Tech Won't Save Us - Migrant Workers in Australia’s Gig Economy w/ Tyler Riordan

Episode Date: October 5, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Tyler Riordan to discuss the state of the gig economy in Australia, the ongoing efforts to improve their conditions, and Tyler’s research on migrant food couriers in Brisbane.Tyler Riordan is a PhD candidate in hospitality and anthropology at the University of Queensland. Follow Tyler on Twitter at @tyler_riordan. 🚨 T-shirts are now available! Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon. Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com. Also mentioned in this episode:The deaths of gig economy workers have become a major focus on governments and the media over the past yearAustralia’s federal government has an ongoing Senate committee on gig workUber settled a case in December 2020 to avoid a ruling on employment status, but another test case has been filed in Federal CourtFoodora pulled out of Australia in 2018Menulog announced it was making some workers employees earlier this yearSupport the show

They really love doing food delivery. It's not a bad gig until something goes wrong. Once you've had an accident, once you've been deactivated without reason, once a pandemic hits, that's when you start to not enjoy it. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Tyler Riordan. Tyler is a PhD candidate in hospitality and anthropology at the University of Queensland, and over the past year he has been doing ethnographic research with temporary migrant gig workers in Brisbane, Australia, and riding along with them as they, you know, make their deliveries, wait for new jobs, and kind of just, you know, go about their day-to-day activities. So Tyler and I talked about recent developments in Australia, but also talked about some of the

insights that he gained by doing that research, by spending time with those workers, and what the future of the gig economy in Australia might look like. I think that there is an interesting conversation here about migrants and, you know, migrants who work in the gig economy and what is going to work for them necessarily versus, you know, some of the things that we often discuss around employment rights and things like that. Especially when you think back to last week's episode with Veena Dubal, where we talked about the large percentage of people of color and immigrants who work in the gig economy in the United States, and how that helps to kind of justify their exclusion from employment rights and their earning of lower wages. And so, you know,

obviously, I support the fight for employment rights for gig workers to improve the conditions of gig workers naturally. But I think that, you know, part of what comes out in the conversation with Tyler is how we also need to consider, you know, what the effects of those would be on some of these temporary migrant workers. And even, you know, this will come up in a future conversation that I have as well. But what that also means for, you know, undocumented workers, workers who are not working legally, so to speak, and the need to also consider them while we're ensuring that we protect workers' rights and the standards of workers' rights in our countries. So I really enjoyed this conversation with Tyler. I think you are going to really like it as well as the first conversation in this series of six episodes

on the state of gig work around the world that I'll be doing over the next three weeks. So stay tuned for those. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. And you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. If you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, and you can share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And this episode, like every episode of Tech Won't Save Us, is free for everybody because listeners who can support the show choose to do so. So if you are enjoying these conversations, learning from these conversations on the gig economy around the world and the broader

topics that I discuss on the show, you can join supporters like Lika from the Netherlands and Griff from Cascadia by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Tyler, welcome to tech won't save us. Hi, Paris. Thanks for having me here. Now I'm really excited to chat with you about you know, what's happening with the gig economy in Australia. And you know, in particular, the work that you've been doing with temporary migrant gig economy workers in Brisbane. So I want to make sure we touch on those two things. But I want to start with getting a broader overview, I guess, of what's been happening with the gig economy in Australia in the past couple of years, I guess, just to give

some context for people who will be listening from outside of Australia and might not have a very good idea of what's been going on there. And so I feel like one of the stories that has really kind of caught the public mood and I guess kind of affected the way that Australians and that lawmakers think about the gig economy is these stories that have been in the media, in particular during the pandemic, about injuries and deaths of food delivery workers. So can you talk a little bit about what has been happening there and what kind of effect that has had on, I guess, the wider discussion around the gig economy in Australia? So I guess to start off, the gig economy here is pretty similar to most other jurisdictions.

