Most people start to pay attention to the specific labor process of the takeaway industry through the article "Takeaway Riders, Trapped in the System", especially the role played by algorithms in it. However, any discussion of the question of the labor autonomy of the laborer cannot find an answer from the single abstract labor process itself, and the degree of labor autonomy must be determined by the dialectical synthesis of various social factors imposed on the laborer. The same is true of the takeaway industry, the power that determines the autonomy of the labor process of the takeaway workers is not only a single algorithm, but also includes the subcontracting system of the takeaway industry, the platform monopoly, the unequal assessment mechanism, and the continuous life pressure borne by the delivery workers themselves.
Takeaway rider delivery
Why we focus on delivery workers
China's takeaway industry began to accelerate in 2015 and has now become an important part of the operation of the urban system. Most people's perceptual cognition of takeaway workers comes from the fact that they wear blue or yellow overalls to shuttle through the traffic, which is their labor process, but also people's daily life experience, which is the particularity of the work of takeaway workers.
But this particularity lies in the general condition of modern urban life, what the British Marxist Raymond Williams called "mobile tibet"[1]: in modern society, people hide in their private spheres, but they can still rely on technological systems to obtain the necessary resources for survival, such as water, electricity, and information, but the so-called "mobile privacy" cannot be achieved without the people who build and maintain these technological systems. The activity of ordering take-out is also in line with the definition of "mobile hiding", because people can get food without going out, except that people can ignore the workers who build electricity and telecommunications infrastructure when using electricity and mobile phones, that is, those who really connect individuals in the private sphere with the outside world. However, takeaway workers must use the flow of their bodies to act as a pipeline for the transmission of food resources in the street corners, shopping malls and elevators of the city to provide convenient services for people.
This "visibility" forces people to pay attention to the delivery workers and look for ways to understand the words of the delivery workers, but how much do these words reproduce the true picture of the delivery industry? Especially in the heated discussion caused by the article "Takeaway Rider, Trapped in the System", the algorithm has replaced the delivery man as the protagonist, and it is no wonder that some takeaway workers will complain:
We are at the center of public opinion, but we can only see the opinions of others, experts, scholars, there is nothing for us. The takeaway brother does not seem to have the right to speak, and no one can hear what we say, and even if he says it, he will disappear into the vast sea of people. The heat has passed, and no one wants to pay attention. The delivery man next to me also complained about it, or had to continue to work. [2]
Frankly, in the process of experiencing food delivery for 4 months, I didn't feel the control of the algorithm at first, because in practice it is clear that as long as you leave a certain business circle for a certain distance, the algorithm will not send new orders. But my master kept telling me to get back to the business district as soon as possible, because only then could the algorithm continue to distribute orders to me and thus get a higher income in the same amount of time. Therefore, whenever I see that even if there is no control of the algorithm, the delivery workers still return to the business circle in a hurry, I will sigh that the investigation of the labor autonomy of the delivery workers can no longer continue along the route of discussing the labor process and algorithms alone, because in this process, they are precisely actively "embracing" the algorithm. According to the Survey on the Basic Labor Status of Takeaway Riders, more than 60% of the riders in the survey have loans, and nearly 1/3 of the riders owe more than 100,000 debts. [3] In the rider's own words, "Whoever came to deliver the takeaway didn't have any debt on him!" Therefore, just by observing the delivery workers from the outside, it is impossible to appreciate the pain of "having to insist on delivering food late at night, on a rainy day, and after a car accident because of the pressure of debt every day." It is precisely because I want to explore the driving force of the labor autonomy of the delivery workers from the real survival and labor situations, which prompts me to become a full-time delivery worker and participate in the labor process of delivering food.
