My experience as a Deliveroo rider and the attempt to articulate our struggle from the UGT union structure

Abstract

In February 2017 I working as a Deliveroo driver. From one day to the other, I went from being unemployed and penniless, to officially becoming an entrepreneur in the emerging of gig economy. However, what really began was a competition to survive and a journey to understand how a model of work that, under the idea of autonomy and flexibility, constantly forces you to overcome your own physical and mental limits. From this experience also emerged our struggle with my colleagues to organize ourselves to try to stop this model and to obtain recognition to the conditions we were subjected to. This has led us to different experiences and, step by step, we have managed to put our situation in the center of the social and judicial debate. So this is a short story, largely drawn from my own experience, that I ethnographed for my doctoral thesis.  The story begins from the time I started to be a rider, and relates the problems our organization has encountered, how companies operate, the main trials we have faced, etc. until I ended up working in union action at UGT, dedicated to digital platforms. So, although the article is narrated in first person, it also brings together the experience within UGT, its strategies and the way in which we organized ourselves together.