By Haig Kisherian

This story begins with what I was doing for work before I became a delivery driver: I was a sessional tutor with a PhD stipend. Then the pandemic hit, the economy transformed, and I found myself using my motorbike licence to deliver pizzas on a scooter around Hawthorn and Kew for Dominos. I used the income from this job to buy a motorbike of my own, which I then used for UberEats on the side. The franchise I worked for eventually went bankrupt, and UberEats became my only source of income for the best part of a year, until I found teaching work once more at a major university in Naarm.

UberEats drivers need an actual job, something that matches the highly developed technical skills nearly all of them seem to have. These companies are not profitable. They can only turn a profit by achieving monopoly control over the market, which is precisely why they need to be nationalised and run in the interests of workers and the public, not shareholders. Some drivers like the casual nature of the work, fair enough, but there need to be ample opportunities for full-time employment with a company vehicle and proper benefits. And even for those who remain casual, there must be real entitlements: injury compensation, cover for vehicle maintenance, and a safety net that doesn’t leave workers exposed. In practice, these companies would go bankrupt overnight if they tried to provide any of this under their current marketised form. That tells you everything you need to know about the model.

Before the Pandemic: Casual Academic

This is what I’m supposed to be doing. I currently hold a PhD, but for much of my postgraduate studies I worked as a sessional tutor. I spent about four years across two different universities teaching literature, creative writing, and game design, on top of a stipend from my PhD scholarship. I was a member of the NTEU and an active unionist.

Then the pandemic hit. Teaching work dried up. Rent was due. I applied everywhere. Fortunately, my motorbike licence saved my arse, and I landed a casual gig as a delivery driver at Dominos.

I’m including this section because it matters: most gig workers are like me. They have some form of tertiary education or a highly developed skill that capitalism is currently wasting. Standing outside Guzman y Gomez at 8pm in the rain, I’d talk to accountants, lawyers, programmers, data analysts, most of them migrants on a visa. As a citizen with a reasonably flash-looking motorbike, I was the anomaly.

I know a bloke who used to call himself an “anarcho-capitalist” and never fully shook those views. He told me the free market had decided that delivery driving was the most “productive” use of my labour, and that “the market doesn’t need people who teach literature or games.” I dispute this entirely. The most productive use of my labour is not ferrying a Guzman y Gomez order to Sandra in Toorak at 9pm, she owns a car, she can get it herself. There are better things for me, and for the millions of other delivery drivers around the world, to be doing with our time and our skills. This is not an “efficient” allocation of labour. It is capitalism producing waste and calling it a market signal.

Delivering for Dominos

I spent three years at Dominos Hawthorn delivering pizza on one of four small Honda Benly scooters. I was hired as a casual but effectively worked part-time hours.

The scooters were serviced once a year, when it was blindingly obvious they needed servicing several times over. Malfunctions were routine. The tyres would hydroplane at the first hint of rain, and I ended up on my arse delivering pizzas more than once.

Half the job was delivery, the other half was hospitality work behind the counter. The hospitality side I could take or leave, I always got a little rush when a delivery came up, because it meant I got to go for a ride. I treated every delivery like a small adventure. To Dominos’ credit, I didn’t have to pay for fuel or servicing myself. I was paid a fair casual award rate, including penalty rates on Sundays, and I got paid whether deliveries were flowing or not.

Working in a team environment was good for me emotionally, too. There was a genuine social element to the job, a sense of being part of a “team” with a specific, shared task. My co-workers and I would gossip about management at the sink area, where I tried, repeatedly, to talk them into joining RAFFWU. My attempts at unionising failed, because almost every worker there saw the job as strictly temporary. The sixteen- to nineteen-year-old e-bike riders had no idea what a union even was and made it clear they weren’t planning on sticking around. The migrant workers, mostly on six-month temporary licences, made it just as clear that they had no long-term stake in the place either.

It was only me, the PhD student on a stipend, who ended up staying three years, finishing my doctorate along the way.

It’s hard to organise a union when your only window for conversation is a rushed exchange over a sink between deliveries. I tried shifting things to Snapchat. No luck there either.

There was one particularly abusive manager who refused to listen to worker concerns about safety, especially concerning the bikes. His management style was appalling. I found it easy enough to stand up to him, and the other workers would back me up without fail. More than once, I scared the living daylights out of him by threatening to go to the Fair Work Ombudsman. Eventually, the franchise owners let him go.

On multiple occasions, our eighteen-year-old e-bike riders were attacked and robbed. One rider was stopped by an armed gang that stole both his e-bike and his clothes. Another was hit with a taser, it failed to knock him out, but he rode straight back to the store and had to take a break to recover from the shock. No arrests were made. No investigations followed. One of the franchise owners had the audacity to accuse a rider of fabricating the robbery he’d just survived.

