Interview with Wings, ethical delivery cooperative

Promising Trouble Head of Research, Anna Dent, spoke to Rich Mason and Ben Jacob from Wings, a worker-owned cycle delivery cooperative, operating in Islington, North London. They use a digital platform to connect restaurants, riders and customers, and strive to provide fair, well-paid work for the delivery riders. 

Anna

Tell me more about Wings and what you do

Wings

Wings started off as an incredibly simple idea: why don't we do platform food delivery in an equitable, worker-owned way, that has roots in all of our personal background? Everyone involved has been out there on delivery. 

The market has been created, for better and worse, by these venture capital backed companies. The customer base is right there and they want to keep ordering this food, and there's nothing to stop a second wave of ethical disruptors coming in. We try to make the user experience as similar as we can, but the feel-good, ethical version. 

When we launched, it didn't have a real place-based identity. We've really grown into this idea that we belong in a place-based community. And it opens up some really interesting possibilities on how we engage — particularly with the local riders out on the street — the social frictions that exist between the delivery riders hanging out in crowded streets and the residents and local businesses. 

[Being place-based] is becoming a major part of the way we communicate with customers and differentiate ourselves. We're authentically neighbourhood based, and we couldn't really be anywhere else, because we are part of the social fabric in Islington and Finsbury Park. 

The ubiquitous [big] tech is radically anti-place, because business and funding imperatives demand that they need to be global, so they really reject any idea of place. They have this infinitely scalable product and that is really antithetical to a sense of place. 

Anna

Can you tell me a bit more about what it means to be based in Finsbury Park? 

Wings

The idea of working closely with the council forced us to think intimately about which anchor institutions are [important]. We talk about the issues that riders face, but restaurants [also] have their profits creamed off in commissions [by the platforms]. They're forced to rely on the massive businesses that then extract everything away from the local level. 

And residents have to deal with the friction that comes about from this model of ultra-fast delivery, which pressurises riders because their wages are contingent on how many deliveries they can do in an hour. So in our area, we've had our restaurants that have got on board with this idea [of a locally-based and accountable delivery service] very early on. We've had people coming out leafleting with us, offering impromptu advice over coffee, which has really come about because people in the area have bought into it as an idea of something that's community focused. We will eventually go from the worker owned co-op to a multi-stakeholder co-op owned by residents, but even right now there's a sense of community buy-in that comes from within the local area.

Anna

You also work with the council to improve foodbank deliveries. Would you agree that these are very place-based by nature? 

Wings

[We] only get asked by the council to do foodbank deliveries because we're an ethical community business. Even if they had access to community foodbank deliveries, [Deliveroo] just wouldn't do it, because it's too particular and too dependent on the contingencies of that area, that community, the individuals involved. If you're a multinational, their whole DNA is about global scalability. 

It was also part of our origin story. We didn't really exist pre-pandemic, it was just the beginning of a business plan. And then myself and others in the initial lockdown [got involved with] bicycle food delivery in South London with hundreds of riders. And that gave us some momentum and also credibility that [meant] Camden Council then were willing to contract us to keep something going.

Anna

Your journey seems to be about both scale and diversification?  

Wings

We really have to be price-competitive with those companies, and live with the ultra thin margins of the market that's been created for us. And therefore, we do have to reach a reasonable scale, thousands of deliveries per week. 

Our competitors are facing crises at the moment. Their share prices have come tumbling down in the face of pressure upwards from workers and downwards from regulators. And they're withdrawing from areas rapidly; they don't have anything to fall back on, on a local level of resilience. 

We have had to do things like put leaflets in local postboxes, work with other community organisations. I think you get that resilience because people trust you. They want you to keep going because you're a community business. 

Anna

Can you tell me a bit more about what your ambitions are for the impact that you might have locally? 

Wings

We’re really keen to hold onto impact for riders as our North Star. We've gone from just being a worker collective into this vision for community infrastructure and community wealth. But fundamentally, if we're not changing the lot of these really marginalised workers we're failing. So what does impact look like and success? It's having 100 people who really need this work, who transition from the most insecure work into well paid jobs with progression prospects, and holiday leave, that they have a better quality of life. 

One of the ways you deal with community issues that come up as a result from a company is by treating riders better. The issues that people complain about, whether that's antisocial riding behaviour or disputes with restaurants, come about because you have a group of people who are treated as less than human on the job. 

Where we want to be in three years time is to have 100 people in secure jobs, who can generate value to the community. We want to have premises where we can offer a safe space to wait, a bike workshop where they can fix bikes, a place to go to the toilet and have a shower. By having Wings as an institution within the area that is explicitly for riders, you deal with all these community issues that come out from that. 

Anna

Let’s talk a bit more about innovation. The received wisdom about innovation is all about academia and big business, and that somehow, if you stick a university next to lots of industry, they will innovate. It doesn't recognise that innovation happens in all sorts of other places, with all sorts of other people.

Wings

If the test is, does it generate economic activity which didn't exist before, I think our innovation level would be exactly zero. Even if we're more successful than our wildest dreams, we're not going to have caused any more people to buy meals, and generated more GDP in the economy. But it's really not the point. The whole point is that the market is there, and we think it's operating really badly and  just extracting value for shareholders. We're just trying to maintain exactly the same level of people ordering food, and then we'll just distribute the takings differently. But it's not really viewed as innovation. 

Anna

It would be great to hear a little bit more about the actual tech, who's built that for you? What's the process been like? 

Wings

When we first started out, we really wanted to build something [but] we’re really glad that we didn't have to do that, because it's so expensive and so difficult to do. We found out that the hard work had already been done by CoopCycle. They are a federation of courier cooperatives like ourselves; they've built this software and it does a reasonable imitation of Deliveroo. You can only use it if you're a co-op, and there's a very low financial barrier to entry. We participate along with all the other worker collectives in improving it. 

That technology was built and specified to work as closely as possible to the Deliveroo software. We completely changed the paradigm downstream from that: we distribute [the revenue] in interesting ways, have internal governance structures, and wraparound activities that are all very different. 

Anna

What would help you to unlock more innovation and impact within what you're doing? 

Wings

Whenever anyone asks us what we need, it's always cash and customers. We're out there fighting against a bottomless pit of money, YouTube ads, and billboards. We need cash to do community based marketing. All it's going to take is people trying us out and then once they've started using this, why would you ever go back to the unscrupulous version? 

Anna

What would the funding landscape look like that supports what you want to do? 

Wings

We’ve certainly had that experience of being the wrong fit for social enterprise. They're all essentially tied back to this idea of profitability and scalability and return on investment (ROI). It’s not like we're completely anti being profitable, it'd be really fun to be profitable, we’d give everyone a pay rise. 

Then there is the classic foundation impact-based fundraising, rather than ROI fundraising. And even then it’s hard to give them what they want, because they want things that are a bit too concrete. [It would be good to see] an appreciation that impact can be nebulous and magical. 

Visit https://www.wings.coop/ to find out more about Wings