Francis Skaife is a courier in the northeast of England in their hometown of Teeside.
It's a home and they love it, but it's a town that suffered heavily from deindustrialisation.
We have like, well, we had up industry like steelworks and ISCI.
Things like that. But it's also just totally died out. It's not the best place to live.
Sometimes it's quite big when you're at work and night is like a lone female.
Is that scary? No, like, it's it's OK. It's just it's just one of those kind of forgotten towns in the north that people don't really know about.
Francis HUF pronouns are they then work for the gig economy platforms do it, making deliveries around their local area.
They suffered from several health conditions and have done for many years now and
working for Stewart with their first job after being out of work for some time.
So my first day in prison, I think I was pretty quiet.
I remember being like in KFC carpark, parked my car here.
My best friend Gere's context makes the left and then like one of her friends to the left of her and we'll pop them like a roll.
And I remember taking a selfie with everyone, like it was just really nice to actually be out and be getting paid to sit with your pals basically,
you know, on a slope knowing that you're going to get money regardless if it was busy.
So it was really nice. It was just really it was like liberating is the right word.
But I've been out of work for so long and just feeling like I wasn't useful to suddenly having this job where,
you know, it's not a huge amount of responsibility. But, you know, I was getting paid.
They expected me to do a job. And, you know, it was just nice to feel like I was actually working again on Rowby Waran.
And this is the Fair Work podcast. And look at the lives of the people working within the gig economy.
This episode looks at management. What's it like working for a platform where the principal colleague you're working with is your smartphone?
And how do you deal with the problems you encounter in your working day? When you have no human manager to turn to?
Frances is classed as a self-employed independent contractor, meaning they don't have access to any forms of sick pay or holiday pay.
So I live with chronic fatigue syndrome and five myalgia.
That's sort of the main issues. So going through tests, the list unlost syndrome.
So it basically just means that I have quite a of chronic fatigue, pain like muscle and joint pains.
I get like dislocations in my knees and my arm calls. So it just it makes obviously I am sitting down quite a lot as like a driver in a car at work.
But yeah, it does affect it. Like what I get these flare ups pain and I just can't go to bed and I know I need to go to work.
I want money that week.
So that's that's been something that's been quite tough recently as my health has been declining a bit is like having shed those sectors both not
really having access to any sort of sick pay for how to operate the system whereby couriers can even work on slot or float on slot machines,
that careers are guaranteed an hourly wage for a predetermined period,
but must be in a specific zone for an exact amount of time and follow certain rules.
This includes the inability to reject work off.
On the other hand, give correas more freedom, including when and where they work and what jobs they accept and decline.
Francis prefers working off slot duty with flexibility, but sometimes feels the need to work on slot.
I asked Francis about what it's like working for this app and what it's like communicating must to it.
So I would take communicating with Stewart is like pulling hen's teeth. It's just it's painful.
It's long, it's slow, it's arduous. You basically say you have an issue on the job.
You know, a customer hasn't answered the door. You need to return the food to a restaurant.
You contact them through the app and they will make you sit and wait like ten minutes and you've got to jump through all these hoops.
But it's often like they have also reply. I think they have some kind of like something subtle to filter out certain words
that you message them and it will just auto reply something related to that.
So if you say something like, this job is too far away, you might get a reply back just saying, like, why have you not delivered the food yet?
And it's like often I think it's just totally unrelated and it just feels like, I don't know, like anyone else.
If you have an issue at work. Kentucky box. Right. You go you can go and talk to someone you can talk to or whatever.
But with us, it's like you have this off, you can email us.
We can't really promise you'll get the reply that you want. There's no sort of appeal if you think something's wrong.
And it just feels like we are totally disposable and we don't really like that.
That's the first thing I would say is important, is that communication with your boss or with your superiors.
And we just don't have. I think it makes me just feel, as I said, like quite disposable.
Like, they don't really they don't really care.
I think at an all there, they're a huge, huge multinational company that is, you know, raking quite a lot of money.
And I feel like they could put so much more effort into that contact with their workers,
you know, the very people who are delivering their packages that they want delivered.
If you can't even have the most basic sort of set of communication with those people,
how can you expect them to sort of work for you and be happy about working for you, especially if you can't even you know,
it makes me feel crap that, you know, if I have an issue on a job or if someone, you know,
times where I've message where I felt my safety was at risk and you get some auto generated reply where someone hasn't read your message.
Francis had numerous cases where they felt worried about their safety whilst at work and turned to the platform for help and support.
Yeah, I mean, there's been a few times where, like, I felt like safety was at risk.
That's you. And like, I think one of them in particular, I was at a guy's house delivering some food and he like literally grabbed my arm and like,
stodge pulled me and I just, like, pulled myself back in my car on the road away and like, managed to get hot message.
Stuart and I got just some kind of I think it was just some kind of auto generated reply, as I said,
that they use this filter system on certain words and it just didn't even relate back to what I'd said.
And I was just like some guys basically just assaulted me.