Over time, we noticed more of our deliveries coming through UberEats, and fewer through the Dominos app or website directly. Towards the end of my time there, I was told that deliveries would now be handed to UberEats drivers as standard, and that I’d only be given orders placed through the app itself. Once that shift took hold, the number of deliveries I received collapsed and with it, my hours and shifts. Meanwhile, the store copped a steady stream of complaints, because many of the UberEats drivers weren’t storing the pizzas properly.

I knew exactly what was going on. The standard-issue UberEats bag can be stored either sideways or upright, but you must tie it down to the bike, which forces you to commit to one position. The alternative is wearing the bag on your back, which is clumsy and awkward, especially through tight doorways and crowded restaurants. Almost every delivery is best stored upright, which means, in practice, most UberEats bags end up strapped to the bike in exactly the position that doesn’t work for transporting pizzas. The result: a lot of ruined pizzas. Stores would scrawl “MUST HAVE THERMAL BAG OR NO PIZZA” on delivery notes, completely missing the actual problem.

To get around this, I bought a custom top box for my motorbike on a loan, one that handles food delivery properly, pizzas included, while still letting me lane filter through traffic. But most gig workers don’t have the credit, or the privilege, to afford a metal top box like mine.

This was just one of many problems that emerged once Dominos shifted from in-house delivery staff to outsourcing via UberEats. Regardless, the economics clearly favoured UberEats, so that’s who ended up taking the bulk of the deliveries. Cheaper for the store not to pay me directly, I suppose.

Not long after, the franchise went bankrupt, and I found myself relying on UberEats as my primary source of income.

The Quiet Desperation of UberEats

At first, I loved UberEats. The money seemed decent, especially during peak hours, and I loved listening to hours of audiobooks while riding across the city. I loved not having to wash dishes or serve customers. I got through a fair chunk of Marx and Engels this way. Just riding. Genuinely great.

What I hated was the hostility built into the job. Most restaurants treat you as subhuman. You’re pointed, tersely and without ceremony, towards some “back door,” reminded to take your helmet off, kept well away from the actual customers. Plenty of customers do the same, refusing to make eye contact, insisting on “leave at door” so they never have to acknowledge the person who just carried their dinner across the city.

I couldn’t help but notice the pattern: an overwhelmingly Black and brown mass of hi-vis gig workers directed through dark, dingy back corridors and side streets, kept well away from the overwhelmingly white customers gliding in through the front door. It’s not subtle once you see it.

I’m in Naarm, and I quickly learned that many deliveries happen in rich suburbs: Toorak, Hawthorn, Kew, St Kilda, maybe Fitzroy on a good night. Outside those postcodes, demand is basically dead. I found it telling that it was precisely the most “walkable” neighbourhoods generating the most delivery requests, while the car-centric outer suburbs, where people actually might need help getting food, saw almost none.

The vast majority of my deliveries were for women with Anglo names. Guzman y Gomez was, by a wide margin, the single most requested item. One busy night, I mixed up a delivery for “Amanda” with one for “Emma,” and joked to the hospo staff, “Sorry, after a while all the white female names meld together.” Everyone had a good laugh. It was funny because it was true.

There’s a quiet desperation that runs through the whole workforce. Everyone is trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of the narrow windows when people actually order. Drivers ride fast and recklessly, avoid eye contact, all while carrying a lingering aura of shame they didn’t choose and don’t deserve.

I always tried to strike up conversation with other drivers while waiting on orders. There’d be an initial awkwardness, a bit like being chatted up mid-piss at an adjacent urinal, but people would open up soon enough. Many didn’t have fluent English. Those who did were often international students, studying something highly technical, or graduates already qualified and looking for work that used their skills, preferably in Australia, preferably soon.

I spoke to accountants, programmers, engineers, lawyers, musicians, data analysts, marketers, scientists. All of them stuck delivering butter chicken to “Ted” in Kew.

Much as I enjoyed the job itself, I quickly clocked where the real cost was landing: my motorbike. Over the past year, I’ve spent roughly six grand on repairs alone, not counting petrol, tolls, or the wear on my gear: helmet, gloves, riding pants, boots.

Eventually I found myself under-reporting income to Centrelink just to make rent. In January, I had to borrow a thousand dollars from my best mate to cover a sudden vehicle malfunction. (I’ve paid him back, for the record.)