So workers are under independent contractor models, not entitled to minimum wage, paid per piece, no access to benefits or social security pensions, things like that. And most of the focus on kind of research and media in the gig economy is related to ride share and food delivery. So as I'm sure most of your listeners know, it touches so many industries, healthcare, professional services, academia, and so on. But really, if we're talking about the gig economy in Australia, we're mainly focused on Uber or DD cars.

And then in terms of food delivery, we've got Uber Eats, Deliveroo, DoorDash, MenuLog, and then a terms of food delivery we've got uber eats deliveroo door dash menu log and then um a couple of others including um there's a couple of companies that focus particularly on um chinese speaking markets as well which we don't often hear too much about and then you've got freelancer upwork and these kind of things as well so most of the the current kind of focus is around safety, particularly for food delivery workers. So as you touched on in your question, we found out last year that five food delivery cyclists had been involved in traffic accidents and died. We've since found out that another two have been announced, and this is across different companies

I won't name the companies but we've since found out another two have died and we only found about a month ago but these fatalities happened a year prior and what's actually happened is these deaths weren't reported and they only came out as part of initially a New South Wales state government inquiry. And then now we've got a federal government inquiry. So I won't bore you with the details of governance, but basically in Australia, each state has different laws, different courts and so on. And then we've got federal systems and the Senate. So the Senate inquiry is where some of this information has been coming out.

But I guess what's most relevant here is we wouldn't have known about these deaths unless these inquiries happened. And this all comes back to the independent contractor status. So because they're not employees, there's no requirements to report to our work safety commissions and so on. And there's also questions about, are they actually working at the time of the accident? So in one of the more famous examples, a young student from Turkey, Burak Dogan, he was killed in Sydney and his death was not reported as a workplace fatality because his last trip was canceled 25 minutes before he was killed. So he was still logged into Uber Eats app at the time, but their insurance, for example, cuts out 15 minutes after delivery.

And this goes around these big questions around the gig economy. When does it work? Should waiting time be classified as work? And the obvious consequences here is that his family wasn't offered compensation in the first instance because he wasn't working at the time. So yeah, that's kind of the wrap up. And I was listening to your episode the other day on the situation in Canada. And I felt a bit of similarities here that we're not really leading the way. We're following what's happening in other parts of the world. And there's a lot of work to be done.

I definitely sympathize with that feeling, especially, you know, as you say, looking at what's been happening here in Canada, the discussion around the rights of gig workers doesn't seem as nearly advanced as in the United States, at least, you know, publicly and in politics and things like that as well. And so I think you provide a really good, you know, overview of what's been going on in Australia there to give us an idea of, you know,

the different companies and the model that is operating. But also, you know, I think some of the bigger issues that are really getting into the minds of the public and lawmakers as they try to figure out what to do about this sector that is obviously growing and has grown during the pandemic, but where workers are not getting the rights that they deserve or not being protected properly, as you're talking about with the safety aspects of this. You mentioned there the Senate inquiry. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about, you know, how that inquiry came to be and what has been happening with it so far. You know, is there any indication of what might come out of it at the end? Yeah. So as I mentioned, there are initially some state government inquiries.

So Victoria, which has Melbourne as the capital, started out with an inquiry into on-demand work a few years ago. And then New South Wales, which is the state where Sydney is, they did their inquiry into safe work. And it was only through these inquiries that I guess the wider public and the politicians started to realise the depths of what was going on here. So there's not really much regulation up until now, and there's not really much knowledge up until now and there's not really much knowledge about what's going on and obviously with COVID-19 and the impacts there this kind of brought it all to the fore so this kind of thing has been happening for a long time as we know you know these kind of contractual models aren't new at all so all that that being said, in December of 2020, the federal government started

