As platform companies try to force a race to the bottom, Xabier Villares reviews gig workers’ tactics for organising in Scotland and around the world.
The Workers’ Observatory (WO) originated back in 2018 as a collaboration between a group of food delivery riders and the STUC. Its activity has always involved monitoring new kinds of work in the city of Edinburgh and exploring how to support gig workers to organise, with a strong focus on the platform economy and a particular interest in on-demand delivery work, as well as care, ride-hailing, and other app-based work. Now independent of the STUC, the Observatory has consistently confronted the challenges of organising in these fields. Recently its activity has taken a step up.
During the last quarter of last year, the WO supported a short but intense process of workers’ inquiry into gig work in Edinburgh. It brought together a cohort of about twenty on-demand delivery riders, mostly with an Indian background, to undertake research on their working conditions in the city. Two days of workshops provided a lab for the riders to talk about the toughness of their jobs, focusing on how the platforms they work for control their activity through AI-driven and algorithmically managed systems.
Their conversations highlighted the increasing concern among workers about platform companies’ use of dynamic pricing to individually tailor their fees, a practice that uses a ‘reverse auction’ system where the system offers fees for rides at or just below the lowest rate it expects couriers to accept. If nobody accepts the rate, it will increase by a margin, until someone accepts it. In this race to the bottom, riders need to guess in less than 60 seconds whether accepting the next low-paid order will give them more income at a quicker pace, or on the contrary, whether the secret algorithm will penalise them in the future by giving them orders worth even less, since they’re willing to accept low rates. It’s part of the psychologically deceptive game that platform companies force workers to play, constantly testing them with opaque boosts and priority systems. Rather than working with the algorithm, the app-based workers work against it.
Activities and topics covered during the sessions included data mapping, learning from similar struggles in India and other parts of the world, developing campaign tactics, and the co-creation of a survey on working conditions. This survey was circulated by workers, resulting in remarkable insights that revealed average wages way below the minimum wage, issues associated with accounts getting blocked, a high rate of bike theft, customer tips being withheld, and 90% of respondents saying work gives them physical pain. The high point of the process was the formation of ROOM (Riders Observatory and Organising Movement), a new collective that remains active, meets periodically, and is now distributing its pocket-sized Guide for Delivery Riders in Edinburgh. Riders also made a video to tell the story of ROOM’s formation. From all of this experience, the Observatory has developed new methodologies of its own. It has produced a guide for developing and distributing a worker-led survey, and launched exploratory work in Glasgow and Dundee, aiming to seed similar hubs to the one established in Edinburgh.
In parallel to our work building power on the streets, the WO has been presenting workers’ findings on the reality of gig work at three different levels of government. In November we briefed MSPs on the day-to-day struggles of delivery workers, at a Fair Work Roundtable at the Scottish Parliament. This event was organised by Dr. Pedro Mendonca and his colleagues at the Centre for the Transformation of Work at Heriot-Watt University, who produced a key study called ‘Fair Gig Work in Scotland? A Review of Employment Practices in the Scottish Food Delivery Work’. In March we presented our insights and methods at an event at the House of Commons organised by Public Voices in AI, the programme that supported our activities at the end of last year. We joined others sharing critical approaches towards challenging the use of AI from below.
We also gained a small but significant win following our deputation to Edinburgh City Council in March. We were tipped off about a Conservative motion which sought to restrict or regulate e-bikes. It complained about ‘reckless weaving’ and ‘anti-social behaviour’ and demonised the migrant workers who depend on e-bikes for their living. Our deputation managed to flip the narrative by talking about what really matters: the exploitation of workers on our streets, who are forced to rush in a never-ending race against the algorithm to earn an income that is often less than the minimum wage. There are stark differences between the amendment that was passed after our intervention, and the kind of motion that passed recently at Plymouth Council which aims to bolster police powers to ‘take action against anti-social riders’ with no mention of the pressures forcing workers to race around the city. Where there’s no effective voice, it’s not possible to hear what workers have to say.
The Current Struggle
The Observatory is gaining good insight into the situation of food delivery workers both in Edinburgh and elsewhere. As a former fulltime rider in Edinburgh who is still riding for Deliveroo, I can tell how much the riders’ culture has shifted during the last few years. Affordable e-bikes have made food delivery more accessible for any person who needs a job. This shift has tended to eliminate push bikes from food delivery, and fewer and fewer couriers actually enjoy going for a ride. Today, the turnover among this group of workers is massive, and the streets are constantly full of new faces, which is one crucial factor that makes self-organisation so hard. It is no wonder the turnover and churn are so rapid. Who would enjoy working at the pace required to make a living, six or seven days a week, in many cases for less than £3 per order? As a consequence, it’s extremely difficult for workers to form stable groups.