I recently did a clinical trial and picked up teaching work at universities once more, so I’ve had a brief reprieve. The first thing I did with the clinical trial money was take my bike in for a service, only to discover both tyres were dangerously overdue for replacement. I genuinely don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t found another source of income when I did. Not everyone does.

Can Delivery Gig Work Be Reformed?

I’ve spent a lot of time turning this over: can this industry actually be reformed?

Half the appeal of gig work is the flexibility, you open the app, you pick your hours. There are in-app tier systems that track your “level.” The highest tier is “Diamond,” which, among other perks, entitles you to speak to an actual human instead of an AI chatbot when something goes wrong.

Broadly, to reach Diamond you need consistently high customer ratings and around twenty hours of driving a week. I found it easy enough to maintain.

One option that might work: offer Diamond-tier workers a full-time contract, with UberEats covering vehicle maintenance or providing a company vehicle outright. My concern is obvious, what happens to everyone else? Do they just cop it? “Rights for some but not for most” doesn’t work as a demand you can build a mass movement around, and it certainly doesn’t work as something workers could strike for. It also still leaves people at the mercy of an opaque algorithm run by a US company, entirely at the whim of wealthy customers who could, frankly, just walk down and get their own food.

The other option is for UberEats to stop pretending it’s a “gig” company at all: workers rostered on properly, company vehicles, paid sick leave, injury compensation, an actual hourly wage. My strong suspicion is that if UberEats did any of this, it would stop being profitable overnight.

In fact, I’d go further: UberEats is only profitable because the costs of vehicle maintenance, petrol and tolls are quietly offloaded onto workers. It’s not an accident of the business model; it is the business model. The desperation of unemployment and underemployment pushes people into this work to survive in the short term, at the cost of their vehicles and their health in the long term.

Unionising gig workers is genuinely difficult, because most of them don’t identify as delivery drivers. They see themselves as temporarily embarrassed accountants, engineers, lawyers, people doing this part-time on the way to something else. Much like my old Dominos co-workers, they don’t see themselves “doing this” for long. And honestly, they’re right, you can’t do this for long without bankrupting yourself and destroying your vehicle in the process. The job is structurally designed to be temporary, which makes it structurally resistant to organising.

I spent a while trying to figure out how you’d even begin unionising this workforce. Do you hand out flyers outside Guzman y Gomez between six and nine? How do you demand better pay and conditions in an industry that’s fundamentally unprofitable without super-exploitation? Even then, you run into the same wall I hit at Dominos: “I won’t be doing this for long, so what’s the point?” What’s the point indeed.

When the Dominos franchise I worked for went under, gutted by UberEats eating its delivery share, I remember thinking, as a Marxist, that it felt “historically progressive”, the same process by which big capital devours small capital through economies of scale, consolidation, monopolisation. That’s what happened to my old franchise, in miniature. But do we need this? It increasingly looks like the plan is simple: let one company grab the monopoly, then jack up prices and gut wages once there’s no competition left to worry about, before pivoting hard to AI delivery drones and cutting human drivers out altogether.

What Gig Workers Need

We need an actual, stable job, ideally one that matches our skills. I should have been working as a university tutor throughout my PhD, not delivering food on two wheels in the rain. That’s where the stable, socialised workplaces with unions exist. The same goes for the accountants, engineers and lawyers I met outside every Guzman y Gomez in Naarm.

These gig companies are not profitable. They cannot be made profitable without either achieving monopoly control or bankrupting their own workforce, one motorbike tyre at a time. Which means they have no business being privately owned. They should be publicly owned, run as a public monopoly that breaks even while paying fair wages and providing real benefits. Once AI delivery drones are viable, the public service can transition to a small, dedicated full-time workforce operating company vehicles.

I think demanding a return to “store-hired” delivery drivers is, frankly, a historically reactionary position, that mode of production is gone, and it isn’t coming back. What we should be calling for instead is an acceleration towards a publicly owned gig monopoly. Until the drones arrive, this should run on a two-tiered system. Casual drivers who genuinely want the flexibility, who want to use their own vehicle, should be free to do so, but with better pay and their vehicle costs covered by the company. Once a worker hits “Diamond,” or its equivalent, they should be offered a stable, full-time contract with the option of transitioning onto a company vehicle.

Unionising gig workers is hard precisely because they don’t identify with the job. I’ve also noticed migrant workers frequently fear that joining a union will jeopardise their visa status, and there’s often a real language barrier on top of that. None of this changes the fact that this is a core part of the proletariat we need to organise and win over, and I promise you, Guzman y Gomez at peak hour is exactly where you’ll find them. There’s real potential for mutual aid and agitation in those queues. Whenever someone offered me water, I took it. You’d be surprised how dehydrated you get doing this job.