Food delivery riders operating in twilight economic zone open to all sorts of exploitation
Food delivery drivers endure hazards including the threat of violence and theft.
Food delivery drivers and bike riders are ubiquitous, particularly in the State’s cities.
The person with the large cube-shaped bag on their back calling to the door with a delivery, drops it, and gets back on his bicycle or motorcycle or electric bike and hurries off for the next delivery.
What few of us see are the hazards that these riders must endure, principally the threat of violence and theft.
Apart from the threats to personal safety, delivery riders are operating in a twilight economic zone open to all sorts of exploitation.
Estimates for the number of delivery drivers working in Dublin, Cork, and a few other cities vary from around 3,000 upwards.
Most of these drivers are working at a complete remove from platform apps such as Just Eat, the market leader, Deliveroo, and a few other newer entrants to the market.
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The platforms are all adamant that they treat their drivers and riders well and are cognisant of the dangers of exploitation.
Last week in a lane off Dublin’s Moore St, delivery riders were coming and going at the Seven Bikes shop, a rental and repair outlet run by a Brazilian brother and sister.
The shop is housed in a converted warehouse, all whitewashed walls and corrugated iron roof, but it has the feel of a community hub.
There are a number of tall steel racks to accommodate the large bags used by the delivery riders.
Tea and coffee and soft furnishings are available for riders taking a break for a quick bite to eat.
English is a second language here, with everybody usually conversing in Portuguese. Coming and going from streets that can often be threatening and the shop offers a safe space.
Leonardo, a young, fit-looking man dressed in black down to the tight beanie on his head, is having a bad week.
He sits at a table and relates how two batteries for his electric bike were recently stolen. These cost around €275 each, draining more than a week’s wages.
He works six days a week, 11 hours a day, and his average daily pay is around €82. Out of that he has to fork out €100 a week to pay for access to the apps for Just Eat and Deliveroo. That leaves him working for around €6 an hour, just above half the national minimum wage of €11.30.
He shrugs about the financial struggle.
“What choice do I have? I go to work every day at 11am and work until 10pm. I take Sunday off.
"I know where I should not go. We have it on WhatsApp when there might be a crowd of young people hanging around anywhere because that means danger. They throw things at us, often eggs but sometimes rocks. People have died but that is how the city is.”
Asked about the gardaí, he smiles and pulls his beanie down over his eyes.
Another rider, Alex, also from Brazil, comes into Seven Bikes after tracking down a stolen bicycle. This bike was taken from a secure environment inside an apartment block and he and his colleagues don’t know how it happened.
But they traced its location through the device and the thieves abandoned it.
Alex used to work until 2am or 3am “because the roads are safer, less cars”, he says.
Now, however, the streets aren’t safer with the threat of violence so he quits around 10pm.
“Most of the time they throw eggs,” he says. “If we see a lot of teenagers in one place an alert goes out among the riders to avoid it. Something though it’s only a couple of them that do it.”
Leonardo and Alex are both from Brazil and are here under a study visa that allows for 20 hours work a week.
This limit, as with all such visas globally, is routinely ignored. The visa does not make provision for self-employment, which excludes these riders from applying directly to Just Eat or Deliveroo for a working contract.
Therefore they effectively subcontract from a qualified person, who is anybody from the EU or with a full working visa.
This costs anywhere between €50 and €100 a week per app for the rider, an overhead that must be paid before he or she earns a bean.
Thereafter, the rider is effectively in a queue to pick up work. He has a map and an alert system which pings to offer him any job about to come available. The rider then has up to a minute — 40 seconds with some apps — to accept the offer.
The time can be seen running down a bar across the screen on the app. It turns red for the last 20 seconds or so, indicating to the rider that he better decide fast whether or not he wishes to throw away another three or four euro of whether it is worth his time.
There will always be somebody else to grab it.
Algorithm technology allows the platform operator to observe the number of riders waiting for a job.
Some say that this system is tailor-made for a race to the bottom, but the platform operators constantly claim to be cognisant of the welfare and conditions of the riders.
While talking to riders at the Seven Bikes the reporter of this piece saw offers coming in for €3, €3.04, and, an apparent choice offer of €4.68.
In one other instance, the offer was for €1, which was for a run from Hart’s Corner in Phibsboro up to Griffith Aveune, a distance of around 1km.
For these princely sums, the rider must to the restaurant and sometimes wait for up to 10 or 15 minutes until the order is completed and ready to go. More often than not, the restaurateur won’t allow the rider to bring his bike inside so he must leave it outside as he goes in, exposing himself to the real possibility of theft.
The journey undertaken can then, depending on the destination, be freighted with the threat of violence. At the destination the rider may occasionally have to wait for the recipient to appear.