the Senate Select Committee on Job Security, which is basically just an inquiry into the impact of insecure and precarious work. So this is still open. They released an initial or interim report a few months ago, which has some great kind of positive recommendations. And it's due to close in November. But the nature of these inquiries, all they offer at this stage are recommendations. And then it's up to the government to decide if they want to take them up or not. Interestingly, this inquiry is led by members of the opposition party. So whether it kind of gets much purchase or not is another issue. And I guess what we saw particularly around the New South Wales inquiry, which was finished already, is some of the recommendations are great, but they're not

really addressing the key issues so far. So in terms of safety, they're putting the onus onto the workers. So the New South Wales inquiry was into food delivery specifically. And that one, what they're mainly focusing on is, do you have a helmet? Is your bike safe to use? Are you wearing highly visible clothing and things like this? But this doesn't really address the core issues around algorithmic pressure, fast-paced delivery times, expectations, things like that. So, yeah, as I said, it's putting the onus on the worker to do more work. And, I mean, the workers in the field find workarounds anyway, or they've already got lights and things anyway. The people I was speaking to about it, they just say, well, yeah, it's great. I get free equipment, but it doesn't stop me getting hit by a car or riding in the 60,

70 kilometer an hour roads mixed with trucks and whatnot. That's the core issue that hasn't been addressed yet. So I guess summing up, it's a great start. There seems to be a bit of political will there, but if it actually means anything significant or not is another question yeah again like i completely relate to what you're talking about like here in canada ontario the biggest province currently has like a committee that's looking into the future of work and the gig economy is part of that and the federal government has a committee that's looking at the gig economy and stuff, but there's been very little word about, you know, what they're doing there and what might come out of it. So yeah, it's kind of tough to feel much hope that

it's going to go anywhere, even if, you know, maybe some of the discussions sound like they might be okay, but, you know, we'll see if that ever makes it to the legislative stage and things like that. You know, you're talking about the workers and the concerns of the workers there, you know, especially you were talking about safety. Is there much organizing among workers, whether through unions or through their own kind of collective organizations, to put demands to the government or to the companies to improve their situations? There's not as much as other parts of the world. There are some groups or some smaller groups that have joined up with mainly the Transport Workers Union,

which has had a few kind of highly successful campaigns with individual workers, and then with some groups that have some connection of language or culture. So what I'm talking about here is, so there was a famous case of hungry panda workers, and that's mainly kind of Chinese-speaking, Chinese background, worker communities. They're more migrants here permanently, so they're kind of settling in Australia for a longer period. Whereas in the case of food

delivery workers that I'm working with, they're actually mainly temporary migrants. And when I say temporary migrants, it's primarily international students. So that has a few unique circumstances due to our, I guess, migration policies. One, they're here on short-term visas. They often have limited levels of English. They come from all different backgrounds, mainly from the global south, a lot of Latin Americans, Southeast Asians, people from India, for example.

But what that means, and we're still trying to work through this with the research, but I think that the reason they're not collectivizing in ways they are in other places around the world is because they're here in a short-term basis. They're here to kind of make money to fund their studies, to fund their life, which is expensive here. And actually, this is what's come out of my research as well is

they really love doing food delivery. It's not a problem. It's not a bad gig until something goes wrong. Once you've had an accident, once you've been deactivated without reason, once a pandemic hits and you're only earning $30 a day, that's when you start to not enjoy it so much anymore. So that being said, there's not been formal organizing, but what we have seen are individual and collective acts of resistance. So they are linking up to share tips to help each other out in terms of taxation. If they have an accident, and we saw this in the case of some of those workers that died, is workers amongst themselves started to organize GoFundMes, basically fundraising, online fundraising activities, to pool money to get the bodies repatriated.