For many, this was never the dream job. Nowadays at least, it’s hard to progress from it to any other jobs. It’s a dead-end job that’s predominantly performed by migrant workers who have very few options. This explains a second element that complicates self-organisation. We’re talking about marginalised groups, people with limited experience living in Scotland, who are often subjected to racial abuse, and among whom it will take time for the great currency to circulate that we need to make things happen: trust.
The Observatory is supporting their efforts to organise, and working in a space where unions have not been able to thrive, partly because the environment is substantially different to what unions are used to, and also because it has not been a priority at all for most unions. Here, we’re facing the desert of the real.
The gig economy has rapidly become an open field of exploitation, a wild west that started on the fringe of the economy but has been able to shift to the very core, especially since the pandemic boosted the use of certain technologies whilst free borrowed money was syphoned toward big tech companies. We’re talking about an ill-regulated area where platform companies can try out all kinds of tools to maximise profit, putting in place practices to exert control over both the production process and the workers themselves that were out of scope just a few years ago.
Beyond the fiction of ‘independent contractors’, workers across this field in fact rely on tips that are often withheld, are always subject to the diktats of a digital programme, and, as Adrain Hon as acidly suggested, are forced to work below an Application Programming Interface while the programmers work above it, and to act rather like non-player characters under constant gamefication. They are part of a cross-sectoral industrial reserve army, where the same individual, never fully employed, might potentially be a cab driver, a courier, a care worker, and also perform some extra hours at a Taskrabbit-type website. Platform companies profit from workers’ misery of not being able to find a more stable option. They enjoy an oligopolistic position after long being supported by investors gambling on these emerging models.
Where are we Heading?
For some, the solution appears clear: let’s regulate the gig economy to transform the false self-employees into employees. The gig economy is nothing new, and neither is disguised employment. Spain was a pioneer in implementing a law to tackle the riders’ situation back in 2021. More recently, the European Parliament approved Directive (EU) 2024/2831 to improve working conditions in platform work. However, from a Scottish perspective, this route would require waiting for a future UK government to either write and pass laws that Labour shows no sign of supporting, or to devolve employment responsibilities to Scotland. Far from making any bold moves in this direction, the latest actions at Westminster in this area have involved HMRC working with platform companies to monitor the pay-rates and tax duties of so-called self-employed riders, and the Home Office facilitating systems for platform companies to report migrant riders who fall foul of documentation requirements.
So, if no change in the status of workers will happen in the short term, what do we do?
First of all, the WO is committed to building the organisational capacity of workers who often go unheard in the union movement and public sphere. Through this work, we will keep building hubs where workers can find company when they feel overwhelmed by work and their permanent struggle with the app, and can further develop their skills, foster a sense of solidarity, and discover some of the joy of building power.
These hubs also serve as spaces for experimentation, to devise new ways to develop counter-power in a situation of perpetual imbalance between workers and companies. They are spaces where, through worker-led enquiries, workers will continue to explore and understand their conditions better, enabling them to design new tactics and devise and test new tools, including by using the latest technology available to share useful data about safe routes, rate trends and any other insights.
As well as building up knowledge, organisations, and campaigns, riders in these hubs are building broader alliances. Food delivery riders are mostly racialised workers, and the Observatory has already partnered with organisations representing migrant workers, from the Student Federation of India to Ofcina Precaria. It is working with organisations that have been building methods for reverse-monitoring platform companies like Worker Info Exchange, the IWGB in England, the Workers’ Algorithm Observatory in the US. In 2024 we visited Kolkata, West Bengal to run workshops with food delivery riders there, and in April 2025 we visited a clinic in Denver, Colorado for workers who have had their accounts suspended or deactivated. We are part of a set of organising projects and experiments that are sharing tactics across the world.
Through all this work, the Observatory aims to make the public aware of the practices that platform companies use to exploit workers and extract value, to inform and influence policymakers, and to work towards coordinated collective industrial action across and beyond the gig economy.
Xabier Villares is the secretary of the Workers’ Observatory.