In September 2021, food delivery workers in Greece engaged in a fierce battle over their employment status with efood, the country’s dominant food delivery platform. efood has been the main player in the food delivery market since the outset, and the Hellenic Competition Commission has recently expressed fears that it has too large a share of this niche. On 15 September 2021, the company changed the employment status of its drivers from salaried workers to zero-hour independent contractors under the threat of complete dismissal.
The hashtag #cancel_efood began to trend overnight on Twitter (now X) with social media users urging the public to uninstall the efood Android app, used for online delivery and takeaways, and give it negative ratings on Google Play Store. Tens of thousands of efood users joined this action. Within two days, the app had fallen from a 4.7/5 to a 1/5 rating on Play Store. Reviews explicitly cited the company’s behaviour towards workers as the reason for their ratings.
Almost immediately, two unions (SVEOD and HWU) announced their willingness to fight against the change imposed by efood. After assemblies of the respected unions and efood workers, a four-hour strike was held and another 24-hour strike planned. On 23 September 2021, a day after the four-hour strike and a large demonstration by delivery drivers, the company announced that it would abandon the change in employment status for existing workers and give permanent contracts to 2,000 delivery drivers who until that point had been working under short-term contracts through a third-party company.
These events were seen as an important victory. The efood workers carried out their planned 24-hour strike as a victory parade in central Athens. Two months later, they formed an efood company union. This union continues to fight for a deal through collective bargaining to benefit all the drivers, regardless of their contract status, with health and safety protections and good pay.
It is interesting to examine the combination of public pressure and labour action that forced efood to capitulate. An online action, such as that mounted against the mobile app, has rarely been seen in labour disputes. Online activity in platform workers’ struggles usually focuses on mutual aid and organisation through chats and social media groups. This kind of action resembles the mass digital activism seen in social movements emerging from the Great Recession of 2009 (e.g. the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the anti-austerity Indignados Movement in Spain and the Aganaktismenoi in Greece). But the tactics employed in the efood case did not seek to raise awareness or target government policy, but rather to make a direct hit on the platform’s actual mobile application. These platforms base their business models on strong network effects. Users uninstalling the app and giving it one-star reviews on Play Store ruined one of its main assets – the connections between customers, restaurants and drivers, and thus the core business value of the platform.
Boycotting and public disgrace, long present in the inventory of workers’ struggles, can take on a new role in the digital age. This is particularly true in cases where the company involved in the labour dispute is a platform and its main asset is its digital presence and the economic relations that it creates. In order to be profitable, platforms need to have strong network effects and thus tend to become a monopoly or oligopoly. Any threat to these network effects is a threat to the business model as a whole. The fact that such platforms are easily replaceable make the network effect their most valuable asset. As Nick Srnicek describes in his book Platform Capitalism, ‘the key is that they do own the most important asset: the platform of software and data analytics. […] All that remains is a bare extractive minimum – control over the platform that enables a monopoly rent to be gained.”
Workers are aware of this reality and take it into account in their actions. In a similar strike by platform workers in Italy, riders used branded clothes and boxes to fight against the companies. They held rallies and went to restaurants to talk about their demands, dressed in company clothing and even while receiving or delivering food parcels on company time. Workers saw themselves as being in charge of the brand, the symbolic but also the core component of the company’s value proposition. This brand and the accompanying software creates the network effects and establishes the platform as a place where labour, restaurants and clients meet. The workers in Italy targeted the company brand in the urban landscape. Social media users in Greece targeted it online. Industrial action, workers’ solidarity and organisation are of course the backbone of the fight against platform capitalism. But one should not underestimate the opportunities that arise for organised workers when they realise the nature of their opponents and reestablish their core business advantages as disadvantages in a labour dispute.
At least one of the unions involved in the efood struggle, SVEOD, does not seem to underestimate these opportunities: ‘We are their body and face, their power and their true image. Platform companies are not a social productive force. They are hollow middlemen who control the flow of customers to retail. They are the miserable epitome of marketing. […] We generate their profits, we hold their whole mechanism in our hands.’
Gregory Tsardanidis is a researcher for Open Lab Athens and an Interaction Designer and Developer for Sociality Collective.
Image credit: RobsonPL via iStock