This document describes the aims and operation of the OurFood application / workers' co-op.
If you are interested in joining or contributing, please email kmfevllt0@gmail.com (until a better method is devised)
Today, the company Foodora announced they will be shutting down due to the workers attempting to unionize. This is a classic behaviour of companies forced into a corner by successful worker action. Delivery workers are left wondering what to do.
Food delivery applications represent a large and increasing share of the methods people use to access food, whether it be applications like Instacart or Foodora.
The very profitable companies which dominate this space have spent a relatively small amount of money to develop a mobile application, a backend, and the basic infrastructure needed to run a business (accounting, operations, etc.), and the rest - as they say - is history.
By offering this service successfully and at scale, these companies have signed up a huge number of workers, a huge number of restaurants, and deliver orders to thousands of people every day.
These companies position themselves as relative monopolies, parasitizing the flow of money between workers, consumers, and restaurants, and deliberately attempt to keep all of these parties in the dark when it comes to the fact that it could be done differently.
OurFood aims to replace these parasitic companies with a service owned, operated, and democratically controlled by the workers who do the work of delivering food.
We naturally have an interest in assuring a top quality service to the customers we serve (unlike these companies), because we live in these communities, and we ourselves will need to make use of the service.
OurFood aims to provide a preferential business model from the perspective of restaurants as well, since compared to the existing private companies who are bloated with management, advertising costs, and the needs to pay dividends to shareholders (Delivery Hero, which owns Foodora, reported 18,070 employees in 2018), this service will run on a bare-bones budget, passing the savings on to workers, consumers, and restaurants (but primarily workers, who deserve a living wage).
OurFood will operate as a democratic workers' co-operative.
All positions of authority in the (very slim) central organizational structure needed to make decisions efficiently (without lengthy votes on every small matter) will be:
- appointed by democratic vote
- open to immediate recall at any time
Further, anybody elected in this way to work for the co-op as a non-delivery worker will be paid a rate of wages no higher than the average for the delivery workers.
This document is merely a beginning. The phases of the growth of this co-op will depend on many factors. The most basic beginning is to spark the idea, and gather interest and discussion. A starting point for a roadmap could be the following phases of growth:
A rapid prototype / minimum viable product will be produced by community collaboration.
In parallel, discussion in the broader community of food delivery workers will help to further refine both this roadmap and the specific rules of how the organization will operate.
In addition to the delivery workers, some workers will be needed who are capable of taking on greater responsibility for communications, planning, developing media, outreach, etc. These workers will offer their time to the collective, and if acclaimed by democratic vote, will be provided some basic funds for their living expenses while doing so. They will be responsible to carry out specific tasks to the liking of the membership, and as mentioned above, can be recalled at any time, should someone else be willing and able to step in.
A handful of restaurants will be approached to consider offering delivery via this app, which will provide them most attractively with a preferential rate on orders not available to the parasitizing app giants. The experience of these early adopters will be used to improve the system.
Should the app giants attempt to lower their rates in response, due to the easy availability of capital injections to keep their business afloat, this will first of all harm their bottom line, but also this is not something that can save them in the long run (see phase 4).
Preparations for this phase will involve coordination in many localities, and overcoming both organizational hurdles for the workers and technical hurdles for the programmers. These will strenghten the organization.
At all restaurants served by workers working for the big apps, cards will be dropped-off informing the restaurants of this exciting business opportunity. Similarly, workers passing each other on their routes will spread the word. An increasing number of workers will sign up or register their interest in participating.
On the technical side, systems will be improved to ensure the scalability of the platform when it rolls out to many thousands of restaurants.
A call will be made to workers in the sector to sign out from the big apps en mass, effectively a strike. This will put the big apps in disarray and unable to fulfill orders, while the only app able to continue delivering will be OurFood.
Once this is done, the app will function identically to the existing apps from the point of view of all concerned, merely without its super-exploitative, unaccountable aspect, which is a product of the unethical profiteering of a small group of investors and managers who do not work, but rely on the work of others.
This document is a work in progress, but should not be revised in its spirit. We workers should control our workplaces and our working conditions, and have the power to change the world if we come together.