didn’t you go to Europe?
“I had to go back. I was working delivering food, but I couldn’t afford to eat”
Working in Europe. Cartoon of Saturday 22 July 2017 in CTXT
“Jinn” is another app from a food delivery company. Jinn means genius in Arabic. Yet another of the many gimmicks born of the rebranding of exploitation to show it as an evolution of employment, what they call the“gig economy“.
Related: Spain is a paradise for the working poor
The “gig” can be summed up as hiring people for one-off, sporadic jobs at specific times. Nothing new, nor should it be a problem. Occasional odd jobs that have always existed. The same old “chapú”, but now with a neo-kooky name and based on the App of some entrepreneurs as the central axis of their dazzling start-up. Sucker middlemen, nothing to do with the collaborative economy.
The problem, as always, is that these smart guys neither hire nor want to play with the labour laws that we all play with. And they also want tailor-made regulation to continue normalising exploitation and precariousness. They are the new digital landlords preaching “the new” with their euphemistic English dictionary under their arm.
The owner of Jinn App met with his company’s delivery drivers in January. They were pretty pissed off. They had not been paid what they were owed and their contracts had been changed so that they were paid per delivery and not the legal minimum wage. Same Deliveroo scam.
In fact, according to ED, the geniuses wash their hands of it in the same way:
The entrepreneurs defend themselves. They claim that the drivers are not their employees, nor are they obliged to accept their orders.
And when have you ever heard one of these posh, stuttering, chatterboxes talking about the rights and conditions of their delivery drivers, or about improving them? For the entrepeneur, the worker is often given the same importance and consideration as a packet of foil or a wastepaper basket, if we are lucky.
Optional exploitation
But listen, if you don’t want to be exploited, you can decide not to let yourself be exploited. You are free to go and be exploited elsewhere. The Jinn believe that with this argument they are free to continue exploiting. It is the maxim of misunderstood economic “liberalism”. Freedom for my own above any law, person or right.
Watch as one of the founders of Jinn, León Herrera Sáez-Benito, takes out his deck of prepaid cards and shuffles them like stickers while chewing his gum in an attempt to calm his employees (whom he does not recognise) as they demand their money.
A genuine costumbrista scene of the new feudalism.