And these are workers that they don't necessarily know the worker that's died. They've just decided, due to the circumstances as well, that they've got to, I guess, look after themselves, look after each other, because there's no one else engaging with them at the moment. It's that solidarity, right? Even if there's not the collective structures that you're talking about, there's still that solidarity between the workers. And I think what you're describing there with the workers saying that, you know, they really like this work. It's just that, you know, the protections and the dependability isn't there that you would want from work that you're doing. I think that resonates with, you know, what I've heard workers saying in a number of other countries as well, right? So I think that sounds spot on. And I want to come back to your work with the temporary migrant workers that you were

talking about in just a minute. I also read that there have been lawsuits against Uber in particular in Australia, one that was settled in December 2020, that looked like it was settled to try to avoid a judgment on worker status and whether workers should be contractors or not. And then another one that was recently filed in August of 2021 that seems to try to get some sort of a ruling by the federal court on employment status and the other kind of benefits and rights of these workers. Can you talk a little bit about those lawsuits? Yeah, I can a little bit. I'm not an expert in this area to be right up front. And I've also just finished my fieldwork. So I've been out on the bike rather than I'm keeping up with the news. But basically, as you've mentioned, it kind of follows similar patterns to other

jurisdictions around the world. There have been a couple of high profile cases against Uber. There was a famous case a few years ago against Foodora, who actually chose to leave the country, leave the market, which I think I actually heard is quite similar the other day on this podcast. The same thing happened in Canada, in Ontario, there was a similar ruling. In that case, it was to let them have the right to unionize. And instead of letting them do that, Foodora just left the country. Actually, I've got an interesting story on this. I'll get back to it in a second, just to sum up the previous one. But basically, yeah, what you've said is right is what they've done is in the end, they've reached settlements with the individual workers.

And what this means is there's no precedent for future cases. Basically, because no decision has been made in the end, not much changes. In the case of the test case you mentioned as well. So this one's just been announced a few months ago, and that's about Uber rideshare drivers as opposed to food delivery. And basically, there's a few litigants there, and they're trying to see whether this work is as flexible as possible, particularly around this idea of freedom of when they can choose to work and when not. This is really interesting in the case of food delivery, because you can only really work at the time people are ordering food, which is lunchtime, dinnertime, and the weekends.

But basically, it all goes back to these questions of the employment model. Are they really independent contractors or not? And what we've seen with the workers is when these cases happen, the platforms make changes that actually make the conditions worse for workers. So going back to the Foodora case, as part of my research, I've spoken to people who were involved with Foodora, and they used to have events for contractors. They'd have a barbecue, trying to get some socialization. They'd offer support when

there were accidents or advice and things like this. But this indicated the employment model, which wasn't positive for the company. So they had to cut all this out, cut off support for workers, you know, close down customer support, phone lines and things like this. When I say customer, I mean for the workers to try and avoid that employment relationship, which could be seen as detrimental to the platform. And it involves paying more wages and safety training and whatnot, which is not a sustainable business model, as we know. I think that's a really good example of, you know, how things could be better, but then just to try to avoid this like classification, then things have to be made worse. And, you know, I think we see that in a lot of places where they're trying to fight back against these reclassifications or these changes to the employment model, that things tend to get worse until they're forced to to make them better.

And even then, you know, they find ways to get around them. One other question before we return to your research, and that's Menulog, one of the companies that operates in Australia, recently announced that I believe they're reclassifying some of their workers as employees. And the way that I saw this reported was that it seemed like it was kind of a preemptive response to the Senate inquiry. Can you talk a little bit about what's going on there? And is it as good as it sounds? Yeah, so Menulog announced a lot of things. And this came as part of the Senate inquiry. So Menulog, basically, their parent company is Just Eat, which is quite a popular brand in Europe. And basically, they announced they would

start a pilot employment program. And this, as I said, was part of the Senate inquiry. The CEO got up and said, you know, all the right things. We have a moral imperative to move workers to full-time employment. And basically, what they're announcing was a trial of employing riders only in the Sydney Central Business District. And this got a lot of positive press and it also got a lot of public support. So in the commentary on social media, I noticed people saying, you know, I've just deleted Uber Eats.

