I start to boil when I read about the gig companies and the Business School
Published 2025-11-21 04.30
“The last mile” by Julia Lindblom
At 8.30 p.m. sheep I received an SMS from an “Ahmed” with a picture of my book package. He has hidden it carefully behind a flower pot on the stairs. I am amazed. For 29 kroner, he has driven far out on the road during inconvenient working hours. It doesn’t add up.
I Julia Lindbloms “The last mile” we read about who takes the hit when the calculation doesn’t hold. You guessed it: it’s not Instabee’s CEO Alexis Priftis. E-commerce in Sweden has more than doubled since 2017 and the courier industry has grown explosively. On the surface, these companies look like modern tech companies, but their roots are rooted in the dark past when workers bent their spines to the point of breaking their spines.
A courier often has to work half a day without a break and deliver a package every five minutes. The salary is SEK 15,000 per month and sickness benefit, OB and insurances are not included. When I read the book, I start to boil: some of these gig companies have been invented in a “lab” at the School of Economics. Think about that the next time you read a pompous text in DN by the rector Lars Strannegård which condemns contemporary “polarization”. His school is helping to fertilize the part of the labor market where some of the most poisonous flowers grow.
Lindblom, former reporter at Arbetaren, has become something of an expert on the back end of e-commerce. In her previous book “Amazon: behind the success” she examined the floor where packages are packed. The book was unfortunately written in a stilted manner and I missed the pathos that one suspected was there. In “The last mile”, where she examines the package’s journey to the consumer, she has matured as a reporter and embellishes the text with fine details that create presence.
Incidentally, Lindblom belongs to a group of young labor market reporters who expanded their important work into book format when the daily newspapers reduced their coverage: Elinor Torp, Anders Teglund, Liza Alexandrova-Zorina, Emil Boss, Pelle Sunvisson. I’m thinking about the trade book crisis. Few imagine that a report on the construction industry or cleaning companies is something to relax about. This should be re-evaluated: good non-fiction should light up the world and these authors’ books shed light on a much larger part of society than they give the impression of.
As Lindblom shows the transformation of the courier industry has major consequences for the rest of society. To take just one example, the algorithms that incite bids have spread to Postnord. With fixed routes in an app and “rating of the service”. Sorry, but why the hell should I give stars to my government postman? In the past, these postmen would probably have blamed the deterioration on the “trasproletariat” – a word we thankfully no longer use. But when we reject it entirely, we miss the system-level danger that the concept addresses. Bad conditions tend to spread upwards – like blackened boards at the bottom of the building.
And it ends not there. Because just like the Blue Train sang, one hand knows exactly what the other is doing. The state worsens the conditions for those at the bottom and Capital rakes in the comfort. Julia Lindblom shines a light on this through migration policy: the more difficult it becomes to obtain a residence permit, the greater the serfdom. In 2011, Sweden implemented a fee reform which meant that students outside the EU had to pay high tuition fees. The result: an explosion of cycling Indian engineering students with other people’s grocery bags. It is in this context that the Tidö government’s increased income requirements for work permits, which come into force on 1 June 2026, should be seen. In practice, it will mean that low-skilled immigrants will have to take another job – alternatively go underground: and guess which app companies benefit from that? The initiative should be renamed “labour market measure for a larger gig economy”.
Lindblom’s book is an urgent reminder of all the venture capitalists who sit and rub their hands. Soon there will be a new season to sow great luck in the part of the labor market that arose from the right-wing government’s “strict migration policy”.
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