Delivery riders have become part of the veins of our cities, delivering meals — or riding errands — through neighbourhoods, intermediating between restaurants, stores, and people at home, and giving our metropolises another way to connect. During the pandemic outbreak, riders were on the front line and were declared heroes by their employers. But scenes of exhaustion began to occupy our streets, and delivery riders’ rights have been swayed by unfair and unsafe working conditions.
Across cities, you see riders sleeping on park benches during daylight or staring at the app on their mobile phones and shouting at the invisible employer, a wasted anger at the expense of an algorithm. There isn’t a single day when I don’t see a delivery worker riding on my street. It is always the same game; more and faster rides, time is money.
Last week, on September 17th, marked ten years of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and with the hindsight of a decade, one begins to wonder if Occupy permanently changed the paradigm of protest. It wasn’t just Wall Street. Four months prior, the spontaneous 15-M Movement in Spain, also known as the Indignados, was calling for a more participatory democracy. These movements inspired protests in other cities around the world.
Today, what Wall Street represents is back in full swing. Millions of venture capital money are flowing to startups like delivery platforms, while labour conditions and the rights of delivery riders worsen. Yet this business model doesn’t break even, as if the invisible legacy of Occupy had been waiting for just such a moment. By now, delivery workers have grasped how to ride in crosswinds and have been demanding recognition as payroll staff with the corresponding rights.
With the same token, riders have been organizing themselves into democratically governed, worker-owned cooperatives in their cities, all united by their membership in a federation of co-ops called CoopCycle, with an ambitious plan to compete with global delivery platforms.
But how to compete with global delivery platforms?
Born and based in Paris, CoopCycle provides a software platform for local cooperatives to run their delivery businesses, thereby reducing costs through resource pooling and creating strong bargaining power to protect the rights of delivery riders. All is part of a plan to mastermind a new form of cooperative conglomerate, departing from the traditional approach of cooperativism, which operates locally and independently while utilizing a universal global application. This approach transforms and decommercializes the information technology sector, neither public nor private, but property of the commons. Something that Trebor Scholz, a professor at The New School in New York City, calls platform cooperativism.
Kevin Poperl and Alexandre Segura are two of the members behind CoopCycle. They met in 2016 during the Nuit Debout mobilization, a French social movement against the government’s proposed labour reforms at that time, which has been compared to the Occupy movement. Poperl and Segura took an active part in Nuit Debout and met with activists like Jérôme Pimot, founder of the Collectif des Livreurs Autonomes de Paris, who were also protesting against the negative effects of the gig economy, producing ‘autonomous workers’ or freelancers with no rights.
Alexandre Segura, a web developer, was disenchanted with the startup world and sought something more meaningful in his work. Not so much interested in politics, the consequences of the gig economy were in front of his eyes when he experienced how, from one day to the next, his brother-in-law, hired as a rider, became jobless. At that time, the delivery platform ‘Take it Easy’ filed for bankruptcy, leaving freelance riders without compensation.
The revolution of the delivery riders
When he met Kevin Poperl, an economist, at the Place de la République in Paris, their informal conversations with other people crystallized around the development of an app that Segura was working on. It would be similar to the classical technology used by Uber Eats, Deliveroo, and other delivery apps but in the form of a cooperative platform for local rider collectives made available under two conditions: to be a cooperative owned by the riders and to have a democratic payment, all profits had to be distributed among the worker-owners (which has led to more than double wages at global platforms).
‘At that time, jobless riders started some kind of strike to complain, and created Facebook groups which rapidly attracted lots of members. So I joined one of these groups and told them that I was coding a delivery platform and offered to use it,’ explains Segura.
The key difference between the CoopCycle software and other technology platforms is that it is conceived as a digital commons. Legally, it belongs to its developers, but a Coopyleft licence allows any coop with employees to use it. This full-fledged software enables cooperatives to manage their deliveries locally, and shop and restaurant owners to access the delivery service in their respective cities. They are free to make their own decisions.
Most importantly, the delivery platform is protected by a reciprocity license, which limits its commercial use to worker-owned co-ops. In addition, CoopCycle limits the possibility of local cooperatives or local workers succumbing to competition among themselves or selling the app for profit, warns Poperl.
And he continues that, in the current context, investors are betting on these new unprofitable apps because they foresee the attractive possibility of controlling the final monopoly, as well as being afraid to lose out in the competition. This is why companies like Deliveroo and Uber Eats have been able to raise funds despite continuing to lose money, as algorithms and artificial intelligence continually adjust for efficiency in hiring drivers.
The race of the riders to post-capitalism
The CoopCycle strategy aims to undermine this final monopoly goal by developing an open-source platform based on a different ownership model, featuring a transparent algorithm for ensuring fair delivery and riders’ rights, and made freely available to any cooperative that wishes to utilize it, as a humane alternative to the free market model.
CoopCycle engages in the production of common resources, thereby benefiting from economies of scale by sharing those resources and ultimately benefiting workers.
We are determined to dismantle the myth of the speculative bubble, which suggests that to win, you have to be the last delivery platform in the market. We can show a better way of operating, which makes investors doubt and encourages alternatives, explains Poperl.
Recently, things started to turn around. Deliveroo’s stock market float earlier this year was unsuccessful, with share prices below the initial offering price, partly due to investor concerns over the employment status of riders. Delivery app Foodora exited the Canadian market when workers secured more rights. And thanks to the efforts of riders’ collectives in Spain, such as Riders X Derechos, the Spanish Cabinet approved the so-called “Rider law” this year.
Essentially, this law classifies food-delivery riders from digital platforms, such as Glovo and Just Eat, as employees rather than self-employed workers. However, platforms find ways to navigate legislation, either using HR services companies as intermediaries, causing job losses, or adjusting algorithms that suffocate riders into complying with self-employed status and prioritizing workers in payroll. Another courier collective in Spain, the Asociación Autónoma de Riders, opposes the law because they believe it will make them worse off. And undocumented riders are willing to work at any price.
In German cities, the workers of the newly created platform Gorillas, supposedly better equipped and with better working conditions, are pushing to create a union affiliation. However, in Spain and France, riders are making their voices heard beyond political preferences or affiliations – workers are starting to fall out of love with unions. They are instead coming together in collectives to fight for their rights, as seen in Barcelona with Las Kellys.
Last week, an article revealed that New York’s 65,000 delivery workers, most of them Latino immigrants, have begun forming civil guards to protect themselves from gunmen and knife-wielding thieves who want to steal their bikes. Exploited by apps like Seamless and DoorDash to deliver food faster and farther, they are unprotected by the police. They are also forming activist networks to push for reforms.
‘In my opinion, we have to change the economy and bring more sense to the world. If we were not exclusively focused on profit, we could dedicate more time and resources to reducing, for instance, emissions and ultimately tackling climate change. Maybe co-ops are the answer,’ says Segura.
When I raise the question of whether people can play a significant role by making the right choices about who delivers their food, Poperl is less optimistic. CoopCycle’s founders see the need for the right labour policies and macroeconomic reforms to improve the rights of delivery riders, rather than expecting gestures from consumers or restaurant owners, argues Poperl, since they are strangled by the same capitalist market structure that liberal reforms impose.
The fact that workers are counting on themselves locally to improve their conditions, outside the old structures of capitalism, tells the whole story. The wisdom of participatory democracy, as seen in Occupy and others, still lingers in the air today. Social movements in our cities have loosened workers’ endurance for a more humane workplace in the gig economy, with no return. Platform cooperativism could be a credible alternative for those navigating the streets of our cities.
CoopCycle now has over 80 co-ops across cities in Europe, Canada, and Australia.
