"One of the main appeals of bicycle couriering is the freedom it seems to offer. Freedom from the inanities of office life, the freedom of the city. But there’s also the freedom to freeze on a slow day in the rain, the freedom to be injured on the job with no chance of sick pay, the freedom to die on the road. It’s a wild, unregulated business, which is part of its attraction. Cycle couriering is the modern equivalent of running away to sea, or joining the circus, without having to leave London. Many couriers are economic migrants, eastern European or Brazilian, taking advantage of the relative ease with which jobs can be found (no qualifications necessary, except the ability to ride a bike) and the relatively lax fiscal scrutiny. They come and go largely unnoticed by their employers and clients. Occasionally one of them is deported and another silently inherits his equipment and identity.
I chose to do the job not so much for economic reasons as for the other things it seemed to offer: excitement, thinking time, blissful fatigue. I thought of myself as following Orwell’s lead, gaining an understanding of hard work at the coal face of capitalism to salve my conscience. It’s easy to see what, precisely, you are being paid to do: earnings are measured in miles – the distance theory of value.
The objects you deliver, of course, tend to be the property of big business, material things that can’t be emailed or urgent jobs that can’t wait for the Royal Mail. Much of the work I did in the West End came from a cosmetics company, sending samples to PR firms. Runs between the City and the Inns of Court were common, too. Then there were the strange one-off jobs, returning legal documents left in Stringfellow’s by an overworked solicitor, taking teabags from Fortnum’s to Buckingham Palace.
You don’t always know what you’re carrying: there was the occasional grubby envelope that I wouldn’t have wanted the police to stop and search me with. A job that has entered courier folklore sent one lucky cyclist to Barbados: a document needed a signature. Other jobs are less glamorous. I heard of one contract with a large bank that sent urine samples off for drug-testing every month. So much for the romantic allure: carrying bankers piss around must place you near the bottom of the employment scale.
The recession has dented profits considerably. For many small firms couriering has gone in-house, and hard-pressed runners or office skivvies now do the tape runs to Soho. It varies week by week, but I’m told the usual festive rush of work hasn’t materialised this year. A downturn hits an unsalaried courier in real time, just when, with an enforced holiday approaching (during which they will earn nothing), they need it most. Freed from the obligations of the nine to five, they are also free to become quickly poor."
"Riding a bicycle round London for ten hours a day is grindingly difficult. A bike courier is paid £2-£3 per job (with a 10 per cent bonus for working a full week if you’re lucky), income can be fickle, and a slow week spent standing in the rain is no fun at all. Though it varies dramatically, couriers cover distances averaging around 300 miles a week. Couriers are obliged to deliver whatever a client wants delivered as quickly as the client requires; if you can’t get from pick-up to destination within 40 minutes, you don’t get paid. Covering London from (roughly) Wapping to Knightsbridge and Camden to Elephant and Castle, you see a lot of the city, a lot of weather, and a great many post-rooms.
Bicycle couriers are generally taxed as self-employed subcontractors. Theoretically, couriers work for themselves, on a job by job basis, and are subsequently afforded no contractual protection. If you fall ill or get knocked off (a depressingly regular occurrence; studies have shown that cycle couriering is significantly more dangerous than most other trades), then you’re on your own. No job security, no sick pay, maybe a sympathetic word from your controllers but that’s about it. Though there have been attempts at unionisation, they seem doomed to fail in an industry that relies so much on a transient labour force.
The most a courier can hope for when injured is the assistance of the London Courier Emergency Fund, a grassroots organisation which pays out small amounts to riders injured on the job. The LCEF is funded entirely by couriers and their friends. Like whaling, the job generates a strong communal network, but this network is completely informal, structured around races, drinking and comradeship rather than institutional legal protection. Because of this, any attempt to overturn the state of the industry through direct action is doomed to failure: striking is met with swift dismissal, whole fleets are sacked and replaced overnight. Average rates of pay have remained much the same for the last ten years, and it is difficult to see how they could be increased, even merely in line with inflation.
I’m not unsympathetic to Roy Mayall et al, but can’t help rejoicing in postal strikes as sending more work the way of the courier. A guaranteed income (at least for the time being), sick pay (albeit restricted) and, most important, the right to strike are privileges denied to the thousands of London bicycle couriers who ensure that while postmen strike, letters still get delivered."
Talk about stingy rates Rapha, 4 tags at Metro was about 120 quid... 4 van rates to w3 though. You ever wondered what Overdrive looks like the morning after a night on the piss, sitting on the loo squeezing out his late night vindaloo, well watch him cycle to W3 with 4 van rates on his back...
"So on a crisp November Friday, I take a day off from broking insurance in order to deliver Rapha packages around London. An odd way in which to use up a day's holiday I admit, but it's really good to be brought back to earth, to the real world, to a place where you work very hard for eighty quid."
Eighty quid! I never had eighty quid day! More like fifty!
Then at the end he says "Four drop offs would earn me fourty quid"
i'mnotsofast- they were riding with seb aka bycaboy, he's an independant outfit and hence commands far more of his docket than your average citysquint drone.