Rich Mason quit his job as a theater manager to deliver meals on his bicycle in order to explore a career change. He says he could barely cover his rent as a rider for a big delivery app. Mason says it is a really dehumanizing experience. You can't talk to a human manager. You can either use your phone screen or not.
Mason wanted to find a better way to get food to hungry people. He started Wings, a cooperative in the North London neighborhood of Finsbury Park that delivers meals from local restaurants. The minimum wage in London is $11 an hour, but Wings has hired riders who work five-hour shifts for a guaranteed wage of $12.10 an hour, according to the Living Wage Foundation.
The food delivery service is ethical.
The inequity of the gig economy was one of the issues that was made painfully clear as demand for delivery services soared. Technology companies behind delivery apps are under pressure from investors and governments to offer better conditions for workers, who are often classified as self-employed with no benefits or a minimum wage.
George Maier, a fellow at the London School of Economics who studies the gig economy, says that the big apps have dominated the industry because they have large pools of money that allow them to build brand awareness and create complex systems to ensure reliability. All that spending has not yielded consistent earnings. Deliveroo and DoorDash were both briefly profitable during the second quarter of 2020 as stay-at- home orders increased.
The European Union plans to reclassify many gig economy workers as employees rather than independent contractors, which will make it harder for the industry giants to ever become profitable, according to Maier. A lot of these companies may fail before the end of the decade. The worker collective model could rearrange things to make them more efficient than in big companies.
Wings uses a Paris company that charges 2% of revenue for software that can track and manage orders from shops and restaurants. The company has licensed the program to roughly 75 groups across Europe, most of them less than a year old and half of which are supported by some form of government funding, according to Adrien Claude, who helps CoopCycle members gain traction. Claude says that every co-op has its own business and is usually cheaper than a restaurant. They want to take care of customers and restaurants.
Wings goes a step further by guaranteeing a minimum wage, which makes it harder to reach break-even, Mason says. Wings makes a commission from the restaurant and a delivery fee. It loses a couple of thousand pounds every month.
Wings would need 100 riders to break even, according to Mason. He would need another £500,000 over the next four years to get there, but he thinks the cooperative model will help him get more grants. He says that technology is not harmful in itself. You can do something really cool if you replace ownership of the technology with cooperatism.