I'm only going to use Menulog because they're more ethical. So this was announced in April. Up until now, as far as I know, they've signed up 10 part-time riders and the trial will only involve 100 workers in total. Workers are still using their own bikes, although they receive a subsidy and the shifts are about four hours long. The CEO has also mentioned that they want to have all their couriers employed within a few years' time, in inverted brackets. Although in June, he then went on to announce that, and this is a quote, we would never sign up for anything where we think it's going to cost us too much, Mr. Belling said. That will break our business, and it will mean that restaurants are going to shut down. We're going to not be able to engage with as many couriers as we want and people are

going to lose jobs. And basically what he was saying is that we want to employ couriers, and this is another quote, however, the current regulatory framework presents a number of challenges with specific regards to existing modern awards, the lack of flexibility they present, and subsequent costs. So basically, the stunt has worked so far. They've got some great press, and the media's not really questioning the details. You know, as we know with the discourse around the gig economy, the sharing economy, but basically reading between the lines,

it looks like it's another attempt to change regulations. In that quote I mentioned before, the CEO was saying it's unaffordable to pay penalty rates of up to $50 an hour, which is what it would cost under the current models. And that's around $38 US for context an hour. As I mentioned before, basically, as we know, through your podcast, through the guys at TMK, for example, these business models are not sustainable to pay a living wage. So I wouldn't put this announcement as kind of the high hopes that people think it may be. Let's put it that way. Yeah, I think that's a really good description of what's actually going on there behind that

announcement. So I appreciate that. So I do want to shift gears now and talk a little bit about the work that you've been doing in Brisbane, you know, doing research with food delivery workers up there, in particular temporary migrants. And so to start, do you have any idea of, you know, what percentage of gig workers are temporary migrants or immigrants in Australia? To start off, we don't know. We've seen this around the world because the platforms are not required to report these kinds of things and they're not always willing. The current estimates are that eight or nine in 10 food delivery workers are migrants, which is pretty similar

to a lot of places around the world. There has been some research by Paula McDonald and colleagues, which was part of the Victorian inquiry. And basically they found that permanent residents are 1.7 times more likely than Australian citizens to be current or former platform workers. So that's across all platforms. And in food delivery, it's a bit higher. But basically, it's mainly temporary migrants doing food delivery.

We just don't know the exact numbers. And why this is important is most research now, and particularly the way the platforms promote themselves, are around this idea of kind of it's a side hustle. It's a way to supplement your income and whatnot. But what McDonald and colleagues found and what's come out of my field work as well is most workers that do food delivery are reliant on this income for, you know, 100% of their income. Now, this is particularly important in the case of the pandemic, for example,

as they are temporary migrants, that means they're excluded from social security payments. So we had here JobKeeper and JobSeeker were the names of these programs. And as independent contractors, they're also excluded from payments that are designed for employees. So this kind of puts them at a double precarity. And particularly for this cohort, they've often come to Australia with a lot of debt in order to get here. Cost of living is very high comparatively. So if you're only able to earn, in the case of the pandemic, $30 a day, now it's kind of $100 to $200 a day, depending on how much work you do. Once you cover living costs and things, there's not much left to go around. Yeah, you know, I think it's an important point. And I

think it backs up a lot of what we've been seeing around the world as well. You know, in one of the pieces that you sent me, you also wrote that temporary migrants are three times more likely to be platform workers than citizens. And so, you know, I think that further demonstrates, you know, the over-representation of them in this kind of work. And now, so you were actually out, you know, biking with these migrant workers, you know, talking to them about their work, observing what was going on. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, how you did that and what that was like? Yeah. So basically I come from an anthropological background and our kind of main research method is called ethnography.

