Those who stuck in the system
In September 2020, a report on Chinese magazine Renwu titled “Delivery riders, stuck in the system” raised a heated discussion on Chinese internet. The research focused on Chinese delivery service industry, pointed out the software that the delivery platform used is utilising AI and big data technology to analyse the rider’s performance and shrink their delivery time. It caused the worker has to break the traffic rules due to under the pressure of getting bad review from customer and fine from platform because deliver beyond required time. The article argue the high traffic accident rate among delivery workers caused by the rider do not have enough time for each delivery. Two biggest delivery platforms in China respond immediately after the report been released, one give customer option to choose waiting 5-10 more minutes, another platform “Meituan” give their worker 8 minutes tolerant time in their software.
The solutions two companies provided indicate the problem can be solved by customer - if the invisible hand pushing the delivery worker to take risk was the afraid of consumer waiting their food too long in home or office, therefore, when we have more patient to wait our food then the worker will chose a safer way to ride their bike. On Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, “be nice to delivery riders” occupied the top trending for weeks. Some people proposed that when next time the rider delivered your meal beyond the time your expected, you should put yourself on their shoes and shouldn’t leave bad review because it was late. It suggests the consumer has the power and ultimately in charge, the choose we made can make difference. However this is simply not true.
The reason customer expect their food will arrive in certain time is they informed by the software they using. The GPS built in the phone can communicate with delivery software to track the location of rider and customer. Even when people inside building the application can keep locating via the wifi and bluetooth. Customers and riders cannot decide to share these information or not - if you using delivery service, your information automatically be collected without notice. The system uses this information to speculate the status of rider - whether they are walking, running, cycling, standing, climbing stairs or taking lift. Base on these status and the location of the rider in each order, the system utilises algorithm to calculate the time that rider staying in restaurant waiting for food to be prepared, spending on the way to customer’s place, waiting for customer to fetch the food after they arrived. Combined with each order information and the feedback customer gave, the system knows the speed of each restaurant for making food, the efficiency of each rider on delivery, and how tolerant each customer is. More importantly, in each order the system can plan out the route and estimate the delivery time based on these information under different condition such as weather, traffic and which floor customer live.
This information not only used for gave instruction for works, but also be used to supervise them. When finishing each order, the software will use the location of rider to check whether the order is real or not. If the pick up and drop location did not match the address of restaurant and customer, or the order finished within 5 min, the software will determine the rider is cheating. Moreover, each customer can check rider’s real time location during delivery. When they find the rider choosing the wrong way or delivering other’s food first, they could call the rider urge them to deliver his food on priority. The customer took the part of role to supervise delivery worker, and it increased the conflict between customer and rider.
One reason is customer can evaluate the performance of rider and this influences the income of riders. Normally, rider will be paid 8 Yuan (0.92 GBP) for each order, but if they deliver beyond time limited this money will cut to half, and will get 20 Yuan (2.31 GBP) fine if received a bad review, 200 Yuan (23.10 GBP) fine if customer made a complaint. After finished on order rider will receive a virtual point as well. If the customer gave good review, rider will get 2 more point, but if he didn’t deliver on time the point will deduct 4. Based on this point each rider had, they has been categorised by 24 different levels. Higher level rider has priority to chose new order. Usually the rider only know the review from customer after finishing the order, and one bad review can let the all effort he put on delivering worth nothing. While they doing delivery job, the customer is only entity to influence the money they can earn in this process, therefore it is not hard to understand why customer became the object for complaining although the rule that system provide taking more responsibility.
This becomes the way for those delivery companies to manage workers - It seems the capitalist do not have control over their workers, but actually they still having the power. They are hiding themselves behind the software, and shift the conflict between them and worker to customer by the reward and penalty mechanism they designed. In 2019, each day has more then 30 million order been made on Meituan application. The system analysed this huge amount of information and using them to instruct, evaluate, reward or punish workers. This is an example of control in digital era. For capitalist, it is still important to transfer the control of labor process form workers to their own hands. This process of capitalist control workers already has a long history.