It should be pointed out that I am not experiencing the labor process of delivery workers with a sense of curiosity and pity, because the takeaway industry also has another universal dimension, that is, it lies in the overall process of upgrading and reconstructing China's economic development model through the development of information and Internet industries after the financial turmoil in 2008. As Tang Min pointed out in the book "Tencent: The Political Economy of China's Internet Giants", after the reform and opening up, China has made remarkable economic development achievements with the model of "taking the export of industrial products as the guide and relying on foreign investment", but its drawback is that it is highly dependent on external global capitalism, and once the foreign consumer market shrinks, it will have a serious impact on China's economy. After the 2008 financial crisis, through the development of the domestic Internet and information industry, looking for new economic growth points, and creating a large number of jobs, in order to resist the impact of the global economic recession, it is the core strategy of China's economic development model upgrading and reconstruction [4], and the takeaway industry naturally lies in the process of information industry development. Therefore, whether the takeaway industry can achieve sustainable development is actually a matter that concerns each and every one of us.
Dedicated delivery model and unequal attendance mechanism
The following information mainly comes from my experience and observations as a special delivery rider in Beijing. Takeaway delivery is generally divided into two categories: exclusive delivery and crowdsourcing. The crowdsourcing model is closer to the "gig economy" that people imagine, and it does not require any conditions to become a crowdsourcing rider, nor does it need to join any organization, just download the corresponding APP to complete the registration. The unit price of crowdsourced riders is relatively low, but it increases with the increase in delivery distance, and in general, all cross-regional and even cross-city orders are made by crowdsourced riders. Because crowdsourced riders join the platform as individuals, they have a considerable degree of freedom compared to special delivery riders, and there are no mandatory requirements for attendance, attendance, whether to take orders, and the number of daily tasks. The takeaway platform did initially appear in the guise of the "gig economy", and the praise words such as "sharing" and "freedom" shrouded in it are essentially a discourse that matches the rapid expansion of the platform economy. However, the reality is that the daily order volume of Meituan takeaway in 2020 has reached 40 million [5], and the "platform + individual" model that lacks professional organizational management [6] like crowdsourcing cannot withstand such a large scale of transaction volume, so from the gig model to the special delivery model is actually the inevitable evolution path of the takeaway industry.
From the above introduction, it can be seen that the labor organization process of the takeaway platform is both complex and flexible, which undoubtedly enhances the control ability of the platform, and in turn weakens the negotiation power of the takeaway. First of all, the crowdsourcing model allows any group in the current society that is under the continuous pressure of life in the recession to become a potential labor reserve army in the takeaway industry, which undoubtedly weakens the workplace negotiation power of the special delivery riders, because even if some of the dedicated riders choose to strike, the platform can still rely on the crowdsourced riders to maintain operations, so the special delivery riders naturally lose the bargaining weight. Secondly, due to the lack of trade union organization and collective consciousness, the power of organizational negotiation has been at a low level. If we only start from the imagination of the "atomization" of the delivery staff group, assuming that there is a dispute between the interests of individual workers between the delivery workers in the self-employment mode, it is easy to ignore the control of the "platform-site-rider" operation mode of the actual "three-tier structure" of the delivery workers.
Unlike the general subcontracting model, the site is not only a substitute for the platform to hire labor, but also embedded in the rider's delivery process at every moment. First of all, the staff of the site is responsible for the background management of the takeaway delivery software, and can shut down the rider's account or dispatch the distribution of orders at any time (orders are good or bad according to the distance and the difficulty of delivery). Secondly, the relationship between the site and the rider is not only confrontational, the site sometimes plays the role of the rider's interest spokesperson in front of the platform. Because the power to impose various fines on riders, including delivery overtime, cancellation of orders for logistics and distribution reasons, blue storm dress codes, customer complaints, etc., still belong to the platform, but if the rider wants to appeal about these penalties, he can only turn to the manager of the site, so that for personal survival problems, the rider can only try to obey the daily management of the site, and hope that the latter can strive for the greatest benefit for himself. At the same time, although the platform ostensibly gives the rider the right to complain about the site manager, in the site to which I belong, the manager clearly states: "You rider can complain that I can, that is your right, but after you complain about me, I fire you is also my right!" "It is clear that in the existing unequal model of management and organization, the delivery workers cannot have the autonomy of labor and defend their rights, but this is certainly a factor outside the algorithm at play.