For those that are not aware, basically this means participant observation and it means you're working with them, spending time with them. When the people you want to hang out with are on bikes, basically that means you've got to get on the bike as well. So I've just finished up about a year in the field shadowing food delivery workers so what shadowing means this comes from um business language basically you you follow a worker during their work day to look over their shoulder to see what they see to do what they do so yeah i was out on the bike i started with the kind of manual in australia we call it a push bike guess, just the bicycle. For the first few months, really struggled to keep up because about 90% of workers

now are using e-bikes. So I got an e-bike as well. And the benefits of this approach is, I guess, first up, you get those embodied experiences and you know what it's like when a car's zooming past you or honking their horn or yelling stuff out the window at you or whatever um you also have that physical and mental exhaustion at the end of the day but the best benefit i think is that in those down times between deliveries you just get to hang out and have a chat and talk about you know what did you think of that customer or i saw that worker gave you a bottle of juice you know, what did you think of that customer? Or I saw that worker gave you a bottle of juice, you know, why did they do that or whatever. So it really gets the conversation happening and that lived experience, you know, you can't replicate just asking questions on Zoom or

in a cafe or whatever. So yeah, really enjoyed it. Miss being on the bike and miss the friends I've made, but that's all part of the research process. Absolutely. You know, it sounds like, you know, it would be a really interesting experience and obviously one that is really enriching for the research as well and for the observation that you get out of that. And so I wonder what were some of the kind of major takeaways or things that you noticed while you were doing this work, you know, that you that you realized about the work and about these workers in particular? It's a good question. I guess first up, and this is something I make a bad habit of doing, is we keep referring to them as workers, but they're people. And that's the main takeaway.

I'm always trying to remind myself when I get a platform like this. And you know what this means is they have all these highs and lows and interests outside getting a burger and fries from A to B. And that's particularly at the start, I really found workers were enjoying it. When I say this, I don't mean just kind of that marketing speak of, you know, the flexibility and autonomy of being your own boss, which is there. And, you know, we can't discount that. But, you know, when you're an international student, it's a great gig because you can sign on or sign off when you want. You can take a break. And as we did one day, we went down and looked at some Formula One cars or

another time with, I'll refer to this worker as Manny. I spent a good deal of time with this guy. And we'd go around the city. I went to his medical appointment one day. We went to talk to his real estate agent another day. We spent a whole day trying to track down a digital clock radio because he wanted to improve his English more. And, you know, all these kind of things you couldn't do if you're working in a kitchen, for example, or working as a cleaner, which are generally the options available to these workers. So after the first kind of six months or so in the field, I really had in my head, hang on, this work isn't as bad as everyone makes it out to be. Maybe I could start doing it on the side while I help fund my studies and whatnot. And just as I had this thought, honestly, I was thinking this just as my friend Manny almost got

backed into by a truck. And it snapped me out of it like that. And that's when I kind of made this realization, well, yeah, it's great and flexible and whatnot but you could die you could not come home from work and as we've seen with these recent examples and no one would even know potentially you know if you don't have social networks here if you don't have contact with your family that's how some of these the news of these deaths came about it wasn't until family members overseas notified the authorities that they hadn't spoken to their family member in australia for a certain period of time and that's when they realized oh hang on this person's not alive

anymore so yeah i guess that's probably my major takeaways and um you know i've got some more specific findings we might get to in a bit about the way workers kind of go about responding to these challenges such as algorithmic management and whatnot. Yeah, absolutely. You know, what you're describing there is one of the things that stood out to me as I was reading some of your work, right? You know, the degree to which the workers say that they prefer the gig work to like traditional hospitality work that they would have to do because, you know, there's no asshole bosses and stuff like that, that they need to worry about. But on the other side, there's that risk of injury. There's the algorithmic deactivation, there's the stolen bikes and, you know, so many other things to worry about while they're on the road and that they don't have protection from, you know, with the, the app company that they're working for, right. That,

