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In the UK, food-delivery workers are compelled to work very long hours at lousy pay.
Swiggy, a food delivery company in India, cuts off delivery workers' medical coverage if they don't meet quotas. That is likely to mean they lose coverage if they get sick.
The thorough cure for this problem, and many other problrms related to access to medicine, is in a national medical system. But even if a country can't go that far, it can prohibit schemes like this.
Stuart, a food delivery subcontracting company which handles delivery for Just Eat in the UK, uses a driver-guidance map system which occasionally sends drivers to the wrong place or via impossible routes. As a result, they fail to complete the job on time, and Stuart fires them.
Uber, Lyft and Doordash have set up a lobbying group against workers' right to unionize.
Grubhub has come up with a way to route phone calls to restaurants through a Grubhub computer as an excuse to bill the restaurants.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't using Grubhub require running nonfree software and identifying yourself?
Get your meal deliveries from local restaurants that will write your address on paper and throw it away after — and pay them in anonymous cash.
Food delivery companies have many ways of preying on the restaurants they offer "services" to.
"Tips" to Doordash and Amazon food delivery workers go to the company rather than to the worker, they cancel out the whole of the worker's base pay.
The article seems to err in equating this to tipping of waiters. They are not the same system. Yes, the waiter's base pay is below minimum wage — but the restaurant does not claw back that base pay when the waiter gets a tip, as Doordash and Amazon do.
*[Doordash] claimed that 100% of tips went to [the delivery people] but instead used them to subsidize workers' base salary.*
As far as I know, only that one food delivery company has cheated in that particular way. But others cheat various parties
in various ways. We should not trust or reward any of them.
Food-delivery platforms learn what customers order from restaurants, then set up "ghost kitchens", phony "restaurants" that do only delivery, to put restaurants out of business.
I quit food delivery apps – the absurd convenience was not worth the cost. The author of this article considers the cost to society and the cost to her tranquility, as well as the price of food ordered that way.
Uber and Lyft are lobbying against the PRO Act, which would facilitate forming unions.
So are Instacart and some of the food-delivery companies. This is another reason to boycott them all. (I won't use them anyway since they won't let me pay anonymous cash.)
Even in places where Goober drivers are considered employees, the couriers for food delivery compsnies may be denied workers' rights.
Food delivery companies can only be profitable if they exploit their workers by underpaying them.
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