Throwdown At The Drive-Thru!

JustEat Drivers Take The Fight To McDonald’s

JustEat Workers in Sheffield, England have been striking at McDonald’s since December. I interviewed Ed, who has been on the ground, helping workers organize.

What are the JustEat workers agitated about?

The strikers work for a French gig economy company called Stuart, which provides the deliveries for JustEat. In 2021 Stuart cut the per-job base rate of pay by 24%. Before, you would get £4.50 per delivery as a minimum, going up to £7.50 after 2.5 miles. Now, you get £3.40. That, alongside relentless over-hiring that’s totally out of proportion to demand, has wrecked Stuart as a platform where you can earn a good living. A couple of years ago, if you put in the hours, you could make a grand a week on this platform. Now people are working 10-15 hours just to make £100 in a day. And remember: these workers have to cover all their own vehicle and insurance costs!

How long has the strike been going on?

The strike started in Sheffield on 6 December, the day the pay cut was rolled out into Sheffield. Sheffield is the best-organized city in terms of food couriers. Since 2019, local socialists, led by the group I am part of, Workers’ Liberty, have been assisting drivers in building up a branch of the IWGB trade union. That is a relatively new union that has done a lot of work organizing migrant and “spuriously-self-employed” workers in the UK. When the strike began there were about 80 members of the IWGB in Sheffield. There are more now. The pay cut was rolled out city by city. It came to Sheffield last because drivers here threatened to kick off when the pay cut was first announced in autumn. After some rowdy Zoom calls, Stuart put off the roll-out by 8 weeks. As the pay cut was rolled out to other cities, there were sporadic strikes in various places. But without union organization or a link to the broader labour and socialist movements, these strikes fizzled out pretty quickly. What drivers tend to do when they get pissed off about an issue is organize a big, spectacular one-day shut-down. Everyone just turns the app off. That seems impressive. It can cause big losses to the company for a single day. But it is expensive for drivers and it is hard to police. After all, you can’t put a picket line in between a driver and their phone. What we did in Sheffield was start picketing particular restaurants. That meant that the pickets could receive strike pay, and other workers could simply decline jobs from the target restaurants and work elsewhere. This allowed us to keep the strike going. This argument, about the superiority of targeted strikes with picket lines over one-day switch-offs, is a recurring theme of this strike.

Say more about the organization

I was part of a group of socialists in Sheffield that saw what the IWGB was doing in Nottingham (i.e. organizing strikes among Deliveroo workers) in 2019 and we decided to go out on West Street and chat with delivery drivers about what they would like to change. Some drivers, mostly Yemeni guys, but people from other backgrounds too, got together and formed a union, the South Yorkshire Couriers’ Network. They formed this as an independent grouping with no membership fees, but one by one, they were persuaded to join the IWGB union, and then affiliated their local group to the union. The IWGB is not without its problems and it is not an alternative to the mainstream trade union movement. It is a part of the mainstream trade union movement, albeit a particularly dynamic and fast-moving part, with all the good and bad that this implies. Up until the Sheffield events most of the food courier organization in the IWGB was weighted more towards white grad students doing deliveries on bicycles in between lectures. The Sheffield branch has always been made up of migrant workers in cars, who often face substantially greater exploitation and problems, from a variety of different angles. Sheffield also soon became the strongest branch of the IWGB. It had a good effect on the union: it challenged the IWGB in some ways. The IWGB has done overall a pretty good job in terms of helping foster these workers’ organizing efforts.

Up until now, this organization has mainly been involved in casework, and a couple of strikes against Deliveroo, over pay cuts and unfair terminations – these have been unsuccessful – and various fights against local villains, like the City Council (for handing out unfair parking fines when couriers stopped in loading bays to pick up food), or certain restaurants (for being rude to drivers or denying them use of the toilets, for example). We’ve won all our local fights but lost all our national ones – until now. We are pretty confident that we can win this fight.

Why did they decide to target McDonald’s?

