This is one of the particularities of this presidential election, on the question of employment: the importance taken in the left-wing discourse of this new category of workers, the deliverers of digital platforms.
Two candidates feature them in their campaign clips. In one of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s videos, Jérémy, a bicycle delivery man, recalls the precariousness in which workers who, like him, suffer from uberization are plunged. Philippe Poutou, the candidate of the New Anti-Capitalist Party, recorded a video which evokes precisely the same theme, and which will be published in the coming hours.
However, the solutions diverge. Jean-Luc Mélenchon wants the status of these workers, and of all those “falsely regarded as independent”, he said. Him elected, everyone goes into salaried contract, and therefore everyone benefits from the other measures of his program, such as retirement at 60 or the increase in the minimum wage.
More radical solutions on the far left
Philippe Poutou goes a little further. The objective remains the wage earner, but the means is different: it quite simply removes the status of autoentrepreneur under which many of these deliverers officiate. “A statute from the old days, before Social Security”, taunts its spokeswoman Pauline Salingue, where the worker is not covered in the event of a problem – illness, accident – and does not benefit from leave. The interesting point is the parallel drawn between teleworking and uberization. “What is common to bothexplains Pauline Salingue, it is the destruction of the ability to organize together. When you are alone in front of your computer, it reduces the ability to fight back with others.
More surprising at first sight: Nathalie Arthaud, the candidate of the “workers, workers” dear to LO, does not mention the subject in her project. Why ? Because “I do not seek solutions within the framework of capitalist society”, replies Nathalie Arthaud. Unstoppable. The path to follow for her: the social struggle, the balance of power, the revolution, “beyondshe says, of the multiplication of statutes promised by each other.”
In the original proposals, that of Fabien Roussel, who advocates the end of the opacity of platform algorithms. These algorithms govern the organization of the work of delivery people in particular. The communist candidate proposes that workers, as well as legislators, have a say in the management of these algorithms.