Last week while I was cycling through downtown Amsterdam an incident occurred, which has become a common practice on my daily trips: a Deliveroo courier cut me off. With the rise of food delivery services, having become indispensable to the lives of consumers, one starts to wonder if there is a negative side to the rapid increase of food couriers. Most food couriers I encounter are always in a hurry, reaching dangerous speeds, often skipping red lights in the process. Because of this overall contempt for traffic regulations, I consequently witness dangerous situations. It made me wonder what the reasons could be for this roadrunner-culture and in my investigations, I found some interesting conclusions. One of the biggest food delivery services, Deliveroo, pays their couriers per delivery. This means that more deliveries equal more money, which I believe leads to unsafe road behavior and should be reconsidered.
Deliveroo is part of the sharing economy, which enables peer to peer sharing of resources via the internet (Hamari, Sjöklint, Ukkonen, 2015). The sharing economy gave rise to online labor platforms, which act as matchmakers between supply and demand. In the past decade we have seen a rapid increase of these new platforms, Uber probably being the most well-known. A dive into news articles and reports points out that these new platforms are not free from criticism on the way they manage their workers. A testimony of 83 Uber drivers in the UK showed that wages of their drivers are often not enough to make a living (Field&Forsey, 2016). The reason why labor platforms are allowed to pay per performance instead of paying an hourly rate, is because most platform, including Deliveroo, classify their workers as independent contractors. Independent contractors are by Dutch law not entitled to a minimum wage (Witteman, 2017).
The three-major food delivery services in the Netherlands are Thuisbezorgd, Deliveroo and Uber Eats. Out of these three platforms only Thuisbezorgd pays their couriers an hourly rate. That is why I would like to make the case that the other food couriers platforms, including the ones not mentioned, should pay their couriers on an hourly basis. This would take away the financial incentive for rapid completion of deliveries, making the practice of skipping lights and cutting people a thing of the past. What do you guys think? Let me know in the comments below.
References:
Field, F., & Forsey, A. (2016). Sweated Labour, Uber and the ‘gig economy’.
Hamari, J., Sjöklint, M., & Ukkonen, A. (2015). The Sharing Economy: Why People Participate in Collaborative Consumption.
Witteman, J. (2017, November 17). Verplicht door als zzp’er? Deze 19-jarige fietskoerier sleept Deliveroo voor de rechter.
