Ken Loach’s gig economy-inspired film
L’ubérisation portée au cinéma.
Le cinéaste britannique n’est pas du genre à se défiler face au monde qui l’entoure. Dans son dernier film, Sorry We Missed You, se saisissant questions de société, Ken Loach dresse un portrait sans concession du coût humain de l’ubérisation du travail.
There is a scene in Sorry We Missed You, Ken Loach’s new film about a parcel courier driven to the brink by his brutal gig economy job, when his wife finally loses patience with his ruthless depot controller and screams at him to give her disintegrating husband a break.
2. “Isn’t that funny,” whispered Ruth Lane as she watched the first UK public screening on Sunday night in Brighton. “I went into the depot office and shouted at Don’s manager, complaining that he didn’t have time to eat. I said you are bloody
killing him. You are working him so hard.”
3. Don Lane, a courier for DPD, which delivers for retailers including Next and Asos, was Ruth’s husband who collapsed and died aged 53 in January 2018 after working through illness in the Christmas delivery rush. His story has partly inspired Loach’s follow-up to I, Daniel Blake, which goes on general release on 1 November, and now his widow was having the “surreal” experience of seeing her own life’s tragic events played out on the big screen at the Brighton Odeon on the fringes of the Labour party conference.
THE GRIM REALITY
4. Don Lane had skipped several hospital appointments to treat his type 1 diabetes because he had been charged £150 by DPD when he missed deliveries to attend an appointment and feared further charges. He collapsed twice while working, including once at the wheel, and was ill and vomiting blood before he died but did not take time off. Ruth Lane is now mounting a egal challenge against the company, which made a £121m profit in 2017 and paid its top executive a salary close to £1m. It is contesting her claims that he should have been treated as a worker with holiday pay and a guaranteed minimum wage, and that its decision to charge him for missing work to attend hospital was disability discrimination.
5. The parallels between fact and fiction came thick and fast for Lane in a film that tackles the emotional and social impact of the shift of financial risk on to workers in the rapidly growing
gig economy, which involves 4.7 million people in Britain doing jobs including delivering parcels, caring for sick and elderly people, or driving minicabs. As Loach’s hero Ricky, a father of two in Newcastle, nodded off at the wheel or raced to deliver parcels in strict one-hour windows for the fictional company PDF (Parcels Delivered Fast), Lane sighed. “Don got breached for being three minutes late on one of those,” she said, as Ricky was rebuked again for missing a “precise”.
6. When the fictional Ricky insisted on doing his round despite being battered and bruised after a robbery from his van, which the depot boss – “the patron saint of nasty bastards” – says will cost him over £1,000, Lane wonders what her husband was going through in the days before he died. After the film, when the screenwriter Paul Laverty told the audience about Don’s story, her eyes filled with tears.
GIVING A VOICE
7. Lane found her husband collapsed in the living room of their cottage and she and their 23-yearold son, Jordon, went with him in an ambulance to hospital, but to no avail. “I think we should remember there are much worse cases than Ricky’s story,” said Laverty. 8. “It’s surreal,” said Lane, who works at a Marks & Spencer in Bournemouth. “People at work say: ‘What did you do at the weekend?’ I’ve gone to a screening of a film partly based on my husband’s death.” “You give Don a voice and it’s blowing me away,” she told Laverty, whose research partly followed the Guardian’s reporting of the impact of the gig economy. “If he had had his treatment he would have been here.” “It’s out of respect,” said Laverty. “It is something that shouldn’t have happened.”
9. Lane was not the only person with personal experience of the pernicious effects of companies’ rising use of selfemployed contractors. Max Dewhurst, a cycle courier and trade union activist in London, reflected that the film was “like watching a documentary”. “I know families being torn apart and the impact it has on their children, people falling asleep at the wheel, people being beaten up for their parcels.” 10. The film’s events are less catastrophic than Don Lane’s story, depicting the impact of a business’s remorseless quest for profit on a person’s fragile family life and mental health. As Ruth Lane said, a film rendition of her husband’s story might not seem believable; his death would perhaps come across melodramatic. It was a view echoed by Laverty. While the film tackles the emotional turmoil of gig economy work, it leaves hanging the question of what the ultimate consequences might be.
11. “The isolation, the low wages, the so-called self-employment is not the system failing but the system working as it is intended to do,” said Loach. “They [companies] need labour they can turn on and off like a tap. Once one big company does it the rest have to follow. We have to take the whole system on.”
Max Dewhurst, a cycle courier and trade union activist in London, reflected that the film was “like watching a documentary.”