Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain

The Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB) is the London-based independent trade union that organises the UK's most precarious and under-represented workforces — migrant cleaners, gig-economy couriers, platform delivery riders, foster carers, video game workers, and healthcare couriers — through a direct-action, legal-challenge, and public-pressure model that has made it the primary union organising force for workers the TUC-affiliated mainstream has historically failed to reach. Founded in 2012 by Latin American migrant cleaners at the University of London who broke from Unite and UNISON over organising strategy, the IWGB has since built the corpus's most extensive body of UK gig-economy employment jurisprudence and become the corpus's principal union organiser on algorithmic management as a worker-power question — distinct from the litigation-and-data-rights frame of adjacent organisations.

Founding and structure

The IWGB emerged in 2012 from disputes within the outsourced-cleaners workforce at the University of London, where a small group of migrants — predominantly from Ecuador and other Latin American countries — concluded that the established unions were not pursuing the confrontational tactics their situation required. The founding cohort launched what became the 3 Cosas campaign, demanding three things from their outsourced employer and the university: annual leave, sick pay, and pension contributions. After wildcat strikes beginning in 2011 and sustained direct action through 2013, the campaign won all three demands and established the operating model — small, agile, member-led, willing to strike — that the union has applied to every sector it has since entered. The 3 Cosas victory was subsequently replicated at the Royal Opera House, the Barbican Centre, and eventually, after a decade of sustained pressure, at the University of London itself, which committed to bringing outsourced staff in-house.

The union is structured around eleven branches — Couriers & Logistics, Cleaners, Charity Workers, Cycling Instructors, Foster Carers, Security Officers, Video Game Workers, Nannies, University Workers, Private Hire Drivers, and a general-members branch — each member-led and autonomous in its campaign priorities, with a central legal department handling hundreds of cases each year. The website is available in both English and Spanish, signalling the Latin American workforce majority that founded the union and remains heavily represented in its membership. Henry Chango Lopez, an Ecuadorian-born former outsourced cleaner at the University of London who was central to the 3 Cosas campaign, serves as General Secretary; Alex Marshall, a former courier of eight years, serves as President.

Approach and tactics

The IWGB's operational model combines three distinct levers: strikes and direct action; legal challenges brought through employment tribunals, courts, and judicial review; and sustained public-pressure campaigns that amplify individual disputes into sector-level demands. The union is not affiliated with the Trades Union Congress. The legal lever has generated a disproportionate body of gig-economy employment jurisprudence relative to the union's size: its cases have established worker-status rights for CitySprint couriers (the first time a major UK courier company was found to employ workers rather than self-employed contractors), holiday-pay entitlements for couriers at multiple platforms, and in March 2018 the first statutory union recognition for collective bargaining in the UK gig economy, with The Doctors' Laboratory — former couriers reclassified as employees with a choice of hourly pay or per-delivery rates. Judicial review has been a further weapon: IWGB successfully challenged the government on health and safety protections for gig workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, extending statutory protections to millions of precarious workers who would otherwise have been excluded.

Gig economy organising and legal victories

The IWGB's entry into the gig economy began with the formation of its Couriers & Logistics Branch in 2015, which initiated a decade-long wave of employment litigation against courier and platform companies. The January 2017 CitySprint tribunal — in which Max Dewhurst became the first gig worker to win worker status from one of the UK's major courier companies, with the tribunal finding his contract "contorted" and its self-employment framing "window dressing" — established the union's national profile in platform-labour organising. Subsequent wins followed at eCourier (admitted wrongful misclassification) and Addison Lee (courier ruled a worker rather than self-employed). The corpus's definitional worker-classification case — Aslam and Farrar v Uber, which culminated in the 2021 UK Supreme Court ruling — grew in part from UPHD's organising within IWGB: James Farrar organised the original employment-status claim while in IWGB's UPHD branch, before that branch became the App Drivers and Couriers Union.

The union's Private Hire Drivers branch lineage traces to United Private Hire Drivers (UPHD), the drivers' association formed in 2015 by Yaseen Aslam and James Farrar that affiliated to IWGB as a branch in 2017, growing to roughly 1,700 members and approximately 40 per cent of IWGB membership at its peak. After a 2020 disaffiliation vote — following disputes over union direction — the branch became the App Drivers and Couriers Union, registered as an independent trade union in July 2020. IWGB retained its own United Private Hire Drivers branch and continued organising platform drivers separately from ADCU.

Algorithmic management challenges

The algorithmic dimension of platform work sits at the centre of IWGB's gig-economy organising. The union's ClappedAndScrapped campaign — targeting Deliveroo, UberEats, Just Eat, and Stuart — addresses the sector-wide practice of dismissing gig workers by automated process: terminations described by the campaign as generally vague, nonspecific, and automated, with workers denied the right to appeal or bring a trade union representative. The campaign demands a formal process allowing terminated workers to present their case, reflecting the union's position that algorithmic dismissal at scale constitutes a structural labour-rights violation rather than an individual grievance.

IWGB members protested Uber's Real Time ID Check system — a facial recognition tool used to verify drivers' identities — characterising it as a racist facial recognition algorithm producing disproportionate unfair terminations of drivers from ethnic minority backgrounds. The protest places IWGB in the same civil-society register as the App Drivers and Couriers Union, which in October 2021 filed a separate legal claim at the Central London Employment Tribunal alleging the same system discriminated against drivers of colour.

The December 2021 Stuart Delivery strike — the longest continuous pay strike in UK gig economy history at the time — was triggered by a 24% pay cut reducing minimum delivery compensation from £4.50 to £3.40, imposed without consultation. The strike won paid waiting times and resolved insurance-related wrongful suspensions, drew solidarity from 32 MPs and multiple trade unions, and became the corpus's clearest demonstration of sustained strike action as a lever against algorithmically-induced pay cuts. IWGB President Alex Marshall's characterisation of platform algorithms as "set-up in a really opaque way that means you just have no idea how jobs are being allocated" — and his call for algorithmic regulation — articulates the union's organising theory in explicit opposition to algorithmic opacity, not just to specific platform decisions.

Funding and independence

The IWGB is primarily funded through membership dues without the institutional or philanthropic funders that support civil-society litigation organisations in the same space. This financial independence distinguishes its accountability structure from NGOs in the adjacent algorithmic-accountability and data-rights field and reinforces the union's positioning as a worker-owned institution whose decisions are accountable to its membership rather than to external funders. The union has used crowdfunding for specific legal costs.

Posture in the movement

The IWGB occupies a distinctive position in the UK make-AI-good movement: it is the corpus's principal union organiser on algorithmic management — a worker-power institution working primarily through collective action rather than through the litigation-and-data-rights strategies of adjacent organisations. This places it in relationship with but structurally distinct from Worker Info Exchange and the App Drivers and Couriers Union, which operate primarily through the GDPR data-rights and strategic-litigation frame. The IWGB's founding by Latin American migrant workers and its multi-sector membership — from university cleaners to video game developers to NHS couriers — give it the broadest demographic and sectoral base of any corpus organisation in the UK precarious-labour space. Its direct-action, member-funded, non-TUC model places it explicitly outside both the policy-consultation and foundation-funded registers that characterise most of the movement's other UK organisations, and the 3 Cosas model it has replicated across sectors from gig couriers to foster carers to video game workers is the corpus's clearest example of direct-action grassroots union organising as the primary vehicle for worker-AI accountability.