However, the beginning of control was mean to improve worker’s life. In 1910, Frederick Winslow Taylor began to examining people with stopwatch and slide rule in hand, teaching them how to do their work faster, scientifically. He called himself as “the father of scientific management”. In the beginning, he and his follower believe if workers could behave more efficiently, they can raise their wages, reduce the cost of goods, even improve their standard of living. They believed “efficiency is the hope of democracy.” However this dream did not come true. Making people working more efficiently did not make their life better. When productivity increases and working hours stay the same, “Ye’re worked like a slave all day and when ye get out ye’re too tired to do anything.”
Scientific management was utilised by factory owner to increase the productivity. It became a way to organise workers by dividing the working process. Workers no longer have the overview on the goods they producing, instead their job become very specific. Through gathering the information relevant to production, centralising the information to management department and utilising these information to control every movement on producing, worker lost their control on working process. The task they need to do was given by manager or defined by production process, and it caused the separation of head and hand of labourer - the worker lost their knowledge on craftsmanship, only play the role of gears and levers.
We can witness the delivery platform adopted this idea as well - the process of delivery has been divided to specific movement and standardised. On platform each order has three phases for the rider: arrived restaurant, picked up the order and finished the order. After finished each step the rider has to confirm with software. Additionally, the software will provide additional information to let rider working more efficiently - the map in the application is showing in which area having more order need to be delivered; The estimated time gave the reference of the restaurant then they will finish cooking based on the history preference of that restaurant after accepted an order; The route will be planed based on realtime traffic information during delivery. The ability of high speed calculation behind software helps the platform update instructions in 0.55 millisecond, which is impossible in the factory before digital age.
This notion of pursue efficiency not only impact the working condition, but also shaped our everyday life. When customer working efficiently in office and using their phone to order takeaway, they want it be delivered efficiently as well. Meituan is using kangaroo as their logo and printed their slogan “Meituan delivery, fast delivery of everything” on the rider’s jacket indicates providing faster service for customer is their goal. It is true if the platform reduced the delivery time, pursue the extreme efficiency, they can increase the satisfaction of their customer, keep them stay in same platform, therefore, they can have more possibility to survive in the competition with other delivery company.
However providing fast service to customer is not the mean reason to make Meituan occupied major market share. During the Chinese new year in 2016, another delivery company Baidu takeaway choice to give their rider money to go back home to enjoy the spring festival with family. Meituan, in contrast, by recruiting more rider during the vacation, giving money back to the customer via red envelopes, occupied major market. Many people believe letting rider enjoyed vacation cause Baidu takeaway lost the battle, the discount in each order attracting people who even have enough time to making their own meal choosing to order takeaway.
The company desire exclusive power on the market, and will do whatever it takes to that power. The tale of free market could means for some capitalists to take over the market, in order to abolish the free market. The company like Meituan concentrated power in food delivery market, the size and the value of company made the similar new small companies unable to compete. Today the market value of Meituan is more then 200 billion USD, and have more then 4 million workers. Maximum their worker’s efficiency on delivery can help company accomplish more orders in same amount of time, and it helps company earn more service fee from it. But how to dissolve the opposition from the worker when company pushing them to their limits is another important part for maintain power.
In the beginning of factory, worker was much easier to consist than today. Apart from you can see the real people who manage the worker, the control structure has changed as well. In the beginning, most the factory developed form small workshop, the owner of the factory usually was skill worker as well. The owner can supervise, give instruction on the producing process by themselves. But when company grow bigger, the vertical management structure emerged inside company. For the worker, the foreman is their superior, and had fully control of them. This type of control is arbitrarily and favouritism, and worker easily to consist. In order to repression this conflict, bureaucratic control was embedded in company structure. Compare to control directly by people, bureaucratic control was using the rules and regulation to manage worker: what people can do and cannot do was written specifically on paper, and it also defined the duty and the range of work for workers as well. This specific instruction forced worker to focus on their own task, and it shifted the target of the worker when they want to complain. For example, in assembly line the worker usually complains about the speed of production rather then the employer.
