Regulating Food Work: The New Competition for the Household Meal

Abstract

This paper examines the roles law plays in the strategies food producers pursue to compete for the distribution and delivery of the household meal. It tracks the producers’ use of liberal labour law when they compete by increasing labour flexibility and reducing labour costs. The concern behind the inquiry is whether the convenience of our household meals might come at the expense of a class of vulnerable food workers. The paper identifies the counter to this liberal law and the points at which it seeks to reassert public labour law standards. By researching the field of meal distribution and delivery, rather than analysing just one law, its case study method aims to show how these contrasting laws relate to each other in the socio-legal field of work and how each law might matter realistically to the future of food work. On the empirical evidence, the study finds that what matters now is the elemental struggle to have food work treated as regular employment. Then, it is a matter, for that employment, that it be protected by the terms and conditions of the appropriate award.