Proletarian Liberation Struggle Association Political Economy Group
In contemporary Chinese society, an imperialist country, highly developed large cities coexist with vast rural and county areas that are extremely impoverished. Due to the anarchic nature of production under capitalism, major industrial and commercial enterprises tend to gather in highly developed riverine and coastal cities to facilitate the sale of goods and procurement of raw materials, leading to severe contradictions between urban and rural areas. Most industrial and service employment is concentrated in first- and second-tier cities, while the vast rural and county populations, due to extreme difficulty in finding employment, have to endure meager incomes, sometimes unable to afford basic consumer goods necessary for the reproduction of their labor power under current social and historical conditions. This hardship often forces them to leave their hometowns and seek work in large cities, forming a huge migrant labor force. However, because of the extremely low income of the working people under the middle-repair (Zhongxiu) regime, their consumption capacity is very poor, and a large amount of produced goods cannot be sold in time, leading to serious overproduction and widespread business closures, which has long been a well-known reality in China. The economic depression makes it difficult for these migrant workers to quickly find jobs, forcing many into prolonged unemployment. They are often absorbed into production during expansion phases or laid off during contractions, or for various reasons, they are sometimes recruited into production and sometimes dismissed back into unemployment, becoming a “floating surplus population.”
Corresponding to the poverty, displacement, and frequent unemployment of urban and rural workers is a huge parasitic class under the middle-repair regime. There are up to three hundred million students not engaged in social labor, as well as the bourgeoisie composed of affluent petty bourgeoisie and exploitative proletariat, many of whom seek to satisfy their material desires by enjoying food delivered directly to their homes without leaving their houses. Additionally, excessively long working hours force some workers to lack time for domestic chores, wanting to reduce time spent on shopping and cooking to ensure basic rest. These social conditions have driven the rapid development of China’s food delivery industry. Currently, many restaurants’ delivery orders often surpass dine-in orders, and some restaurants have even stopped providing dine-in services, focusing solely on takeout. Meanwhile, the number of delivery personnel has expanded rapidly. The entry barrier for delivery work is very low, with few restrictions. As a result, delivery workers have become a “transitional occupation” for temporarily unemployed migrant workers and urban industrial workers. Mei Tuan Research Institute Vice President Li Jiwei states that “most delivery riders are part-time or serve as temporary relief or ‘transfer stations’ during work adjustments. Nearly half have worked less than three months, and only 11% have worked more than 260 days.” However, with the worsening unemployment problem today, many delivery workers cannot find suitable jobs and choose to stay in the industry. Many unemployed industrial workers and students who cannot find jobs after graduation also join the delivery workforce, making the group even larger. By 2025, the number of delivery workers has exceeded ten million. Among them, most come from rural areas and small counties struggling to make ends meet, with statistics from October 2020 indicating that the agricultural household registration accounts for as high as 68.9% of delivery workers. This does not include those from small towns and prefecture-level cities who are forced to work outside due to low income; if included, the majority of the delivery workforce remains migrant workers, many of whom still belong to the petty bourgeoisie.
The characteristics of the food delivery industry appear to be “free” on the surface—easy entry and exit, no strict labor discipline. Delivery workers’ work helps the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie engaged in the catering industry realize the value of commodities, making them part of the transportation sector. From an economic standpoint, delivery workers are essentially proletarians; many use rented electric bikes from car rental shops, and even those who own bikes lack the ability to work independently outside the monopolistic platforms (such as Meituan, Ele.me, JD.com). Due to the nature of their work, delivery workers are relatively independent, similar to small producers, and compared to industrial workers in factories, their connections are weaker, which further disperses the group into petty bourgeoisie. Despite appearing to enjoy more “freedom,” this “freedom” entails extremely poor working conditions. Delivery workers do not sign labor contracts with their platforms and are not protected by labor laws. To avoid liabilities for injuries or deaths during work, giants like Meituan and Ele.me register their delivery riders as “individual industrial and commercial households.” Meanwhile, the invisible chain of “piece-rate wages” tightly binds them—“if you don’t work, you don’t earn”—and the platform’s delivery system compresses delivery times as much as possible. As Lenin said, “Serfs worked for landlords and were punished by them. Workers work for capitalists and are punished by them. The only difference is that those who are unfree used to be beaten, now they are whipped with rubles.” Chinese workers have long escaped exploitation and oppression, but now they regress to the same plight as workers in Russia a century ago, subjected to the whip of the renminbi. Economic coercion forces delivery workers to find ways to improve efficiency, even resorting to traffic violations like running red lights and speeding to ensure timely deliveries. According to suspiciously unreliable surveys by Meituan and Ele.me, the average salary of delivery workers approaches 7,000 yuan, but at the cost of almost abandoning all rest days (most orders are concentrated on holidays), and platforms use various methods to force more labor, such as bonus incentives during bad weather and holidays, or hidden punishments—those with fewer deliveries or less online time are not assigned orders. Many riders, aiming for the 80-deliveries bonus of 100 yuan, work desperately in rain, snow, and holidays. All these factors push delivery workers to extend their working hours as much as possible, sometimes working 15-16 hours a day.
