During the Monday tutorial, our group was pretty clear that we were going to follow the concept from “The Carrier Bag Theory”, and focus on delivery drivers. People cannot survive without food. They do the most important work, but they are not given enough attention, they have almost zero contracts, and there are almost no women in the workforce. In order to find out more about the specifics of the job, we are going to conduct interviews with delivery drivers.

Key points:

• uniforms and invisibility/dehumanization
• space of women on delivery work (which is not considered work)
• working at night and invisibility/safety

This week I read “International Labour Organization: Women at Work, Trends”. This article, although it is a bit far back in time with data collected in 2016, gives a comprehensive picture of the difficulties women face in the workplace. Women not only face the highest risk of unemployment, but the work they do is also often considered valueless and unpaid.

For the primary research, our group interviewed the delivery drivers at Elephant and Castle on Thursday night. It was after a heavy rain, we received a lot of refusals in the beginning because most of them were in a hurry. Our first interviewee was surprisingly the one and only female driver that we met, we felt really lucky about that. Afterward, we walked to the entrance of McDonald’s, where there were not only a lot of delivery drivers waiting to pick up the food, but also a lot of people taking a break. We ended up interviewing 8 drivers, all of whom were very friendly. Most of them are immigrations and hardly speak English, so we were careful to show them respect and focus on protecting their privacy and identity. We were trying to draw a parallel between interviews and raise questions as to what could come in the future.

As our group included different cultural backgrounds, we also searched for delivery drivers in China to interview through social media, to gather more comprehensive information. Together we interviewed delivery workers in three types of cities in the country: large, medium, and small, asking around 50 people in total, but due to being so busy, only 6 ended up answering our questions. And although we would like to get more answers from a female perspective, it was unfortunate that the interviewees from China were all male.