Today, management decision even can be made without human be involved. On Meituan App, the time limit for each order was reduced from 50 min to 30 min, which include the time for restaurant preparing food. This change was made by the platform, based on the analyse result of the data it collected. The article on Renwu suggest when most of people can deliver the order within the limited time, the system will reduce the delivery time a little bit to check if most people still can deliver the order in time, if so the system will make same decision again and again. People have to follow the instruction and put their life on risk to ensure not deliver beyond the time limit. But when they following the rules, it actually made them has fewer time for next delivery. However if we go to examine how delivery rider works in real life, there is one part this article is missing.
It is true that the platform is reducing the time for delivery, however it did not make the order impossible to finish. If fact after I had a interview with a delivery worker, I found that the idea of single order is not really exist - they will try to combine orders as much as they can. After received first order, they will deliberately wait a bit so the system will allocate more order to them which need to be delivered to similar area. Some of them even find a way to extend their waiting time in order to get more order - the system allow rider has extra 20 min if the restaurant did not finish making food within require time. When they received first order they usually stop around restaurant but confirm on application that they already arrived. After waiting for 5 mins the system will predict the restaurant cannot make food on time, and then will give rider extra time for this order. Using this trick for waiting combined orders has already become the secrete everyone knows. While the time reached the limit, the question is they already delivered 3 orders or 6 orders. We could say it is the rider actively put themselves into the situation that have to break the traffic rules to take risk to delivery as much order as possible in single unit time.
In each year we can see the increase of number of rider working for Meituan as well. In end of 2019, Meituan has 3.99 million riders. This number increased to 4.7 million in the end of 2020, and 40% of new rider was working in factory before, 70% of them think become delivery worker has more freedom. The worker on assembly line do not have control on the speed of producing, the time to start / finish work, when can have lunch / take a break and the task to do. Even when can go to to toilet was not decided by themselves. Although both factory workers and riders get paid by the number of jobs they completed, the number of things can produce by factory is depend on the speed of assembly line, each month the income won’t have dramatic change. In Guangdong, most factory workers earn around 4000 yuan (462.15 GBP) per month, with working 12 hours per day. In comparison, 77% of Meituan riders can earn 5000-9000 yuan (577.69-1039.83 GBP) per month, 11.5% of them earn more then 9000 yaun. The money rider can earn straightly connect to the number of order they finished each day, work harder means earn more.
This is another characteristic of digital control: the people been control actively participated in this game. The mechanism of how Meituan works encourage the competitive individualism, the hierarchy of worker increase the conflict between them, the reward after each job keep workers’ loyalty to the company. The internal driven behind this, is the pressure of living. The average age of these riders is 30 years old, but 70% of them already married and had child. Only 15% of them went to university. Before doing delivery job, they were working as security, waitress, house cleaner, assembly line worker, construction worker, or farmer. Compared to other works, delivery rider has clearer way of counting salary, and do not have the issues of arrears of wages.
This new way of controlling already has global impact. The software became the key component of modern supply-chain management. Same as the one which delivery worker used on their phone, these globally used software has built in algorithms that distribute labor to making factory operating at their highest capacity. However same as delivery platform, the issue of this system is the people who design these software didn’t see the workers, and the designing process itself involved multi person. This is the direct impact of division of labour: Designing different components require different specialist, no individual be able to draw a detailed picture of the whole system. Furthermore, the data which fed into software has no explanation of how that date collected. This disconnection in human level letting software dominating the role to make the decision. A small change in system can end up with reducing a worker’s time for eating, taking breath, or seeing the loved one.
Today, trillions of dollars have been created in recent decades but everywhere this wealth is accruing to an ever-smaller number of households. The industrial model of managing worker still embed the new digital technology, and these technology did not liberate worker, instead it was used by capitalist to control their worker in a more extreme way. In the age of digital control, capitalist hand over the role of managing to digital platform. Through providing specific instruction to the worker, the worker lost the ability to against it. Instead, by providing the “Free choice on working time” for the worker, people who under the pressure of living embraced this system, the only reason however, is they do not have other better choice.