The three-tier structure of "platform-site-rider" adopted by the special delivery model further complicates the labor relations and labor organization model of the takeaway industry, which itself weaves a web of labor control, and the rider is constrained in many details of the labor process, and there is no existing mechanism to ensure that the rider democratically determines his own labor process. For example, the attendance requirement of my site is that the rider must be on duty 26 days a month, and run 25 orders per day, otherwise the original unit price of 9 yuan a single will drop to 8 yuan, and a rider can basically run to at least 700-800 orders per month, if he does not complete the above indicators, then he will lose 700 yuan. This is undoubtedly an extremely unequal regulation, and its role is simply to force the delivery workers to maintain high attendance during holidays or extremely bad weather as a platform to make more profits. One of the riders next to me was forced to deliver food until 12 midnight for 5 consecutive days in order to ensure daily attendance during the "May Day" holiday, and at that time, the 25th order was called the "home order" by the riders. Including windy weather, rainy weather, the reason why riders risk their lives to run a single is also the product of this unequal attendance system. In addition, in the customer complaint system, riders are also facing unequal treatment, in June this year, a rider in Yinchuan, Ningxia, was fined 50 yuan and limited the amount of orders just because he refused to help customers throw garbage, the rider's appeal process is very cumbersome, but customer complaints only need to unilaterally "state the facts", the platform does not need to verify its authenticity.
Some people say that the delivery workers, although hard, enjoy more autonomy in the labor process than the factory workers in the work, which refers to the experience of riding a battery car on the road, and even the delivery workers themselves will admit this, and the oncoming wind and the rapidly receding street scene on both sides seem to help them create a different space for temporary escape from the pressure of reality. But of course, this is not the whole labor process, for example, in addition to the harsh fines, the rider's monthly salary is also fixed to deduct the costs as follows: union fees of 25 yuan, rider fees of 15 yuan, insurance 125 yuan, service fees of 75 yuan, each rider pays for traffic insurance this is not news, the takeaway staff has more than once questioned the legitimacy of these deductions, but the station master warned: "Don't dwell on these dozens of dollars of small money, unreasonable fines of hundreds of dollars at other sites are very common, People on this site should know how to cherish. ”
It is very clear that in these issues involving practical interests, the delivery staff lacks autonomy, and I often wonder, if there is no unreasonable fine system, no unequal complaint mechanism, if there can be less inexplicable deductions on the pay slip, if the platform can form a mobile maintenance team to help the isolated riders deal with the problem in the event of a traffic accident, in short, if the riders can get rid of the tight control to fight for their own rights, then their lives will be a little better?
A concentrated resting place for takeaway riders
Algorithms: Materiality, Information Commodification, and Technopolitics
Returning to the algorithm problem that was once hotly discussed, it is increasingly felt that algorithms as a technology independent of human free will are influencing human decision-making and organization, but this perceptual cognition actually obscures the material dimension of algorithms themselves. In the takeaway industry, we can see an "algorithm" that is not supported by bright computers and big data technologies, that is, India's "dabbawala", the original "takeaway system" with a history of 130 years, still contains the following information: rider positioning, merchant positioning, delivery time, delivery route, dish style and price, etc., which do not rely on computer programming at all, but through the takeaway in common practice summed up a set of simple coding system consists of colors, letters, Numbers and other simple symbols are used to ensure the timeliness and accuracy of delivery [7].
