1 Details of Fatima’s pay at the Ministry of Justice were correct at the time of writing. Cleaning subcontractors at the Supreme Court do currently pay their staff the London Living Wage.
2 Hilary Osborne, ‘UK workers’ wages fell 1% a year between 2008 and 2015, TUC says’, Guardian (27 February 2017); ‘UK workers experienced sharpest wage fall of any leading economy, TUC analysis finds’, press release by the Trades Union Congress (27 July 2016); ‘UK wages worth up to a third less than in 2008, study shows’, Guardian (31 January 2019)
3 Bhrmie Balaram and Fabian Wallace-Stephens, ‘Seven portraits of economic security and modern work in the UK’, RSA (25 January 2018)
4 David Metcalf, ‘United Kingdom Labour Market Enforcement Strategy 2018/19’, UK Government (May 2018)
5 Elle Vickery, ‘Theresa May: Work is the best route out of poverty’, Daily Express (24 January 2018); ‘Theresa May on not raising VAT, tax pledges, welfare and Brexit’, ITV News (30 April 2017); ‘“Work is the best route out of poverty” – May and Corbyn debate Universal Credit’, Conservative Home (12 September 2018)
6 Patrick Butler, ‘Record 60% of Britons in poverty are in working families – study’, Guardian (22 May 2017); ‘Seven million UK workers living in poverty’, The Week (7 December 2016)
7 Andrew Haldane, ‘Pay Power’, speech given to the Acas ‘Future of Work’ conference (10 October 2018); Amelia Hill, ‘Seven in 10 UK workers are “chronically broke”, study finds’, Guardian (25 January 2018)
8 Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Polity Press, 2016)
9 Richard Partington, ‘Gig economy in Britain doubles, accounting for 4.7 million workers’, Guardian (28 June 2019)
10 Owen Boycott, ‘Junior judges face zero-hours working conditions, say lawyers’, Guardian (30 June 2019)
11 Sarah Butler, ‘Nearly 10 million Britons are in insecure work, says union’, Guardian (5 June 2017)
12 Graham Ruddick, ‘Number of striking workers now lower than ever’, Guardian (2 August 2016)
13 Sean O’Grady, ‘Strikes are at an all-time low – and that’s because we don’t really need trade unions any more’, Independent (30 May 2018)
14 Jonathan Maze, ‘McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook was paid $21.8m last year’, Restaurant Business (12 April 2018). The sterling calculation is based on currency exchange rates at the time of writing and assumes a forty-hour working week.
15 Donald Hirsch, ‘Two-thirds of single Britons in their 20s now live with their parents. Here’s what that means’, CityMetric (4 February 2019)
16 ‘Ferrovial reports 454 million euro net profit in 2017, a 21% increase’, press release by Ferrovial (28 February 2018)
17 My interviews with Fatima were conducted with the assistance of a Portuguese translator.
18 Form AR21 Annual Return for Unite the Union (2017); Form AR21 Annual Return for United Voices of the World (2017)
19 ‘What is the Origin of the Term Wobbly?’, Industrial Workers of the World
20 ‘Unison Actively Undermining IWW Living Wage Campaign At St George’s’, Industrial Workers of the World (24 May 2012)
21 Alexandra Rucki, ‘Medical school cleaners secure London living wage’, Wandsworth Times (29 May 2012)
22 Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (The Jungle Publishing Co., 1906), p. 38
23 Ibid., p. 163
24 Callum Cant, ‘The wave of worker resistance in European food platforms 2016–17’, Notes From Below (29 January 2018)
25 Beverly J. Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization Since 1870 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 47
26 Sarah Butler, ‘Amazon accused of treating UK warehouse staff like robots’, Guardian (31 May 2018)
27 Matt Novak, ‘Amazon Patents Wristband to Track Hand Movements of Warehouse Employees’, Gizmodo (31 January 2018)
28 Trent Gillies, ‘Why most of Three Square Market’s employees jumped at the chance to wear a microchip’, CNBC (13 August 2017)
29 Emine Saner, ‘Employers are monitoring computers, toilet breaks – even emotions. Is your boss watching you?’, Guardian (14 May 2018)
30 Ibid.
31 Jamie Woodcock, ‘Automate This! Delivering Resistance in the Gig Economy’, Mute (10 March 2017)
32 Sinclair, The Jungle, p. 70
33 Woodcock, ‘Automate This! Delivering Resistance in the Gig Economy’
34 Saner, ‘Employers are monitoring computers, toilet breaks – even emotions. Is your boss watching you?’
35 Woodcock, ‘Automate This! Delivering Resistance in the Gig Economy’
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Amy Walker, ‘Hospitality abuse: new website to encourage workers to speak out’, Guardian (31 January 2019); see the ‘WorkIt’ app, available on iOS and Android app stores; John Evans, ‘An introduction to Wobbly: an app for 21st century workers’ power’, Notes From Below (16 August 2018); Tim Lezard, ‘Unite launches online pay tool to counter bosses’ money lies’, Union News (17 January 2018)
39 Alex Rosenblat, ‘The Network Uber Drivers Built’, Fast Company (9 January 2018)
40 Cara McGoogan, ‘Uber drivers gang up to cause surge pricing, research says’, Telegraph (2 August 2017)
41 Adam Barr, ‘Microresistance: Inside The Day of a Supermarket Picker’, Notes From Below (30 March 2018)
42 Ibid.
43 Kim Moody, On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War (Haymarket Books, 2017)
44 Robert Wright and Camilla Hodgson, ‘Foreign cleaners expose lack of protection in UK labour market’, Financial Times (2 May 2019)
45 Callum Cant discusses this further in ‘McStrike and Unions in the Precarious Economy’, a podcast episode published by Novara Media (5 October 2018)
46 Ibid.
47 Steven Parfitt, ‘Labour history shows us where workers “took back control” without building walls’, Open Democracy (9 November 2018)
48 Ibid.
49 Zachary Young, ‘French Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Foodora workers strike during World Cup final’, Politico (11 July 2018); ‘Food delivery riders protest against “wage theft” by Deliveroo, Foodora and UberEats’, Guardian (16 May 2018)
50 Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), p. 139, quoted in Moody, On New Terrain, p. 75
51 Moody, On New Terrain
52 ‘Quentin Marshall steps up to head Weatherbys Private Bank’, Weatherbys (6 July 2017); ‘Meet the Private Bank Team’, Quentin Marshall profile on Weatherbys’ website: https://www.weatherbys.bank/about-weatherbys/team/private-bank
53 ‘Company History’, IDM (‘Intelligent Debt Management’) Group website: https://www.intelligentdebtgroup.co.za/timeline.php
54 Wendy Liu, ‘The Inevitability of the Gig Economy’, New Socialist (19 November 2017)
55 Tim Lezard, ‘We are going up! Trade union membership on the rise again’, Union News (30 May 2019); Alice Martin, ‘Young climate strikers could achieve even more by joining a union’, Guardian (30 May 2019)
56 Tweet by Jason Moyer-Lee, general secretary of the Independent Workers of Great Britain union (@MoyerLee) on 31 May 2018: https://twitter.com/MoyerLee/status/1002157038120652801