“It’s not unusual, except that Manna is telling you exactly what to do every second of every day. If it asks you to go to the back and get merchandise, it tells you exactly where to walk to go get it. And here is the weirdest part — I never see another employee the entire day. The way it makes me walk, I never run into anyone else. I can go for a full shift and never see another employee. Even our breaks are staggered. Everyone takes their breaks alone. We all arrive at staggered times. It’s like Manna is trying to totally eliminate human interaction on the job.”

All described in prescient classic: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

The ADCU has been representing app drivers and couriers in the UK for years, but they're probably not the best model.

https://www.adcu.org.uk/

https://www.wired.com/story/adcu-gig-economy-union-toxic-rep...

The reality is that a large proportion of app workers are undocumented. Worker accounts are rented or sold to people who do not have the legal right to work. We can't reasonably address the issue of working conditions on these platforms if we don't acknowledge that fact.

https://inews.co.uk/news/deliveroo-uber-eats-just-eat-illega...

There's no workplace to speak in hushed tones.

There's no way to know when you've reached a quorum of local drivers.

SMS. When I drove for Uber, there were massive group chats amongst the drivers. They even organized planned shortages in certain parts of the city when rates got too low.

I’ve often felt like there would be a lot of value for an app that’d simply let gig workers in an area find each other to talk and actually create a “workplace”.

But I’m not sure how you’d fund its creation. No VC would want it and there’s not a wealthy user base to bootstrap it.

I’m guessing there a discord server somewhere with 90% management agents just waiting to honeypot potential union workers.

Seems like digital workplace should be easier to organize with all the community tools we have.

The much greater problem is that they are not employed. They are just self employed people, who take on gigs from various platforms.

They can, by definition, not unionize. Even striking is basically out of the question, as organization is near impossible and most of these people could not sustain months with zero pay.

This needs to be just made illegal, it is just a subversion of labor laws.

In the UK you can (and usually do) unionize without a workplace.

Many are industry-specific such as the "Communications wokers' union", but there are also general workers' unions such as GMB [1] or Unite.

It would be possible, indeed probably preferable, to form a "Delivery workers' union". It would be a union of delivery drivers who would pool resources to fight for common rights.

[1] https://www.gmb.org.uk/campaigns/deliveroo/

Well, those companies have a CEO, Director of Something, etc...

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