Lockdown: food-delivery couriers more dehumanized than ever
By Claire Le Breton, PhD student at emlyon business school
“I feel like a robot. When I bring food to front doors, I don’t think they [customers] would be able to tell who actually carried out the delivery, they’re not even looking up. For them, I am just a way to get food.”
As underlined by Maxime (the name was modified for privacy purposes), a Deliveroo courier and free-lance designer, in the extract here-above, their right to exist is limited to their sole capacity to carry a steaming brown bag from one end of the city to the other in less than 20 minutes. If couriers of platforms such as Deliveroo or UberEats are omnipresent in the public space and are now part of the daily urban landscape, their individuality seems to be concealed by a system where only achieving the tasks matters.
When the watchword today is to stay home and fear contacts with the exterior world, how do we consider individuals whose role consists in sweating for hours outside, going back and forth between the “hands” of restaurant owners and customers?
Since the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak in France, we praise the efforts of cashiers, garbage collectors, farmers and care givers, who are directly exposed to the contamination risk, and are working far beyond the 35 hours to guarantee that first necessity services are not discontinued. In parallel to the closing down of cafés, movie theaters, museums and most of public places, restaurants are allowed to maintain home delivery services, mainly carried out these past few years by intermediary online platforms.
Front liners
Deliveroo and UberEats thus implemented a new option in their application, the “front door delivery”, ensuring customers that couriers are to “step back 2 meters after having left the meal at the front door to be picked up by customers”, thereby complying with the social distancing guidelines the government issued.
Couriers, side by side with restaurant delivery employees, are now part of the front liners involved in this unprecedented sanitary crisis. We could easily jump to the conclusion that this crisis will enable to promote, and for once salute, these “dirty jobs” that are more often than not discarded and made invisible.
In reality, couriers are getting out of breath in empty streets, to deliver a “vital” pad thai, to a home working engineer who will wait for the courier to step back several meters from the front door, before picking up his meal, in compliance with “barrier measures”.
As for the courier, they shall only see the elevator doors close onto the customer’s silhouette, unable to see the customer’s face who is looking down at the floor, where his order is waiting for him. The couriers’ role does contrast with the current need for distancing required under such pandemic conditions.
Hyper-present in the urban landscape, and yet blended in the scenery, their bodies are exposed, on display for everyone to see, and to the dangers of the outside world. While major working instruments, the couriers’ flesh and bones are soaked with street stigmas: their bitter-cold faces in the evening are dripping with sweat at lunch time; foul-smelling clothes from prolonged waiting at fast-food counters; delivery bags as heavy cloth-shells, are soiled inside from a runny Vietnamese soup, and outside from putting them down on more than likely dirty floors.
A “dirty job”
If before the sanitary crisis couriers were already stating the indifference, the disdain they sometimes felt when delivering to customers, the dehumanization of this interaction is now fueled by the sanitary measures of physical distancing and individual protection: the new standards require to stand a least one meter apart from one another, and to disinfect skins. Contaminated by a soggy exterior world, couriers are kept at bay from under-control interiors.
For people confined in a sanitized 60 square meter apartment, such carnal layers are the scarecrow of contamination, viral but also social. It is then more comfortable for employees of the service sector, who are “saving lives” by staying home and working from home with permanent contracts, to look away rather than to be faced with the harsh reality of these sweaty and exhausted workers rushing onto their next paid gig.
Food delivery is considered to be a “dirty job” — couriers are exposed to the dangers of traffic and sickness, for a non-qualified job which rarely crowns a deliberate professional career. Such workers are stigmatized, even in restaurants, where words like “couriers must wait outside!” are displayed in big capital letters.
Couriers are kept at bay, under the rain or the scorching sun, from fear that their precarious sweat shall contaminate customers in the dining room, and tarnish the restaurant’s image.
Their “dirty job” disturbs.
Covid-19 amplified distancing is now really becoming social, in the sense that it does sharpen barriers between — relatively — stable employees and the contagiously precarious self-employed entrepreneurs.
Allowed by the government because it is a way, in theory, for vulnerable people with no one to help them, to have food brought to their doorway, platform delivery services are in reality, a way for upper middle class people to celebrate their safety with friends via Skype sushi parties.
The virus of precariousness
The Covid-19 pandemic is exposing and amplifying the stigmas scarring couriers of the platform economy. If Deliveroo and UberEats are considered to be the main actors of meal deliveries in France, it is so at the expense of the people who actually get their hands dirty in order to deliver such services.
From lack of any other option, couriers have no other choice but to be exposed to the virus of precariousness to continue to pay their rent. Working for meal delivery platforms is the sole source of income for most of these ghost workers, socially unwanted, and yet, deemed to be “essential” today.
In times of “war” as stated by the French President, Emmanuel Macron, these “behind the scene” workers have become front liners. It is however important to understand the full extent of such war metaphor. We are not dealing here with hand grenades or point-blank shootings: these tragedies are unraveling silently in many areas of the world, while the rest of the Western world is wondering whether or not they are allowed to go running within 2 or 3 miles around their home.
Let’s keep in mind the front line that couriers are being sent to is one of another nature. Couriers are breathing in the toxic exhaust fumes of indifference, of disdain, of rejection. They are confronted to the bayonet charge of task wages. For them, for us, the fight is primarily economic and social.
For a year and a half, as part of her sociological study carried out for her thesis on meal delivery platform workers, the author actually cycled for two of these platforms, carried out about thirty formal interviews, took notes about numerous informal interactions with couriers, restaurant owners, customers, and followed discussions of about ten online talk groups dedicated to couriers. This analysis is the result of this work and the theorization of existing scientific works.
This article is republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons license. Read the original article in french.
Claire Le Breton is recently graduated of emlyon business school and the University of Lyon III. Her current research focuses on the sociological perspectives of power in organizations.
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