. We had the autonomy to log in and out of the Uber app at a time of our own choosing.

Moreover, the Uber algorithm was less capricious and tyrannical than a human line manager. At the very least, Uber’s algorithm was not going to stop you from earning enough to eat simply because it took a personal disliking to you.

Suggested reading

Warehouse work needn't be worthless

By Polly Mackenzie

Uber isn’t the only company operating in the gig economy of course. Callum Cant’s new book, Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy documents life as one of the food delivery company’s 15,000 UK couriers. As of 2018, there were around five million self-employed people in the United Kingdom, many of whom work in the booming gig economy.

Cant’s book resembles my own in many ways, not least because the author unflinchingly documents the methods used by gig employers to keep workers impoverished and under tight control and supervision. Making consumers aware of what really goes on when they order a taxi or food is an important task. As Cant writes, the reality of the gig economy is an economic landscape where “the worker takes all the risk”, while the company he or she works for “get all the reward”.

In the case of platforms such as Uber and Deliveroo, workers shoulder the cost of doing the job – the car, the petrol, the cost of time taken off through injury or ill health – while the companies themselves avoid the usual burdens associated with having employees. These are passed onto the workers themselves but also to the taxpayer. One Deliveroo courier I interviewed took time off with a ligament injury and ended up signing on for housing benefit because he was not entitled to sick pay.

The biggest difference between my own book and Cant’s, however, is that readers of my book tend to come away depressed after reading it, whereas Cant strikes a more optimistic tone. This is partly a consequence of gig workers making substantial progress in organising themselves (predominantly through the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain) since I wrote my book back in 2016-17. As Cant writes:

“This is not just a sob story about workers being exploited in bad conditions by bosses who get rich off their work, it’s about how workers have squared up and fought back”.

Indeed, several fashionable shibboleths are demolished very effectively in Cant’s book, from the notion that trade unions are irrelevant to those toiling away in the flexible economy, to the idea that migrant workers can’t be unionised.

Suggested reading

Who will speak for today's working class?

By Paul Embery

The book focuses predominantly on London and Brighton, where Deliveroo couriers used WhatsApp group chats to organise workers against exploitative piece-work and a local oversupply of labour which was driving down wages. Initially Deliveroo couriers in London protested against collusion between border enforcement agencies and Deliveroo managers, but the dispute quickly escalated as the company made changes to its payment structure. As Cant writes,

“The system would be changed from a flat hourly rate (£7) with a bonus per completed delivery (£1) plus an additional petrol bonus for moped riders, to a fee-per-delivery piece-wage (£3.75) with no hourly rate. If there were no orders, workers would earn no money.”

This prompted a wave of strike action among Deliveroo’s couriers.

Cant does get carried away. “Deliveroo workers have launched a militant struggle for a better world,” he writes. This is true as far as it goes, but Cant seems to define a better world strictly as one in which socialism has triumphed.

This is quite a philosophical jump, not least because contemporary socialism is spectacularly ill-defined, even by its adherents. “Fundamentally, the socialism movement relies on two parts,” Cant writes. “The first is the struggle of the working class against exploitation, and the second is a critique of capitalism and a socialist programme.”

But what is the socialist programme in 2019? For Cant, socialism entails the lofty idea of workers’ democratic control of every workplace. Yet socialism also requires a centralised plan if markets are to be eliminated. Herein lies the fundamental contradiction at socialism’s heart. As I wrote earlier this year for UnHerd:

“you cannot advocate central planning on the one hand and workplace democracy on the other. As soon as workers rebel against the state’s central plan, their democratic rights are stripped from them”.

I won’t dwell on this aspect of Cant’s work, because the book contains many important lessons about fighting back against exploitative gig employers. My own book was written to lift the lid on an underreported aspect of working-class life in Britain when gig practices – at least in their current guise – were relatively new.

We’ve moved on since then. We are now at a point where workers whom we were told had no time for trade unions –predominantly migrants and students – are getting organised and fighting back. Anyone who cares about social justice, whether you share Cant’s politics or not, should be cheering them on.