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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

On the Roads

by New Worker correspondent

The novelist Jerome K Jerome, of Three Men in a Boat fame, once wrote: “I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.” This correspondent wholeheartedly agrees – and while doing precisely that he noticed an interesting feature of modern capitalism. Recently he noticed a postman steadily walking along the pavement, stopping at various houses to make deliveries. Minutes later a van with DPD markings sped along the same road, a driver sprang out and ran up the steps to hand over a parcel before running down the steps and speeding off. The latter approach to deliveries has been the cause of fatal accidents caused by strict targets.

The Times recently investigated this matter by interviewing 20 past and present DPD drivers.

DPD, once called Dynamic Parcel Distribution, is actually a state-owned company, the state being France, and in particular its postal service. Operating in 24 European countries, its UK arm was acquired by taking over Parceline in 2000. In recent years it has done more business in customer deliveries than Royal Mail.

It hit the headlines in February 2018 when it was discovered that a diabetic driver had died after missing medical appointments because he feared the standard practice of being fined £150 for absences. His death caused Frank Field, then Chairman of the House of Commons’ Work and Pensions Select Committee, to describe DPD’s regimes as “smacking of sweated labour from the Victorian era”. Some DPD drivers have complained of working 14-hour days, seven days per week, which is obviously dangerous to themselves and anyone near their vans. In addition to breaking speed limits to meet targets, they report being sent out with over-loaded vans.

In the light of this scandal it was forced to offer its “self-employed” drivers the chance of becoming direct employees. But that seems like a distinction without a difference.

There are three types of contact on offer at DPD. Firstly direct employees, who get lower wages because they receive such extravagant treats as holiday or sick pay and pensions. These are denied to their self-employed “owner-driver franchisees” who lease their vehicles, and “owner-driver workers”.

Despite being formally self-employed, drivers have little control over their work, particularly over hours worked, which is one of the main criteria of that dubious status. One driver told the Times that he was threatened with the sack for declining to work a seven-day week before Christmas.

The 14-hour working days complained of breach government regulations as they include travelling time to and from the depot, which takes drivers about the 10 hours they are allowed to spend behind the wheel. While naturally DPD denies they break the law, drivers and even some managers reported to the Times that some routes are removed from the electronic record to keep within the law and to ensure that the depot is cleared every day.

Drivers say that things got worse at DPD when the pandemic struck, boosting home deliveries. DPD offer a one-hour window to customers, which means that drivers are under pressure to make deliver so many deliveries in that time. Overall the delivery market doubled in size between 2014 and 2021.

In one particular case a DPD driver was jailed for dangerous driving after a fatal accident while rushing to make deliveries in Brighton in May 2020. It was only after this incident that DPD stopped sending messages to drivers’ cabs that they were falling behind target. In another case an accident caused by speeding resulted in a DPD driver being held responsible for the £2,700 costs.

In a south London case a driver involved in a comparatively minor crash reported the incident to her depot, she was simply instructed to put her bumper back on and was back on the road 15 minutes later despite the shock she suffered. She told the Daily Mail she was surprised more accidents don’t occur. “All the drivers would speed. Our vans had a limit of 80 mph, but we’d regularly race up roads with much lower speed limits. You quickly learned where the cameras were and which ones were working or not. Getting from one delivery to the next was a priority and you couldn’t stop to eat or drink. I’d eat at the wheel and rarely had toilet breaks – I ended up with urinary tract infections so many times from holding on.”

These pressures are not unique to DPD. Kasim Rashid, who has worked for three other companies, reported that: “Right from the moment you leave the depot with your parcels you have a chap constantly phoning you up to say: ‘You’re behind!’ or ‘Why have you stopped?’ and every hour they send you a report to tell you how many drops you’ve done.” He was given the impossible target of delivering 60 parcels per hour. He managed 25 in one hour due to throwing parcels at people’s doors and then running back to the van.

He said that his official wage of £700 per week was before deductions of £200 for the van hire, and that the driver would have to pay for their own petrol and any damage done to the vehicle. His reward was effectively 80 pence per delivery.

Delivery companies are often negligent in providing proper security for drivers. The trade journal Chemist & Druggist notes that in its sector pharmacies often “send drivers out without the right sort of security” and “potentially face legal repercussions”.

Medical supplies have “come increasingly under attack by thieves selling on to the black market”, with deliveries to chemist from wholesalers a particular favourite.

Amazon Again

At our old friends Amazon things are as bad on the roads and in their warehouses.

Between 22nd December 2022 and 2nd January 2023 law firm Leigh Day carried out a survey of 168 Amazon drivers who reported: “never a spare second to eat or drink”, “have to pee in bottles due to an ever increasing and unmanageable workload” and are left “financially broken”.

One Amazon delivery driver reported that: “Amazon control everything you do. There were times I was out on delivery, and I’d stop for a few minutes, and they’d ring up and ask why I was parked up. The money I was earning wasn’t anywhere close to covering my rent and bills. In one week, I worked 36 hours over four days and I should have earned £464 but they gave me £2.74. I was very unhappy delivering for them. Effectively I was paying them to do their deliveries, rather than the other way around.” Even Santa Claus only had to work a single 24-shift, and he got all the mince pies he could eat.

In the survey, 97 per cent reported working a full day without a break, with 67 per cent reporting having to work a shift of more than 12 hours, 43 per cent reported working more than six consecutive days without a day off, and 64 per cent claimed their pay did not cover the cost of living.

Leigh Day launched a group claim in 2021 against Amazon on behalf of its delivery drivers for back pay for unpaid holiday, the national minimum wage and an employment contract. Some 3,330 drivers signed up and they have also been making similar claims against Just Eat, Bolt, Veezu and FREENOW.

One of the Leigh Day employment team said: “It is deeply concerning that the Amazon delivery drivers who completed our survey report experiencing unmanageable and potentially harmful circumstances during this period. Our group action legal claim is aimed at getting these delivery drivers the pay they deserve and create better working conditions, as well as holding Amazon to account.”

GMB have had some success in organising Amazon warehouse workers. Perhaps Unite should use its weight to organise drivers in the same way that RMT have attempted to organised outsourced catering and cleaning staff.