How do capitalists exploit workers?
In China, the answer may be a bit cruel.
Not long ago, a director in Beijing experienced the life of a takeout worker and concluded that it was not easy to work 12 hours for 41 yuan, which is a lot!
On May 10th, the chief of the department with his inspection team had a conversation with the company representatives of Meituan, and the information he got was shocking!
First, there are 10 million registered delivery workers on the Meituan platform, but none of the 10 million are official employees, but are outsourced to contractors.
Because of the outsourcing relationship, many of the delivery workers only get the minimum standard of social security, or even no social security!
Second, the inspection team asked: if a takeout rider has an accident, is the Meituan responsible, or the supplier? The representative of Meituan was very direct: "This is a matter of commercial insurance to be responsible for, there are too many riders, we have no way to be completely directly responsible."
Guess what, it's the 3 bucks a day commercial insurance that Meituan deducts from the commission of the delivery guy!
The reps from Meituan, even in front of the inspection team, had a cold and arrogant tone.
They, how have they ever treated workers as human beings!
Statistics show that from 2013 to 2020, China's takeout market grew from 63.48 billion yuan to 835.2 billion yuan.
Users and capital, geometric increase, fat is of course the capitalist's pockets.
Hungry Mansion was successfully acquired by Ali at a high price, and the share price of Meituan has also risen wildly.
It took just a few years to go from small startup to industry giant.
And nourishing these giants are the countless takeout workers.
Chen Hui (a pseudonym) is an employee of Meituan, and his working hours have doubled since he quit his job and joined the takeaway industry.
9:30 am to 8:00 pm, one or two shifts a week to 12:00 at night, only 1 ~ 2 days a month to rest.
Although wearing the clothes of "Meituan", he is not a real employee of "Meituan", but a third-party logistics company assigned.
The company's main goal is to provide the best possible service to its customers.
His delivery time is repeatedly compressed by the calculations of the takeout platforms.
From an hour to 45 minutes to 30 minutes.
There is a countdown to delivery on the app, and he holds his phone like a time bomb, because if he doesn't deliver on time, he faces a fine!
The fine is $5 for 10 minutes overtime, $10 for 20 minutes, and so on.
The fine schedule lists up to 10 items.
In order to hurry, he rode the speed of the electric car, can only be described as "life".
Now, in Baidu search, we enter the keyword "takeout, traffic accidents", you can retrieve 13.8 million results.
Almost every day, there are accidents involving delivery boys.
In April 2015, a high school student was hit and injured by a "Meituan" deliveryman, and finally the court found that the deliveryman was in a hurry and collided with a pedestrian, and Meituan paid 157,000 yuan in compensation.
On January 2, 2017, a takeaway delivery worker was hit and killed in Shanghai for allegedly running a red light.
Some time ago, the news of the sudden death of the takeaway boy detonated all over the Internet, and guess how much money Meituan paid out?
Just 600,000 dollars.
The inspection team asked the Meituan representative: "Is this in addition to your commercial insurance, or is it due to public pressure?"
The Mission rep replied, "It would be the latter."
The rep's subtext is that it wouldn't have paid out $600,000 if it hadn't been such a big public outcry.
Perhaps in their eyes, the life of a delivery person is not even worth 600,000 dollars!
Even with so much risk and pressure, there are still a lot of people who choose to squeeze into the industry.
For the millions of people who come to work in big cities, what can they do if they don't deliver?
In factories, there is a cold assembly line and paramilitary management, which is not only labor-intensive, but also doesn't allow workers to walk around, talk, or play with their cell phones, which makes them very tired every day.
And many white-collar workers in the city are paid only five or six thousand dollars.
It's possible to make 8,000 to 10,000 dollars if you're desperate to run a takeaway. This is despite the fact that there is no employment contract and no social security.
Takeaway platforms have also captured the mentality of workers, who save the cost and time of building huge logistics teams through outsourcing companies, and by extension, shirk the social security responsibilities of hundreds of thousands of takeaway army.
Some people calculate that once Meituan is required to pay five insurance and one gold for nearly 10 million takeout boys, the annual cost will rise by at least 10 billion yuan.
In order to save this money, the giants will do anything.
In the case of Meituan, for example, at the beginning of 2014, Meituan had only 200 employees and covered only 20 key cities across the country.
Today, Meituan has a delivery team of more than 3 million people, of which only tens of thousands are direct employees.
In most third-party delivery companies, there is no formal labor contract, let alone insurance.
In the salary structure, there is no base salary, and they are only remunerated with a commission on the delivery fee they get per order.
The more invisible squeeze is that the delivery workers think their job is free and they can run around.
But in reality, they have no freedom at all.
With big data calculations, these giants have used a whole range of algorithms to keep the takeaway driver's trajectory in check.
The ranking of the number of orders delivered, the distance ridden, and the number of positive reviews has plunged these riders into a capital-customized "rush game". This disguises the extended working hours and increases the intensity of work.
A study shows that the average daily working time of riders is 11.4 hours, which is already the standard for manufacturing "sweatshops".
Under the algorithm, a delivery driver's body is like a machine on an assembly line.
Just like last year's popular article, "Takeout Riders, Stuck in the System," it reads:
Yes, capitalists are never soft on workers, and some have escaped Foxconn's assembly line, but not the big data of Meituan.
The big data that the platforms have in their possession is not for the users, but for them to maximize the exploitation of workers and maximize the fooling of consumers!
As you can see, the takeout economy has created a lot of jobs in a manufacturing downturn, which is an important shift in China's labor market in recent years.
The squeeze from internet platforms is more insidious than the squeeze from factories.
With the manufacturing industry, migrant workers can still improve their work-life situation through the legal process, and factories generally pay a minimum of five percent insurance.
But in the takeaway economy, all of this can be circumvented.
By law, the amount a company can discipline an employee cannot exceed 20% of the worker's monthly salary. If the deducted amount is less than the minimum wage, it is paid at the minimum wage.
However, the platform's punitive measures for riders are currently unrestricted, and often a bad review from a customer can turn a week of a rider's labor into nothing.
What's a retail takeout worker to do against these giants?
The takeaway platforms are the ones that use the ambiguity in the law to give the platforms maximum control over the rider and minimum responsibility!
Holding a smartphone, riding an electric bike Mercedes-Benz in the metropolis, they are still a group of youthful rice eaters, no one knows where their tomorrow, and no one to give them protection.
Of course, there may be individual extreme phenomena.
For example, Jingdong, each security guard, each cleaning, each courier has a labor contract with Jingdong, Liu Qiangdong also insisted on full payment of five insurance and gold to employees.
Liu Qiangdong said, "If you this company is relying on withholding five insurance and one gold for employees, sacrificing the money to save their lives after 60 years old, that's shameful money, how much it earns will make my conscience uneasy, I have no sense of accomplishment."
However, Liu Qiangdong is also only one, Jingdong's employees are also limited, and the capitalist's commitment is also said to change.
How to save more than 10 million people eating the capitalist "leftovers" of the delivery staff?
We look forward to the country to see this group of people in the sun, can not get the "sun"!
The policy is to give the giants some restrictions and a little care!
If you've ever ordered takeout, I hope you'll take this call forward.
What do you think about the relationship between takeout workers and platforms? Feel free to chat in the comments section.