‘They alter the structure whenever they want to’, one rider claims. ‘And they have so many conditions. If we don’t log in for a week, our basic daily incentive changes. Recently, they decreased the overall incentive for 15 orders by 20 percent.’ Another rider, who is slightly older than the rest of the group, adds, ‘it seems like, the longer I work this job, the less I earn.’

All of the riders feel aggrieved with how the platform has been treating them, especially with the lack of support or cooperation when they try to reach out to the platform. The group Fairwork researchers spoke to had mobilised a strike the previous year via WhatsApp groups to protest the decreasing incentives. But the riders who participated in the strike were soon blocked from the platform for a week. They say that the platform does not care about them and this is also indicated in the platform’s unresponsive attitude over the helpline.

‘Nobody is ready to help us’, the rider says. ‘So we help ourselves. We are all brothers here. Whenever there are new joinees, we try to train them and show them around for the first week or so. Recently there was a new rider from a foreign country. All his papers were intact, yet the police were pestering him so we all went together and sorted it out. We tried calling the platform but there was absolutely no response, they didn’t listen to us.’

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While it is evident that technological innovations facilitating the global platform economy augment tendencies of surveillance and atomisation, they also dovetail with new opportunities for collective solidarity, rapid mobilisations, and labour refusal. In order to coordinate disruptions, workers may use the affordances of the platform to their advantage.

One particularly relevant affordance of Deliveroo’s platform, algorithmically determined physical meeting points which are located near popular restaurants, was appropriated by London’s Deliveroo riders in August 2016 to push back against the platform company’s decision to change their payment structure to piecework. Intentionally designed and implemented by the platform company to boost the efficiency of deliveries, a labour organiser said that those meeting points helped workers not just to get to know each other and talk about working conditions, but to build a collective identity. Without a specific physical workplace, you can still create the idea of a space, within which you can talk about these things and consider your relationship with management and what they’re offering you.

However, it is important to emphasise that the tensions between platforms and workers do not play out in the same way across different sectors, countries and settings. Instead, the nature of such disruptions is always shaped by contextual and geographical particularities. In South Africa, some platform food-delivery workers reported that on strike days some of them travel around town and vandalise the bikes of other platform workers who have refused to participate in the strike.

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The right of workers to freely associate is enshrined in the constitution of the International Labour Organisation and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.[1] The Fairwork project advocates that platforms must observe this right by ensuring that platform workers can collectively communicate their wishes and concerns to the platform. They (nor any parties they contract with) must not hamper or prevent workers’ freedom of association, or penalise workers for associating or expressing demands.

Moreover, for workers to have a meaningful voice in determining their working conditions, they must be able to bargain with the platform through a collective or representative body. Platforms must also recognise this collective body and make themselves available for good faith negotiations. In most cases, such bodies do not yet exist in the platform economy.

Where that is the case, platforms should publicly state and signal their willingness to recognise and work with a collective body if one is formed. While most platforms refuse to negotiate with or even acknowledge the collective mobilisations of their workers, collective action and representation can pose an existential threat to the platform model. Platforms profit by being seemingly ephemeral organisations, but their weightless infrastructure will continue to render them vulnerable to new forms of disruption.