App couriers fight for labor rights in Paris

On Sunday (1st), Labor Day is celebrated, one of the most important holidays in the French calendar. For the occasion, RFI took to the streets of Paris to see the conditions under which online food delivery workers work. Despite the fact that in several countries delivery drivers have won legal battles, the situation in the French capital is still grim for many of these professionals.

“We arrive in the morning and go to areas where there are many restaurants, connect to the platform and wait for an order,” says a 23-year-old Ivorian who prefers not to tell RFI his name.

It’s ten o’clock in the morning in the central district of Sentier, where there is a lot of activity both in offices and in bars and restaurants. The young man, who has been in Paris for three years and has been working as a delivery driver for a year and a half, works for the Uber platform with a rented bicycle for which he pays €109 (about R$500) a month. He only rests when he’s sick, he says. He has no contract, no social security or vacation entitlement.

“I make about ten or twelve orders a day, it depends, some days I only make one.” I get two euros, three, five, depending on the distances. When it’s eight kilometers, it’s six euros. With that I earn €700 or €800 a month”, calculates the young Ivorian as he keeps an eye on his phone to see if he has a new race.

In Ivory Coast, he worked as a mechanic and entered Europe via the island of Lampedusa (Italy), after a long journey across North Africa and by boat across the Mediterranean. He says he cannot work as a mechanic because in France training is required and he has no qualifications. For now, he will continue to work as a delivery driver, but he would like to get some improvements because the working conditions are poor and there are also many dangers.

bicycle theft

“There are people who follow us and when you go up to deliver the order, they take the opportunity to steal our bike. And sometimes they pay you three euros for an order and you have to go up seven floors, you ask them to go down, but they don’t want it, so when you get back out on the street the €1,000 euro bike is gone. What I ask is that [as plataformas] pay better for the races and that, please, the customers go down to the door to get the food”, he proposes.

He also complains that he has suffered a lot of racism and that he is not the only one. “There are people who treat us very badly and if you complain, they give you a bad mark on the platform and then they take you out of the system”, he laments.

The fight of the couriers in the court against the platforms

In recent months, workers at platforms such as Uber, Deliveroo and others have been convicted in several countries because the courts considered them to be salaried employees rather than “self-employed”.

For example, 15 days ago, Deliveroo was sentenced in France to a fine of US$405,000 for “irregular work”. In Spain, new legislation came into force in March 2021 that considers delivery drivers as salaried employees. Deliveroo announced it was leaving the country, the other platforms stayed, although they were pirouetting to avoid law enforcement.

In Latin America, there are initiatives to regulate the activity of these platforms and improve the working conditions of employees. There are proposals in Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Colombia, but so far no laws have been passed.

In the US, Joe Biden struck down a Trump administration regulation that blocked the legal ability of platform workers to claim their status as salaried employees.

Italy, on the other hand, secured a commitment from the platforms to implement improvements to the workforce in exchange for the cancellation of a large fine.