Today, however, the high specialization and commercialization of the media and information industries have separated language, media and information technology from their material basis at the level of universal experience. Lukács argues that higher animals must communicate with each other in order to survive, and that human language and interaction stem from economic necessity—that in order to be able to control increasingly complex production organizations, humans need to communicate with each other. This is also the core of cultural materialism: language, information, and labor are inherently two aspects of a general material process that cannot be understood separately.[9] Thus, when we understand the dialectical relationship between information and human practice in the path of cultural materialism, we can understand that, as the example of "Dabbawala" shows, the media and information technology that seem to have been professionalized are actually still derived from human activities themselves, which are extracted from human practical activities through professional means and dissolved into universal human communication activities. But this "extraction-dissolve" process does not mean that information and culture are simply reduced to the direct practice of human beings, because it is mediated by the logic of commodification. A significant consequence of the commodification of information is that when media and information begin to appear on a large scale in the "form" of commodities, and thus become the infrastructure of human organization and life, the full penetration of capital into the living world is possible. At the same time, the "content" dimension of media and information cannot maintain its original appearance under the form of commodities, and the content must be changed by the form, which involves the technical and political problems of algorithms.
The essence of the takeaway platform algorithm system is still based on historical information statistics and learning in a short period of time to give a solution that connects the supply and demand between merchants, riders and consumers. Compared with the previous media and information technology, the particularity of the algorithm is that it can present the massive information generated by real-time communication activities in the form of data and process it efficiently, and it itself has become a new mode of organization and interaction for human beings. But it is precisely in this process that algorithms are mediated by the logic of capitalist commodification, and then embedded in line with the platform's pursuit of profit maximization values. A takeaway platform programmer said bluntly: "The faster the takeaway rider runs, the more efficient the delivery of the platform, but it has caused himself and his companions to be more and more hard to deliver the time to be repeatedly squeezed." [10] When the delivery man is retrograde or runs a red light on a certain route for fear of overtime, the time saved by these riders at the cost of their lives is absorbed by the algorithm and reproduced into a new universal time standard, and so on, and the final result is that the time requirements of each route will be compressed to the extreme, and the platform will thus get more profits, but behind the rider's life and death speed staged every minute and second.
I have an empirical sense of the technical politics of this algorithm. During May Day this year, due to the small number of orders, I could not complete the assessment standards mentioned above, so I spent until 10 o'clock in the evening, when the sky suddenly began to rain, and I crashed into the guardrail on the side of the road in a panic. The electric car couldn't start properly, and my knee was injured, but the time in the algorithm system was still passing minute by minute, which was really desperate, and when I called the webmaster to explain the situation, he first asked me if I could complete the unfinished order in my hand, because it was about his performance. Obviously, the algorithm here acts as a cold timer, it does not sense a living situation, and no one can intervene in the algorithm at that moment to stop the timing. However, there is not only one algorithm, if we can embed the value of efficiency into the algorithm, then also put safety-conscious parameters in it, such as increasing the delivery time of traffic-prone roads and time periods. Algorithms have a variety of possibilities, we now know that has been shaping the dominant force of algorithms, that is, the logic of information commoditization, then we should think about the establishment of a negotiation mechanism that allows takeaway workers to dominate the algorithm design process according to their own labor experience and demands, rather than desperately and imaginatively solidifying the algorithm into a technical entity that excludes and oppresses riders.
In addition, it is precisely because of the materiality of the algorithm that we can puncture the myth of the so-called "self-employment" of the takeaway platform, which masters the most core means of production - algorithms and mobile phone software, so the rider is still under the wage labor system. But we can't fall into another trap, that is, to think that electric vehicles, mobile phones, work clothes and other products purchased by riders are not counted as means of production, in fact, the more radical understanding is that platform capital not only exploits the surplus value created by the rider, but also expropriates the accumulation by appropriating the means of production purchased by the riders themselves [11]. If each rider's mobile phone, electric vehicle and general maintenance, maintenance and electricity costs, according to the minimum estimate is about 4500 yuan, then of course it can not be compared with the amount of tens of billions, but according to the 2020 Meituan financial report [12], the total number of single riders in 2020 is 2.952 million, and the total cost of electric vehicles and mobile phones is at least 13.284 billion, which is still not a small amount.
