Deliveroonion

Deliveroonion is a movement of Deliveroo employees pushing for union recognition for UK office and remote workers. Deliveroo does not currently recognise a union for its office and remote workers, but the union with the highest membership amongst office/remote workers is Prospect. Our aim is to ensure that, at Deliveroo, workers voices are not just listened to, but actually actioned on, to make Deliveroo a better place to work for us all.

As Deliveroo does not currently recognise a union for its office and remote workers, we have limited power to influence pay or working conditions. Currently, if the Deliveroo executive want to make a decision, they are not compelled to consult us or listen to our concerns. Prominent examples of this are the 2023 redundancies and the changes to the remote working policy at the start of 2024, but there are plenty of other examples of decisions that Deliveroo have made unilaterally at the expense of us workers (e.g. refusing to publish pay bands, reducing notice periods for newer employees, no longer awarding new stock options to employees below L7).  We have attempted to voice our concerns to Deliveroo in response to these decisions, but Deliveroo has consistently chosen to ignore us.

If we are able to gain union recognition, then Deliveroo will be legally obliged to collectively bargain with employees on, at a minimum, matters of pay, hours, and holidays. We will also have legal protection to call for industrial action (e.g. strikes), that will give us tangible leverage when petitioning Deliveroo to improve or maintain working conditions. We are currently working to achieve union recognition with Prospect, who offer some additional benefits (e.g. legal support) to members beyond enabling us to collectively bargain.

There are many good reasons to join a union. Unionised workers are, on average, better paid (and have reduced gender pay gaps), receive better sickness benefits, and receive better training provisions and personal development prospects, but these are just some examples of the benefits of being part of a union. Changes that the union is able to make at Deliveroo can not only make Deliveroo a better place to work, but can also set an example to the industry as a whole, potentially improving working conditions whether you stay at Deliveroo or progress your career elsewhere.

Because a union within a workplace is formed by employees, it is the employees who decide what issues are important to them, and so unions can be used to improve the conditions of your workplace in the ways that are most relevant to you, whether that is by preventing wages from being eroded by inflation, improving job security, ensuring flexible working policies, or even protecting against companies misusing new technologies (like the protections against AI won by the WGA after their strikes in 2023). 

Unions are already making a difference at Deliveroo! The GMB union, the recognised union for Deliveroo riders, negotiated a pay deal for riders in May 2024 that secured a 15.2% increase to the rider pay floor (the minimum amount riders can be paid for their work). We hope that recognition for office and remote workers will see similar improvements in working agreements.

The reason that unions are able to secure all of these benefits is because of the collective power of employees acting together, and so the more union memberships we have at Deliveroo, the more power we will have to improve our working conditions. In particular, with high enough union membership, we are able to force Deliveroo to recognise the union without relying on voluntary recognition.

Getting Deliveroo to recognise our union will dramatically improve the power we have to shape decisions at Deliveroo and make Deliveroo a better place to work. In order to achieve union recognition, we need to have a high density of employees who are members of a union.

Union recognition is granted to a specific union for a specific group of workers (know as a bargaining unit). We will begin the process of formally obtaining union recognition once 50% of employees in our bargaining unit are members of Prospect (the union that has the highest membership across office and remote workers at Deliveroo). We do have the option of trying to obtain recognition with fewer members, but waiting until we reach 50% membership increases the chances of successfully obtaining recognition, and protects us from Deliveroo moving to derecognise the union after it obtains recognition.

Our bargaining unit can be any group of workers that makes sense. Our ultimate goal is to achieve union recognition for all employees at Deliveroo, but if a particular group of employees achieves over 50% union membership and union membership across all employees is below 50%, we will focus on achieving recognition for the smaller group of employees first. The reasoning behind this is that there will be some improvements that we can bargain for as a smaller group that may be applied to all employees (e.g. the changes to the remote working policy were made consistently across job roles and departments, so securing remote working flexibility for one group could lead to remote working flexibility for employees as a whole), and if we can demonstrate that the union can improve working conditions for one group of employees, then other groups of employees are more likely to want to join the union, and we can push to gain recognition for those employees once we have enough union membership within those groups.

As our membership stands at the moment, the largest group of workers with the highest proportion of union members is Tech Individual Contributors (those that work as individual contributors in tech roles as opposed to those working in the tech org). It is likely that this is the first bargaining unit that we will try and obtain recognition for, but we may widen this group to include more employees or seek recognition for a different group of employees depending on how membership grows over the coming weeks and months.

If you want to achieve union recognition for your job role or area, make sure that you join Prospect and encourage your colleagues to do the same.

If you want to get involved and help us to make Deliveroo a better place for employees, you can:

• Become a member of Prospect (if you aren't already) 

• Get involved in discussions on the Prospect slack channel (you can join the public channel without becoming a member, and will be added to the private Deliveroo channel after joining Prospect)

• Talk to colleagues about joining Prospect (and share this page with them if they want additional info)

• Let us know what issues are important to you (by going to the 'Have your say' page)

• Fill out this form if you would like to do more to help us organise

You are of course welcome to have discussion about the Deliveroo union wherever and to whoever you like. However, we understand that many people will be hesitant to talk about unionising around non-union members or on official Deliveroo channels. There are a number of spaces you can go to for discussion (be aware that these are external channels not owned by Deliveroo, so you should not use them to share any confidential Deliveroo data):

The Prospect Slack workspace - This is the official Prospect workspace. There are some public channels that you can access without becoming a member of Prospect, as well as private channels for Prospect members, and Deliveroo employees only. You should gain access to these private channels within a few days of becoming a member of Prospect. If you have not been added to either or these, and believe that you should be, let us know via our questions form.

The union is run collectively by all members of the union. This site is maintained by a small group of Deliveroo employees who have gone through union rep training with Prospect. We maintain the site on behalf of all members, so any feedback is welcome. We are bound by GDPR to protect your personal data, and beyond GDPR we want to make sure that no information you share can be linked back to you by anyone other than those of us who maintain the site. 

Some of the feedback forms we provide require you to sign in to protect against spam and to allow you to change your responses, but your email address will not be collected, you can sign in to whichever account you are most comfortable with.