The gig economy is dead. It was never meant to survive
The fourth issue of “Workable Futures”. On a giant hoax, reverse pacing and how a broken model reshaped work.
Borgo Mezzanone is a rural settlement near Foggia, in the Italian region of Apulia. It hosts one of the largest informal migrant communities in the country, home to roughly 3,000 to 5,000 people, mostly agricultural workers, often undocumented. The site is defined by dangerous, inhumane conditions: corrugated metal shacks, no electricity, no running water. A large community waiting for the tomatoes to ripen, for winter to pass. The newspaper shorthand is telling: il ghetto.
Apulia, my own region, carries a long-standing reputation for gangmastering in the agricultural sector. Every summer, nothing changes. Fifteen years ago, a strike broke out for the first time among the tents of Boncuri, on the outskirts of Nardò, another village in Salento, “the heel of the boot”, as I usually explain to friends who have never visited, tracing the shape of the peninsula with my hands. It was a loud protest against Ghanaian caporali who supply labour to small firms, imposing appalling conditions and taking a cut of workers’ pay.
Now, a change of scenery. Picture the polished windows, fancy restaurants and soaring towers of Milan, the city that “never stops”, as its mayor proclaimed just hours before shutting it down at the outbreak of Covid. A few weeks ago, the public prosecutor ordered the local subsidiary of Deliveroo to be placed under special court administration, accusing the food delivery service of exploiting its workers. The order followed a copycat measure issued against Glovo, and another, dating back to 2020, when Uber Eats first came under scrutiny.
The accusation is the same for all players: practices associated with caporalato, unlawful labour intermediation and exploitation (a criminal offence). Food delivery companies are suspected of taking advantage of the “state of need” of thousands of riders to impose non-decent working conditions and wages that are, to say the least, laughable: roughly €2.50 per delivery, for shifts ranging from nine to ten hours, six days a week, sometimes every single day. The prosecutors appointed a judicial administrator to oversee the company, tasked with “regularising” its workers and ensuring compliance with labour rules and working conditions.
In several testimonies, couriers have also described the company’s methods of control over their work: “If there is a delay in the delivery, Glovo calls me to ask for explanations and to know where I am”. This suggests that, according to the reconstruction of the prosecutor’s office, “the IT architecture of the app […] is suited to enabling constant monitoring of work activity”. In their words, the offences “reflect a deliberate choice to engage in unlawful conduct, implementing a corporate policy that explicitly disregards the need to comply with the law”.
There is a great deal of Apulia in Milan. It is the business model, one might argue.
Like many other researchers in (labour) law and technology, I have spent the last decade following legal developments in the gig (or platform) economy. I have written far too many papers and blog posts on the topic, even co-authored a book. Every time an editor invites me to contribute my ideas on this phenomenon, I promise myself it will be the last time. Every time, I lie to myself. Not without reason, as recent years have culminated in the adoption of a timidly bold EU directive that attempts to bring a pinch of reality back to a world of overhyped myths.
Here, I do not want to rewrite the genealogy of this hoax, but rather offer a kind of funeral elegy, one of the few in which the dead are not spoken of kindly.