Platform monopoly or platform cooperativeism
A big sister who has been a takeaway worker in a business district in Beijing for 6 years told me that in 2015, Baidu takeaway has not been swallowed up by Hungry Mo, and Dianping has not been swallowed up by Meituan, when the takeaway staff's monthly rainy days, long-distance delivery, large weight and high temperature subsidies totaled about 2,000 yuan, and now similar subsidies are less than 100 yuan per month, even in 35 degrees of high temperature weather has never had any subsidies. Under the monopoly of the platform, in the face of such unfair treatment, the takeaway workers can only complain sporadically in the WeChat work group, without any bargaining power. However, the pursuit of profit maximization of the platform monopoly capital produced by the social contradictions are endogenous, they will not really disappear, this summer "Shaanxi takeaway staff angry meal box", "takeaway staff four hours to grab 253 singles and then 'retaliatory' registration account" news has confirmed this, if can not establish a real mechanism to ensure the labor autonomy and rights and interests of takeaway workers, similar destructive conflicts will only be staged again and again, therefore, we must explore in addition to the platform monopoly of diversified and sustainable takeaway operation model.
American scholar Robert McChesney pointed out in his book "Digital Disconnection" that the natural "network effect" of Internet technology [13] will make it easier for the Internet industry to form a monopoly. When a platform takes the lead in building user resources with capital advantages, it has a certain degree of publicity, and potential users who have not yet joined the platform will be continuously absorbed. However, this judgment seems to be more applicable to social media platforms that provide public social needs beyond the space limit, and the "network effect" of the takeaway platform is not so significant, because no matter how the platform monopolizes and expands, the activity of food delivery is always highly localized and limited by space. In the actual operation process, most riders are always within a 5-kilometer radius of a certain area, even in the current monopoly platform model, the actual management and operation is the regional subcontracting site, not the platform itself.
Therefore, the monopoly operation of the takeaway industry is not an inevitable choice, and the current operating model of the platform just proves that the service of takeaway does not necessarily have to be provided by a large platform, and can be based on a city or even a county, based on the inherent localization logic of the takeaway industry, to explore the local "platform cooperation" model. For example, based on local needs, takeaway cooperatives are established, which are jointly owned by takeaway workers, merchants and consumers, and at the same time, participatory democracy is implemented in the management organization to ensure the autonomy of the delivery workers. Or the government or NGO organizations raise funds to build infrastructure such as algorithms and applications, and allow delivery workers in different regions to use this infrastructure to carry out food delivery activities. These platform cooperatives[14] imaginations have blossomed in practices such as the Coop Cycle initiative in France and the Radish platform in Spain,[15] and are also practical resources worth learning when exploring the current diversified and sustainable development path of China's takeaway industry.
An article by the official account Zhicheng workers revealed the "legal dark web" of the takeaway industry: company A pays him a bill, company B insures him, company C pays him a salary, DEFG company pays him a tax... They intertwine and tie the rider tightly, but when the rider actually falls into the pit ahead and asks for help, neither of these companies is enough to be his employer. And the migrant worker lawyers standing outside the system seem to be able to watch the labor relations being artificially broken step by step like this... [16] It can be seen that although the algorithm is a key force in determining the labor autonomy of takeaway workers, it is only a link in the overall control network of the takeaway industry, and the legal dark web, unequal assessment mechanism, platform monopoly, and continuous life pressure are restricting the pursuit of a better life for takeaway workers. If you want to clarify this complex network, it is not enough to rely on the research of academia, media and platform companies themselves, but also to cultivate an environment that allows delivery workers to make their own voices, decide their own destiny, and open up their own paths. The Strengthening of the Construction of Trade Union Organizations in the New Economy Industry[17] required by the Guiding Opinions on Safeguarding the Labor Security Rights and Interests of Workers in New Employment Forms issued by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and eight other departments in July this year is a preliminary exploration and attempt, and its specific landing situation is an issue that needs continuous attention next.
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