When you are in the business of exploiting people, and you want to get away with it, language matters. This is what a recently leaked document from Deliveroo teaches us.
The list, given to managers at the app-based food delivery company, provides a number of 'dos' and 'don'ts' that guide supervisors when talking to Deliveroo's workers, and can be read as a kind of exploitation manual. The document is geared to emphasising that the people who deliver food for Deliveroo are and should remain independent contractors, not employees: do say 'On boarding'; don't say 'Hiring'.
The difference matters. Employees are afforded a number of entitlements that independent contractors are not: the minimum wage, superannuation, overtime allowances and others. Of course, correctly classifying workers is not a new issue, but the online gig-economy, its employment arrangements, and the language used to disguise them, are putting a glossy façade on old models of worker exploitation.
Essentially, Deliveroo is trying to make sham contracting — when a business deliberately disguises an employment relationship as an independent contracting arrangement in order to avoid paying employee entitlements — sound like an 'innovation'.
The leaked document showed that Deliveroo maintains a level of control over its workers' performance standards, availability and work patterns normally associated with an employment relationship, but gave managers instructions on how to avoid using language that would reflect this fact.
I am not the first to point out the issues of worker categorisation in online labour markets. In 2016, a Unions NSW report into the employment practices of gig-economy company AirTasker categorised the online labour market as 'unregulated Taylorism within a Dickensian marketplace where workers compete for bite-sized fragments of labour'.
But the Deliveroo document demonstrated the importance of language in underpinning these new models of exploitation. For the most part, these developments are euphemistically reported as 'disruptions' or 'innovations'. Once this linguistic smokescreen is cleared, however, the reality of the app-based services economy is remarkably straightforward: a handful of 'tech bros' in Silicon Valley are getting rich on the back of millions of contingent workers around the world who are denied basic employment entitlements.
Sociologist Wolfgang Streeck has examined a number of these terms — 'innovation', 'disruption' and 'resilience' amongst others — in the context of the continuous mutation and evolution of capitalism.
"It reflects a philosophy of economic Darwinism: the strong will survive, and the weak will drive them around and deliver their food, for less than the