UK study of the last mile gig sector: job allocation is a major issue and carriers should coordinate so drivers can move between delivering meals and parcels
The future is gig work - but the system is currently broken. Solutions are coming from academia
Context & Ripple Effects
The study lands mid-arc in the UK's back-and-forth over how last-mile workers should be engaged: Just Eat had outsourced 6,000 riders to Randstad under stricter employment rules, then laid off 1,700 couriers to return to a gig model its own CEO once called harmful. Against that instability, academia is stepping in with a systems diagnosis — the problem is not the gig contract itself but how jobs get allocated.
The proposal that carriers coordinate so drivers can move between meals and parcels treats food delivery and parcel logistics as one labor pool rather than separate apps competing for the same couriers — an idea that reframes what platforms like Deliveroo, Uber Eats, and Amazon Flex are actually running.
First-order effects
- Carriers adopting the recommendation would smooth utilization for their own couriers, who currently idle between meal peaks and parcel volumes that arrive on different schedules.
- Platforms facing regulatory pressure over worker status gain an alternative lever: better allocation raises effective earnings per hour without reclassifying anyone as an employee.
Second-order effects
- Coordinated allocation would blur the competitive boundary between food-delivery apps and parcel carriers, since whoever routes the shared pool controls capacity — echoing the algorithmic power Chinese couriers are already gaming and unionizing against.
- It dovetails with the government's move to share rider data with Deliveroo, Just Eat, and Uber Eats: once platforms exchange operational data with the state, exchanging it with each other for dispatch becomes a smaller step.
Third-order effects
- If cross-carrier pools become normal, the last mile structurally shifts from per-app employment toward a shared dispatch layer sitting above multiple brands — with whoever owns the allocation algorithm holding the pricing power.
- The pattern also suggests regulators will judge gig platforms less by contract type and more by allocation quality, since the same workforce's earnings depend on dispatch efficiency rather than employment status alone.
The trend: Last-mile delivery is converging on shared, algorithmically allocated labor pools that cut across meals and parcels, with job allocation — not employment classification — emerging as the sector's core battleground.