Callum Cant, Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019, 180 pp. ISBN: 978-1-5095-3550-7.
Callum Cant’s Riding for Deliveroo examines labour relations in the platform economy through the relationship between algorithmic control, precarity, and worker resistance, drawing on the direct working experience of a Deliveroo courier. Cant combines his experiences working as a Deliveroo courier in Brighton with a workers’ inquiry approach to explore the labour regime behind platforms’ promises of flexibility and individual freedom. In this respect, the book is not merely an external observation of platform labour, but an investigation developed from within the labour process itself.
One of the book’s central concerns is how platform companies control the labour process. Although Deliveroo lacks the physical and managerial structure of a traditional workplace, it exercises significant control over the allocation of work, the monitoring of performance, and the regulation of the pace of work through its app and algorithms. The seemingly independent and spatially dispersed workers of the platform economy are subjected to a new regime of labour control through digital technologies. Cant thus considers the technological innovations of platform capitalism together with relations of power and control within the labour process. The chapters “The Job” and “The System of Control” are particularly devoted to this labour regime.
However, Riding for Deliveroo does not portray platform workers as passive and atomised individuals in the face of algorithms. A significant part of the book examines how couriers connect with one another through everyday interactions, messaging groups, and informal networks, and how these relationships gradually develop into collective action. Cant shows that a digitally managed and spatially dispersed workforce can also develop collective identity, solidarity, and the capacity to organise. This process is examined particularly through the struggles of Deliveroo couriers in London in 2016 and a broader wave of strikes and protests.
The book therefore focuses not only on the critique of working conditions but also on the emergence of new forms of platform worker struggle. Cant situates couriers’ resistance to changes in payment systems and working conditions within a longer history of precarious worker struggles. The tension between the tendency of algorithmic management to fragment and individualise workers and workers’ capacity to develop new forms of collective organisation constitutes one of the book’s central themes. The chapters “A Short History of Precarious Militants”, “The Strikes”, and “A New Wave” develop this historical and organisational connection.
Drawing on these struggles, the final sections of the book discuss the future of the platform economy and the possibilities for workers to expand their power over the labour process. The issue therefore extends beyond platform workers winning better pay or rights under existing conditions towards the question of who controls technology, the organisation of work, and relations of production, and for what purposes. Platform technology itself is treated not as a fixed and neutral structure, but as a labour infrastructure shaped by relations of power between workers and capital.
In this respect, Riding for Deliveroo directly connects the literature on digital labour and platform capitalism with debates on worker organisation and class struggle. By treating algorithmic control and worker resistance as two opposing dynamics within the same labour process, the book is important not only for understanding capital’s control over digital labour but also for examining the forms of collective organisation that emerge in opposition to that control. Through its study of Deliveroo, the book provides a concrete basis for discussions of worker power, organisation, and democratic control over the labour process under platform capitalism.