you know, they're, they're not protecting them if something happens. As you said earlier, there might not even be insurance or compensation if something happens to them, you know, depending on when it happens while they're doing the work. You know, you were talking there about the algorithmic deactivation and the other ways that these workers kind of have developed tools to respond to some of these issues. Can you talk a little bit about that aspect of it? I'm kind of working on a few papers and book chapters at the moment. And I guess the theme that links them is the way that workers are kind of individually and collectively resisting and challenging the circumstances they're in. So I'll start with the resisting. So what I mean here is that they've developed ways

of challenging the authority of restaurants, customers, and the platforms and algorithms themselves. So this could mean in terms of the restaurants, if a restaurant worker or owner treats a worker badly, this worker may put this up on their social media or WhatsApp or signal groups or whatever. And then the workers will collectively decide to avoid that restaurant in the future. Or they may go on to Google and give them bad reviews and things like that. I'm not saying I think this is the right thing to do, but this is what's happening. And then the idea, I guess, behind that is that potentially that restaurant will change their behavior

and treat workers more hospitably in the future. In terms of the customer, I've got some really cool stories here. I'll just touch on one. But basically another guy I've been working with, basically when he arrives at an apartment building that he doesn't want to deal with the complex layout or interior he'll send messages to customers to kind of nudge them to come down and collect the food from the the gate so that he doesn't have to lock up his bike and waste his time and get lost and whatever so this is really interesting

this worker also he's really creative and the workers themselves, they all sought out their own COVID-19 vaccines. They weren't eligible at the time necessarily, but they found ways to get the vaccines all above board or legally and whatever. But then he started posting this in his bio that the customer sees basically it has a question on this on uber eats app you know why do you do delivery and he used to put to fund my studies or whatever and now he puts i'm fully vaccinated to keep my customers safe or something like this basically he explained it as you know he is looking after himself you know he's on the front line he's at risk to the virus, but he also wants to protect the customer

and maybe it's going to make the customer tip more. So that's just an example there. And then in terms of how they resist the algorithms. So there's a few examples. I won't go into them too much, but basically they can go slow deliberately to try and get a second order tagged on, which basically is usually more financially beneficial than waiting to get a second separate order.

They have all at points collectively decided to, you know, we're only going to accept deliveries over $5. So this was particularly the case on social media. And they all stopped accepting $3 deliveries, $4 deliveries. And then the platforms realized, well, you know, we have to pay more. So they all collectively got a bit more. And, you know, I'm giving examples of financial benefits. That's not the only case. It also helps, you know, make the work more enjoyable. It's got a lot of other social benefits as well beyond financial, but I guess

why it's important is that it brings into question this idea that we've come to that, you know, workers' whole lives are controlled by these algorithms. Well, they are, but as workers have done for centuries, we find ways to resist. We find shortcuts that make the work better and also more enjoyable. You know, if you've got to get up and go back out on the bike again, day after day, you need kind of these motivations beyond kind of the gamification that the platforms put upon them. Yeah, you know, I think that's a really good point. And when you were talking about the reviewing,

it reminded me, I spoke to Ritha Khadri a number of months ago about gig workers in Indonesia. And that was one of the things that they did when there was like a restaurant that treated one of the gig workers badly. They would do negative reviews on like Google or whatever they use. So yeah, you know, it's interesting to see how the tactics are used in multiple different places around the world. You know, we were we were talking earlier about the desire to fight for rights for the workers who do this food delivery and the other gig work, and how employment status was one of the things that a number of workers are fighting for and trying to achieve.

And that has obviously been part of the discourse, you know, outside of Australia, as well as in it. What would that mean? Do you think I I guess, at least, for these temporary migrant workers that you were talking to? Would that affect their ability to do this work or whether on visas and things like that, do you think it would still be okay for them? This is something I had to reconcile while I was in the field, is the workers I was working with aren't necessarily interested in employment status. They're not following the media stories in the way I am. And what I mean by this is, so as part of research, you need to get informed consent from the people that you're talking with. And on the title of my project and in the first description,

