Time to stop the rough ride for food delivery workers

Riders for Deliveroo, UberEats and other food delivery platforms are hired like workers, get tired like workers, and can be summarily fired like workers, but legally speaking they are not workers at all. Classified instead as ‘self-employed’, they have no right to minimum wages, parental leave, sick pay, union protection, or other statutory rights.

Food delivery workers and other ‘platform’ workers are sitting in a dangerous blind spot of British employment law. Why dangerous? Because it makes the work an even rougher ride and poses a risk to public safety. This month at a meeting of ROOM, a food delivery collective in Edinburgh, Janez (a pseudonym) explained he had borrowed £500 to buy an e-bike so he could keep up with the rising pace required to earn a day’s pay. Two weeks later, the bike was stolen. Now, with more debt, he has to work longer and faster for vanishing sums: he showed us a £13 fee for a 23 mile journey. Like many riders he regularly earns £1 an hour during the slow times of day. In Scotland’s cities thousands of riders work for less than minimum wages. The AI-driven algorithms used by platform companies seem to operate like a reverse auction. The platform gathers data from every worker in the city about the amount that they are willing to work for.

It automatically determines the lowest fee for which it expects a worker to accept a given order. Then it offers the ride at just below that rate. If the worker does not take the ride, as the algorithm expects, it is offered to another rider at a slightly higher rate until it is accepted.

While fees race to the bottom, rates of e-bike theft are rising fast, up 20 per cent in Edinburgh this year. A recent survey by the Workers’ Observatory, a gig work monitoring group involving workers and researchers from St Andrews and Edinburgh Universities, found that 40 per cent of riders had bikes stolen while doing delivery work. If you’re lucky, you buy a discount second- hand replacement from a friend, but shouldering debt owed to a friend is a heavy burden. With falling fees, rising debt, and no limits on the numbers of riders, the rush to earn a basic rate is getting faster and faster, and injury rates are high: 1 in 3 riders had had an accident while doing food delivery work in the last six months. Try working on the streets for 16, 17, 18 hours to make the equivalent of a minimum wage. You soon get exhausted. You might cut corners. Yours and others’ safety is at risk. This is when the public finally starts to notice.

Earlier this year, Edinburgh Council debated a motion raising concerns about the potential public hazard of “reckless weaving” by e-bike couriers. During the debate, a Workers’ Observatory deputation highlighted the roots of these dangers in falling pay and rising workplace pressures. At subsequent committee debates, councillors from three parties singled out the Observatory evidence as key to understanding the danger facing riders and the public.

The council has now started to address the city’s gig work blind spot. Edinburgh’s Fair Work Action Group, co-chaired by Kat Brogan and Councillor Lezley Marion Cameron, has invited representatives from all parties, the Scottish Government, and other stakeholders, to a roundtable hosted in partnership with the Workers’ Observatory to lay out an agenda for improving conditions for gig workers. Councillor Marion Cameron, who is also Edinburgh’s Housing, Homelessness and Fair Work Convener, has pledged her support to addressing the issues of concerns for Edinburgh’s gig workers.

She says: “If we are serious in our commitment to making Edinburgh a safer and fairer city to work in - where workers receive a fair wage for a fair day’s work – I believe it’s imperative to engage not only with workers who are riders, but with all parts of the gig economy, including digital platform companies. Precarious work can have an impact on pay, rights and working conditions. That’s why we’re calling for this type of work to placed at the centre of the Scottish Government’s Fair Work agenda. This is alongside exploring upskilling courses and advice sessions for gig workers, and a charter to improve the working conditions for the growing number of gig economy workers in our city.”

The Workers’ Observatory are focusing on two principles: everyone should get home safe, and platform work should be fair work. It has highlighted examples of policies in other cities that make a material difference for workers. Workers could input into decisions about street infrastructure, parking facilities, and other street furniture. The council could issue a charter of expectations to all licensed restaurants about workers’ treatment, toilet access and other hygiene facilities, and safe parking spaces. The council could support workers to develop the status and resources to communicate effectively with the council, government, and platforms. For food delivery workers, their workplace is our city.

The council is therefore responsible for maintaining their working environment. Police are responsible for enforcing its rules and preventing theft of workers’ means of production. And all parties – workers, bus companies, taxi drivers, local council officers, the public, and the platform companies themselves – surely share some responsibility for ensuring that every worker gets home safe from work.

Today’s roundtable will also open a discussion about whether there are powers that the Scottish Government could use – or legislation that the Scottish Parliament could pass – to make gig work fairer. By amending the 1982 Act, could Holyrood grant councils power to license platform companies that use our streets to profit on the backs of low-paid workers? Employment law is reserved to Westminster, but self-employed workers are not protected by employment law anyway, and until they are, the hazards of gig work is a problem for every level of government. Ten years ago, the Scottish Government launched a shiny new policy vehicle aiming to make Scotland a Fair Work nation by 2025. Workers of the growing gig economy have been left squarely in this policy vehicle’s blind spot. When the new Scottish Government revamps and resets its Fair Work agenda in 2026, it is essential that this major fault is not repeated, and gig work and platform companies are clearly in its sights.

Cailean Gallagher is the Coordinator of the Workers’ Observatory and an Associate Lecturer at the University of St Andrews