The scenes are familiar to the Indian viewers as they resemble what we see commonly in many Indian lower middle class and working class families. A series of such scenes depict how pressure builds up leading to severe strain in emotional family ties. At first sight, these are the boring and tiring stuff of any Indian soap opera. But when the manner in which they have been beautifully woven into a larger canvass portraying the emotional and psychological fallout of the gig economy on the family lives of gig workers, causing immense stress to them to the point of their virtual break-up, conveys a deeper social message, the film on British gig workers’ lives acquires a tremendous artistic quality.

Films about the work and lives of the labourers often tend to get too propagandistic. But in the hands of a masterly director like Ken Loach, it acquires a superb art quality unlike the Indian kitsch. A moving human drama shorn of undue melodrama. Though a Trotskyite in his personal political convictions, Ken Loach’s commitment to the primacy of the artistic quality doesn’t make his political views unduly interfere in a preachy manner with his film scenes. The film is Sorry, We Missed You and it is about the gig economy and gig workers of Britain. Though released first in November 2018 in England, it caught the international attention when it was premiered at Cannes in the third week of May 2019. The film attracted rave reviews from leading film and culture critics. Quality working class films are rare but a film by Ken Loach is an event in itself. So, the Indian film-lovers are also rushing to watch this remarkable film.

Gig economy is an economy where there is no formal employer-employee relationship between the employer and the employee. The employer has no obligation towards the latter and often remains faceless and doesn’t enter the picture at all. The worker is also supposedly “free” to decide whether to work or not and gets paid for the hours of work she/he puts in but has no other claims on the employer. They resemble our Ola or Uber drivers or the Swiggy delivery boys and girls.

The only difference is that unlike our Ola drivers, the main protagonist of the story Ricky doesn’t own a car to be operated as a taxi but sells his wife Abby’s car to buy a shaky delivery van and works as a delivery worker. Abby is also a zero-hour contract care worker catering to the elderly and the sick. Zero-hour contracts are typical unsigned contracts between an employer and the worker where the employer is not obliged to offer any fixed hours of work to the worker and the worker, who is supposedly free to decide whether to work or not, invariably ends up rendering longer hours of unpaid work. Nominally, both are free to choose how many hours they would work but the low wages and the pressing family needs force them put in 14 hours a day and six days a week much to the neglect of the two children.

Ricky seldom meets his employer and, as in the case of our Ola drivers, his actual employer is a small communication black box constantly hurling orders at him and which tracks all his movements though a GPS system and seldom offers him any leisure time. It is like working under some non-human surveillance tool. He has no time for himself. In other words, he is alienated from his own life and living time. This is best portrayed by Ken Loach when an experienced co-worker gives Ricky a bottle to urinate as his work amidst the busy Newcastle traffic wouldn’t let him take even a washroom break. A human being is incorporated into the machine to survive as a human being!

Ken Loach has offered us many sensitive films on working class lives. His last film Daniel Blake in 2016, which bagged an award at Cannes, was also about the ravages of deindustrialisation in Newcastle, a British industrial town, reeling under the impact of Thatch rite neo-liberalism, similar to our Metro Mumbai or Ahmedabad. The 2002 film Bread and Roses is a complicated representation of the universal tendency to exploit that pervades even the White workers, who similarly exploit their own Latino janitors and domestic helps, though ultimately they all fall victims to the all-powerful capital and face common exploitation.

‘Sorry, we missed you’ is at one level a brief note the delivery man Ricky leaves on the door of his customers to whom he is unable to deliver the consignment when they are not at home. But metaphorically speaking, it stands for everything he misses in life for the sake of dreary work. The worker who sells his time has no time for himself and just in order to make a living he misses life itself. In fact, the tight schedule of his gig work comes in the way of gelling class consciousness too as he is often forced to cut short his animated conversations with his fellow workers about their own conditions of work as his black box blares instructions for his next delivery. He mechanically keeps delivering but his work and life doesn’t deliver much to him or his loving son and daughter.

Ricky and Abby are crushed by the debt they had incurred to buy a small house and they are unable to cleat it. But more than the suffering due to working class indebtedness, low income, long hours of monotonous work and the very precarious nature of work, the elegant film delicately captures the very process of alienation from life and how it wrecks the very family life of the workers. A must-watch movie!(IPA Service)