And you haven't even bothered to reply properly, you have even bothered to give me a constructive you know, what I can do about this situation.
Can I flag this person's house or put a complaint in? It was literally just I can't remember specifically what it was,
but I just remember it was some object generated by that didn't didn't even relate to what happened.
But it seems to happen quite a lot.
Like I, I don't do delivery's in certain areas because of, you know, my safety and worrying that something's going to happen there.
And knowing that if I contact Suer, it's probably not a be a very good reply to that.
As a means to manage workers. The Stewart app runs a scoring system for all of its careers known as a client performance school or CPS.
The school is a tool to let kuris know how well or badly they're performing.
It's based around how many jobs you take and how many slots you take or how many slots you don't turn
before it counts all of those things and gives you sort of a weekly score of how well you're doing.
And it's like how satisfied all your clients are with your work.
And you can sort of be penalised by, say, you take slots for a week and you don't turn up for two or three of them.
Your good CPS would be penalised because you you got to and not to end up essentially just like not turning up for not shift at work.
A key aspect of the scoring system is that Stewart doesn't make public how schools
actually impact careers and how they use within the process of algorithmic management.
This is the thing. I don't know. I don't know if the high or CPS score is the more jobs are assigned to you
or I don't know what their job allocation is like or why they allocate jobs,
certainly. But I think some of us definitely wouldn't wondered if having a higher CPS score would mean you're allocated more jobs as well.
In addition, schools can be used as a reason for terminating someone's account.
But yeah, it's with you, CPS. It's this sort of looming threat that if it ever goes beyond like a below a certain
point that you might get your account looked into and possibly terminate it.
But it definitely looms over me and sort of feels like they're sort of dangling my employment over me and saying, look,
if you don't you don't have a high score, then we'll we'll terminate your accounts, because that I think has happened.
People will fall away if you go below ground to very give you, I think, a fault.
I also to improve your score. If it doesn't improve, they'll they'll terminate your account.
So I think that definitely worries me sometimes because mine's only about three.
It's not great. And that's because obviously I've had a lot of sick time off for, you know, the day before shift.
I'll have a flare, but I need to consulate, so I'll I'll be penalised for that.
So I definitely worry about my CPA score. I wonder if it's going to ever come and bite me in the butt.
For Francis, communicating with Stewart has always been difficult as a platform.
It operates no fixed offices in the area where Francis works and all communications take place via email.
At the start of the U.K., first national lockdown, couriers were facing difficulties related to their work.
France has turned to Stuart for help.
We were having a lot of issues accessing toilets like delivery partners, being able to access toilets at places where they were picking jobs.
And there was this sort of requirement that all couriers wash their hands before each and after every delivery.
But there was no effort to do it because places just weren't letting us in the toilets.
So I crafted this really great email. Took me days. This email, I thought was fantastic.
That was really sassy, I thought, when I got my point across. And I got this sort of.
It was so. So. I couldn't even put it into words.
This I spent ages on my email. It was pages long.
And I got this reply, which wasn't even a couple of lines, wasn't even a paragraph.
And it just said, we are aware of the issue and are discussing it with curious like.
And that was it. I don't even think she said like, hello. Hello, how are you? It was just very much.
We know we're discussing it. Thank you very much. Bye.
I think the whole my response to it was, you know, that situation not being able to access toilets was humiliating enough.
And I had really spent a lot of time trying to get the point across this lady about why it was an issue,
why it was important and why it was against the law. And it was just this whole like it's just it's how Stewart is this blunt, blousy.
They don't really have time for you. So there's just craft this tiny little email and it just makes you feel like so small.
Because I know it was it's it was crap having to deal with that, not being able to access toilets.
You don't have to go outside some careers. You know, it was really desperate.
Some couriers got toilet in streets and in bushes and, you know, it was demoralising and painful enough to even go through.
So for them to reply with not even a paragraph, you know, not I don't even think they even said hello or said my name.
It was just we are discussing it with correas. Thank you.
She probably didn't think so. I think I'm being too nice. Well, I just thought, you know what?
I'm one of you down, Corea's. I've worked for for nearly two years now.
Do I not get a say in this conversation? I just think there needed some kind of quick response to get me off the case.
And I don't think think realise that I'm like a dog with a bone and I'm not letting all these issues go.
They're not getting away with it. Thanks to Frontispiece Skaife for sharing their story at Fair Work.
We believe that all work can and should be characterised by fair pay, fair condition, fair contracts,
fair representation and fair management platforms ultimately have the power to improve standards and the ability to choose.
Too many platforms operate management structures that opaque and with little capability
for workers to understand the process by which work is managed and distributed,
platforms can improve the work they provide.
By opening up communication channels for workers with human representatives, by taking active steps to ensure that discrimination does not occur,
and by opening up documented channels for workers to appear low ratings and deactivation.
We're actively campaigning to improve the conditions for workers around the world and whole platform to account.
You can find out more Fair Work.
This episode was written and produced by Robbie, wherein our music was composed by Louis Borlase with additional competition by rookie Barry.