UberEats joins Wetherspoons, McDonald's workers in low pay strike

UberEats joined workers from JD Wetherspoon, Uber, Deliveroo, McDonald's and TGI Fridays who are striking on Thursday over low pay.

Walkouts will be held in several cities across the country and there will be a rally in London.

UberEats is requesting workers want to be paid £5 per delivery, and an extra £1 per mile for each delivery. Last month workers had their minimum pay per delivery reduced from £4.26 to £3.50.

Workers at JD Wetherspoon, McDonald’s and TGI Fridays want to be paid £10 an hour.

Striking McDonald’s worker Lauren McCourt said the industrial action could transform the sector for the better.

“The days of poverty pay, insecure contracts and lack of respect for workers are numbered. A living wage of £10 an hour for all ages, security of hours, and our right to a union are the basic rights we are fighting for,” she said.

"The fact that UberEats drivers have decided to strike on the same day as us shows that low pay is an issue that affects people across the industry," said a spokesman from the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU), according to the BBC.

TUC general secretary Frances O'Grady told the BBC programme that the strike was "small but growing" and added that the firms could afford to award a pay rise "and should".

Paul Hickman, analyst at Edison Investment Research said on Thursday that: “By definition the workers affected by flexible hours contracts are not a comprehensive industrialised workforce in the sense of, say train drivers or the miners of the 1980s. Provided branded operators like Wetherspoon, McDonalds and TGI Fridays can keep their doors open, the financial effects are unlikely to be significant."

"Uber Eats is only a small part of the Uber UK operation, which is only a small percentage of Uber’s worldwide revenue. Therefore any action by Uber drivers is unlikely to move the dial for Uber as a whole. It could be more significant for UK-based Deliveroo, but even so we doubt whether all drivers will show complete solidarity, and certainly Deliveroo was still taking orders in central London today," he added.

The strikes are being held to coincide with industrial action over pay by fast food workers in Chile, Colombia, the US, Belgium, Italy, Germany, the Philippines and Japan on Thursday.

MORE PAY AND MORE JOB SECURITY

Low pay is not the only thing worrying workers in the leisure sector, according to the Guardian around half of the people on zero-hours contracts want more regular work and a greater job security aside from a raise in their wages.

Companies like Deliveroo or Uber allow their workers to choose the hours they want to work granting them flexibility but around 44% of the workers now request more working hours to ensure a minimum wage to live.

Back in 2013, JD Wetherspoon was found to have around 80% of its staff (24,000 people) on contracts with no guarantee to work each week. The pub chain offered their workers the opportunity to move to permanent hours in 2016.

In 2016 around 80,000 of the 82,000 UK workforce at McDonalds were employed on zero-hour contracts but also offered their workers the chance for a more regular job.

Research from economists Nikhil Datta, Giulia Giupponi and Stephen Machin, found that almost 30% of workers had no other option but to accept working on a zero-hours contract because of a lack of job opportunities, the Guardian reported.

The study also said that zero-hour contracts help the companies buffer the wage cost shock induced by the minimum wage rises which would explain the high numbers of these type of contracts in the sector.