It is obvious that if delivery workers are involved in traffic accidents due to violations like running red lights, most of these incidents—99 out of 100—are not due to personal reasons but are entirely attributable to the invisible labor discipline created by the monopolistic capitalists of the industry to increase labor intensity, and to the capitalist system that forces migrant workers to leave their hometowns and seek livelihoods in big cities. However, Shanghai has now introduced a policy shamelessly blaming the delivery workers themselves for traffic accidents and imposing checkpoints under the guise of “traffic safety” with the so-called three-color “traffic safety code.” Since April this year, the Shanghai Public Security Bureau has launched this so-called traffic safety code, linked with the monopolistic giants Meituan and Ele.me, and directly imposed it on the broad delivery workforce. They assign “green, yellow, and red” codes to delivery riders, linking them to their qualification status: new riders must have a “green code” to work; repeat offenders with a “red code” are blacklisted. The standards for these “green, yellow, and red” codes are that only vehicles with compliant license plates, no unresolved traffic violations, and no responsible traffic accidents qualify for a green code. If a rider commits 1 to 3 unresolved violations, or has unresolved minor accidents, or accumulates five or more violations in a month, they are rated as yellow; if they use illegal modifications or electric tricycles, or are penalized twice or more for not using designated license plates, or have four or more unresolved violations, or two or more responsible accidents in a month, they are rated as red.
Is this system truly for the “safety” of delivery workers? Of course not. The low delivery prices and the extreme compression of delivery times force delivery workers to risk their lives violating traffic rules. If the monopolistic companies and the middle-repair government truly cared about their safety, they should improve working conditions instead of shamelessly shifting the blame onto the workers under the pretext of “safety.” The so-called “traffic safety code” will inevitably increase the oppression of delivery workers. Although it has been less than three months since implementation, and many specific measures have yet to produce tangible effects, it is already clear that this “traffic safety code” will greatly strengthen control over delivery workers. Delivery platforms will evaluate the daily average score of delivery riders at each site (green code 10 points, yellow 7 points, red 3 points) to rate the site’s star level; higher-level government regulators will also assess the risk level of platforms based on these scores—high or low risk. Even ignoring the blatant use of yellow and red codes to restrict workers, past practices of monopolistic delivery companies in punishing riders through covert means like reducing order dispatches suggest that the safety codes and related “safety scores” will be directly linked to order distribution, ultimately leading to increased control at the site level. Since April, over 420 riders have been blacklisted for being assigned a red “safety code.”
Furthermore, the implementation of the “traffic safety code” will inevitably be highly flexible—“if the law is uncertain, then the threat is unpredictable.” During the past three years of the pandemic, we have seen how the middle-repair government linked the “green, yellow, red” “health codes” to workers’ travel, banking, and other basic activities, brutally suppressing workers’ struggles with baseless “red codes.” The same applies to delivery workers: due to invisible labor discipline constraints, violating traffic rules during work is almost unavoidable. If a delivery worker strictly obeyed traffic laws—no red lights, no speeding—they might never be able to deliver on time or earn a basic income. In reality, workers who follow traffic rules strictly are virtually nonexistent. Therefore, the middle-repair government cannot base the traffic safety code solely on violations caused by workers; otherwise, most would be assigned yellow or red codes, making the system unworkable. When the “traffic safety code” is expanded further, the degree of “turning a blind eye” will depend entirely on the needs of the bureaucratic monopoly bourgeoisie. Economically, the worsening fiscal crisis leads local governments to impose fines and taxes on workers, and the “traffic safety code” will soon become a tool for fining delivery workers, increasing fiscal revenue. Politically, with rising unemployment and a large influx of workers into the delivery industry, the number of orders and prices decline, and the group often organizes class struggles. In future struggles, the middle-repair government will likely use the “traffic safety code” as a tool for intimidation and repression, playing a more reactionary role politically.
However, “chaos leads to order, darkness leads to light,” which is the development law of all social movements. Chairman Mao correctly pointed out that “the contradictory opposites are unified and also struggle, thus driving the movement and change of things.” The “traffic safety code” and the more economic and political shackles that the middle-repair government will impose on the delivery group will indeed worsen their living conditions, but this oppression can also serve to educate the broad delivery group, making them more aware of the close connection between political conditions and their lives. Although delivery workers are inherently dispersed in their work, their large activity areas and frequent contact with various industries partially compensate for this weakness. Once the group is strengthened through class struggle and begins to actively fight for their political rights, they can leverage this characteristic to play a greater role. In the near future, delivery workers will inevitably deepen their blood ties with their class brothers in factories during their resistance against increasing economic and political oppression, becoming an increasingly important force in the struggle for social liberation.
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