The cycle of struggle: Food platform strikes in the UK 2016-18

This chapter presents a survey of food platform strikes in the United Kingdom (UK) between August 2016 and 2018. It uses a combination of surveys, interviews and ethnographic data to develop a thorough and in-depth understanding of the workers movement from the perspective of workers themselves. There is an epistemic problem facing any analyst of food platform strikes: informal action organised through primarily invisible worker networks is hard to identify from the outside. Class composition was developed as a framework to make sense of the findings of inquiries, putting forward theory of how classes are formed and relate to each other under capitalism. The framework developed by Italian workerists focused on the technical composition of the labour process and its relation to the political composition, or forms of struggle, of workers. Workers drove up and down the street, with horns blaring and chants directed at the headquarters.