it says whatever it was at the time, investigation into food delivery in the gig economy. And a few workers started asking me, what's the gig economy? And I kind of thought about it and I thought, well, okay, that makes sense. And, you know, I've got family in Colombia and I speak Spanish. And one day I was trying to explain my research to them and I couldn't translate what gig economy means. It took a while and we got, you know, and it was actually my mother-in-law who said, you know, but how is that different from work? And once you start to kind of engage with that and where people come from, you know, I had someone else at a conference presentation once

he stood up and he said, you know, we just call that work in my country, you know. So the reason I bring this up is, and it goes to the premise of the question i think we need to really engage with the idea that people are choosing to do this work and for whatever reason they could go work in a kitchen if they wanted but as you said before you know they don't want an asshole boss they don't want to be forced to work at times they don't want to work and things like that so i don't know that employment is the answer I don't know what the answer is but you know and this is something I'm looking at in other areas of my research you know industries like hospitality are inherently insecure that's not the option we want to go back to because there's a whole reason people don't want to work in hospitality retail

agriculture you name it. So I think we've got to make all forms of work, I guess, more secure, more values-based, make jobs attractive and not just beyond paying higher wages, which we need, but giving workers freedom to have some form of decision in the job they're doing. No one wants to, in inverted commas, work for the man anymore, because we know there's better options out there. Even more broadly, I think it's an interesting discussion, because especially, you know, I've heard the discussions, I can't remember which countries, but I'm sure it's the reality

in a number of countries where there's even workers who are doing work on these apps who, you know, don't have visas to be working in specific countries, but that's how they get by, right? And so that's not to say that, you know, we shouldn't seek employment status and better rights for the workers who can have it. But I think that there also needs to be this consideration of, you know, what do you do with these other workers who are reliant on this? And, you know, I think clearly, we don't just want to have like a hard kind of crackdown immigration policy that doesn't try to help these workers or these people. Yeah, so I think that's an interesting discussion. And I'm sure it's one that's happening more broadly.

Yeah, there's just something there you reminded me of. And this is really come out of the research as well. And I'm still trying to, I guess, clarify it in my mind. But it's not just about the work. And, you know, as you've mentioned there, we also have problems with our migration systems. We've got problems with lack of access to healthcare and all these kind of things. So I guess we need more holistic solutions that look beyond just the sectors and the so-called gig economy. You know, I think you've given us a good overview of, you know, what's going on in Australia, but also of what you have been finding in your work in Brisbane, you know, working in particular with temporary migrant workers. And so I wanted to close just by asking you, is there anything else,

you know, about gig work in Australia or about the research that you've been doing that you think it's important for our audience to understand before we end our conversation? I guess I'll finish with, I'm only one person telling the stories on behalf of the small amount of people I spoke to. And I find as researchers, as media, as customers, as governments, we all are invested in the gig economy and we're all invested in this idea of the future of work, but we're not all engaging with the people that are doing this work. So I really think we need to have more voices from these individuals that are marginalized, that they're excluded, that they don't have a voice in these conversations. And obviously it's not the case all around the world.

We've seen some great things happening. Most recently comes to mind what's happening in New York City, for example. But I think we need to have genuine conversations with the people that do this work. They're not robots. They're not autonomous driving or flying vehicles. They're people. And they're people that are looking after us, they're putting themselves at risk, not only with COVID-19, but, you know,

with getting hit by a car or whatever, to bring a pizza to our door. And there's a whole other conversation we could have, and I know you're having it with other guests about the cost of this convenience you know this expectation that you know we can get a ice cream delivered in 15 minutes in the case of what some of the new platforms in europe are proposing or get a whatever pair of shoes delivered within the day or by the next day like so i guess wrapping up we've all got a part to play we We're all invested, but we've got to be talking to the people and really listening to what they want as well. Yeah. I think that's a really good way to close this conversation. Tyler, I really appreciate you taking the time. Thanks so much. No problem. Thank you.

Tyler Riordan is a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland, No problem. Thank you. that I put into making this show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.