Some of the platforms require the rider to wait up to seven minutes for a response. If one is not received by then the delivery must be photographed and left at the door.
All of this might typically take up to half an hour at least and yield in the region of €3 for the rider.
During the interview with Alex, one call came through offering him €3.09. He pointed to the screen, showing that the delivery was just short of 3km, which represented a 6km round trip.
“I won’t do it for less than €1 a kilometre,” he said.
Leonardo says that the very least that needs to be done is a proper minimum price be introduced for each delivery.
“Why couldn’t they just pay at least €6 per minimum for each delivery?” he asks.
“That would not be a lot but it would be a lot for the riders.”
He says that he can’t understand why riders like him are targeted for violence.
“I deliver for Irish people and for everybody else,” he says. “We are not doing anything bad. It’s good to get people’s food and bring it to them, it’s a nice service. But we must go to work with this fear and worried about the risk. It’s not good.”
Alex says that the one thing he would like to see change is that all restaurants allow riders to bring in their bikes or otherwise to come out to them with the delivery.
“This would be less worry about our bikes being stolen.”
Deliveroo responded with a statement to a series of questions asked by the . It stated that the company works with around 2,000 “self-employed riders in Ireland”.
The company says it provides face-to-face support to riders and is this year visiting Dublin, Cork, and Galway to engage with riders.
Asked whether Deliveroo has a minimum fee per delivery, the response was: “Riders in Ireland always earn at least the national minimum wage plus costs for time spent on orders while working with us. In most cases, riders earn significantly more than this.”
The orders seen by the being offered to riders would seem to contradict this statement.
When asked whether the company is aware that contracts are subcontracted out to other riders who do not have the visa requirements to be self-employed, the response was that all Deliveroo riders must have the right to work in Ireland in order to have an account with the company.
“Deliveroo takes a zero tolerance approach towards any rider who fails to meet their legal obligations when working with us.
“Substitution is a legal element of being self-employed, but any substitute must also have the right to work in Ireland.”
Fiachra Ó Luain, who founded the English Language Students' Union of Ireland and works with delivery riders says that a public debate is required so that people can see what is at stake for workers in this service industry.
“These workers are part of the invisible labour market,” he says.
“They have to work all hours just to get by and that of itself is highly dangerous as numerous studies have shown.
"There is a correlation between better pay and road safety, for instance. We need to ensure workers here are treated properly as that sets the tone for the future.
"People coming in to serve the economy can and should be very positive but to have people going to work full of fear and insecurity is not the way to do it.”
A statement from Just Eat did address the subcontracting issue.
“Self-employed independent couriers have the legal right to find a substitute courier. Legally, the courier account-holder is responsible for ensuring their substitute meets the necessary standards to deliver on our network,” it stated.
Just Eat also said that it “constantly engage(s) with couriers through ha number of channels, including regular pulse surveys, emails and offline messaging with courier support”.
It did not address a question about whether it operates a minimum fee per delivery.
An EU Platform Workers Directive has been agreed by the Council of Europe and is now scheduled to go through the European Parliament.
The directive has two key features designed to improve the lot of platform workers, the regularisation of their employment status and the use of algorithms for human resource management.
It remains to be seen what the final outcome will be but the technology companies have lobbied hard to protect their interests.
In the US, the mayor of New York announced last Sunday that delivery riders must now be paid $17.96 (€16.40) an hour before tips. The average earnings up until now for such workers was around $11 after tips.
The advances in technology have rendered the delivery business as potentially lucrative.
The food takeaway and delivery market in this country is estimated to be worth €2.2bn annually.
A report published by Just East in June found that on average consumers order a takeaway just under three times a month, spending an average of €46.49.
Just Eat, the market leader in Ireland, reported a profit of €14m on turnover of €65m for 2021, the latest year for which figures have been published.
The platforms charge restaurants a considerable percentage value of each delivery order for including on the app.
One offer seen by the was for 35% to use the app’s delivery riders and drivers or 14% if the restaurant provides its own transport.
Adrian Cummins of the Restaurants Association of Ireland says his members often contact him to complain about the level of the commission but there is also considerable business generated though the platforms.
“They do suit to an extent because it’s often not viable for restaurants to have their own drivers, when you include insurance and everything else.
"You might have 10 or 20 orders for takeaways coming in through somebody like Deliveroo where as you might need 70 or 80 to employ a driver.”
He does see issues with the manner of employment for drivers are riders.
“Are they self-employed or not? A line in the sand needs to be drawn on that debate and then we can have a proper structure around it. This is only going to get bigger as the delivery model is now also moving into the grocery market.”
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