McDonald’s processes a high volume of delivery orders. They are JustEat’s single biggest client and therefore Stuart’s single biggest client. The high volume of orders coming out of each restaurant means that even if a few drivers cross a picket line, the overall disruption and loss will be very high, incentivising restaurant managers to switch off their JustEat tablet in order to avoid waste, re-makes, complaints, and snarling up the kitchen. But striking against McDonald’s involves a lot of sacrifices from drivers. After 35 days or so of hitting McDonald’s every single night for 3-5 hours, that’s a lot of lost income for both the company and for the drivers. In order to keep the strike going on a more sustainable basis, we took a decision to move to hitting Greggs, which is the second or third largest client. We are able to cause substantial disruption even though the overall order volume is lower, meaning that the strike hurts Greggs worse than it hurts drivers. In addition to the daily strike on Greggs in Sheffield, we have started doing “Sunday specials” where we go to a drive-thru and hold a rowdy protest with a convoy of cars.

The drivers hold meetings every single week, which their elected local leaders, some volunteers, and any drivers who want to (union members or not) can attend to debate the way forward. Only drivers can vote, regardless of union status. That is really crucial. The more openness and transparency in the decision-making, the more solidarity and courage the workers can muster. These meetings monitor the strike week by week. In Sheffield, which is central for the whole national strike, we often debate national developments too. This means that when we judge the moment right, we can switch the targets at fairly short notice.

How has McDonald’s responded?

Publicly, nothing. Behind the scenes we have seen lots of quite senior McDonald’s leaders turning up to cities where we have been hitting them, in some cases holding tripartite meetings with local management and Stuart and JustEat management. So this has hurt all three companies. They really don’t like what we are doing.

How have McDonald’s workers responded?

Overall, they have been very positive. Obviously we are always encouraging them to unionize. I don’t want to say any more about how that has been going, because McDonald’s management responds very proactively to any perceived threat of worker organization. But it’s good. Shift managers have generally been very good about shutting down the tablet for us, when they haven’t been forbidden from doing so by more senior managers. There have been one or two managers who have tried to go to war with our pickets, presumably to prove their loyalty to Ronald McDonald. That normally has involved calling the cops. On a couple of occasions they have simply closed down the whole store and sent all the customers home! But the cops have never given us any hassle, and Ronald will never reward store managers who fight for him.

How has JustEat responded?

They haven’t, publicly, other than to issue a stock response to all requests from journalists for comment: that they are having ongoing discussions with Stuart about the situation. I should think they are, alright! On occasion JustEat have seemed to imply that they have consulted with riders as well. This is not the case. Stuart have a stock crisis-management response: they hold a “round table” where they hand-pick drivers whom they consider very loyal to the firm, often longstanding drivers or captains, and hold a private meeting with them in order to find some second-rate concession that they can throw out in order to quell the strike. In a few instances they have held these and put the boost up, where they have been dealing with isolated groups of drivers who aren’t hooked up to the union. The round-tables they held with Sheffield and Blackpool drivers in January though, produced national results. In part that’s because genuine local leaders simply crashed the meetings. Stuart fixed the insurance document upload system, a persistent bug in which had been suspending a few drivers whenever they uploaded their updated insurance documents; and they restored a perk they’d stripped away a few years ago, which is payment for time spent waiting for an order in a restaurant. Previously that was from 20 minutes, at £4.50 for every 20 minutes spent waiting; now it’s after 15 minutes but they’ve not announced the rate yet. No way would they have given us that without the strike. Stuart went quiet after they made those concessions, and for a couple of weeks, only Sheffield was still doing a daily strike. Stuart probably thought that had killed the movement. But now there are strikes in Sheffield, Chesterfield, Middlesbrough, Sunderland, Dewsbury and more towns are stirring too. So they’ll have to drop the strong-and-silent act.

There was a petition signed by local businesses in support. Have they been supporting in other ways?

No

What are the next steps?

What we say frequently is that if you want to cost Stuart enough to win, there is no way you can make the numbers add up in your town alone. The key to success is spreading the strike. And that is what we are doing. I personally have been traveling across the north of England, visiting groups of riders in different towns every few days. Some IWGB union staffers and driver-leaders have been doing likewise. We are also building a network of UberEats drivers who are just desperate to take action. When we spread the strike to ten, twenty towns, beat Stuart, and build up durable leadership teams of drivers in all those places, then we will plan a real war against Uber, and beat them too.