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Inside Gig Work: Trading Flexibility for Uncertainty, Risk and Racism

Kevin Park’s gig economy career as a food courier began as a research project and ended with a broken hand.
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Thousands of workers move food, people, and goods through platform-based apps like Uber, SkipTheDishes, and DoorDash. Photo via Envato Elements.

Kevin Park’s gig economy career as a food courier began as a research project and ended with a broken hand. 

Park’s electric unicycle  collided with an e-scooter on a late September night at the corner of  Smithe and Howe in Vancouver, after the other rider took a left turn too  soon. The crash sent Park flying into the intersection. 

At first, the Simon Fraser University grad  student hoped his hand was only sprained. But it wasn’t. And then he  realized he could no longer do his job. 

“There’s no insurance for this. There’s  nothing I can do. There’s no compensation here,” Park said. “So I’m  already like, fuck.” 

Park is one of thousands of  workers moving food, people and goods in Metro Vancouver through  platform-based apps like Uber, SkipTheDishes and DoorDash. The drivers  and couriers are not considered employees but independent contractors,  without labour protections many take for granted. Data from Lyft  suggests the vast majority of their employees in B.C. are racialized people,  something Park also believes to be true from his time on the job. They  are not guaranteed minimum wage, sick pay or even a profit.  

Many are drawn to the work  for its flexibility — drivers choose their own hours — and the potential  to make good money. They have their own formulas for how to get the  most money out of their time, strategies about how to juggle orders  between apps and save on gas and long trips. 

But the work is full of perils. Park was  assaulted once during a shift, an attack he believes was racially  motivated. Other drivers have stories of kicks to their car, verbal  abuse and shifts where they actually lose money instead of making it. 

“In terms of what I do for a short-time  side gig, it’s OK,” said Peter, a part-time food courier. “I’m putting  mileage on my car. Some nights, no deliveries are coming and I’m wasting  my time. I’d say it’s OK as a side gig. But I know people who are doing  this full time, and that’s completely nuts.”

British Columbia is considering how and if  it might impose regulations on those companies. MLA Adam Walker, who was  tasked with creating a precarious work strategy in the province in  2020, held a series of meetings with gig workers across the province  last month. Those consultations could lead to new government-based  benefits or pension plans for the workers and new regulations on the  companies. 

But Walker has declined to presuppose what government will do. 

Workers interviewed for this story said  they enjoyed the convenience and flexibility of the work. Some were  hesitant about being regulated as employees, except in specific  circumstances. But all agreed the status quo — no minimum wage, no sick  pay, no benefits — was not sustainable.

“We’re all just numbers out here,” food  courier Harley Rose said. “Skip, Uber, DoorDash — they don’t give a shit  about us. They care about getting their orders to the home.”

The curious case of Kevin Park

Park wasn’t supposed to become a first-rate  food courier. Originally, his deliveries were part of a research  project launched by a professor at Simon Fraser University on the use of  devices like e-bikes in the food courier business. They approached Park  to make deliveries himself, record observations and distribute flyers  to fellow riders seeking participants. 

Park liked the work, and he was good at it —  so good that he kept it up himself when the research project ended. He  meticulously tracked his orders and estimated he made an average of more  than $40 an hour, or about $2,000 every week. That’s partially because  his electric unicycle requires little upkeep and no gas. But Park also  figured out a system — one he’s hesitant to share in full. 

“There’s this whole thing about not  divulging information,” Park said. Many drivers and couriers treat their  formulas like trade secrets. But they have a lot in common: successful  couriers often use multiple phones and multiple applications. They  screen for larger, better orders with more pay. That often means doing  split-second mental math on which orders will pay off and which aren’t  worth the gas.

“If it’s not worth at least a dollar per  kilometre, I drop it,” said Rose, a rapper and former Vancouver mayoral  candidate. Rose likes driving for the apps because it fits around his  schedule, which includes caring for a relative in the evenings, and  means he doesn’t have to report to a boss looking over his shoulder.

“I’ve started businesses, I’ve  shut them down, I’ve failed, I’ve succeeded. To me, this is just  another business,” Rose said. He estimated he makes between $20 and $25  an hour on average. But everyone has bad shifts, and some people have a  lot of them. 

“I lost money last year. My accountant said  I did not make money,” Peter said. He asked his real name not be  shared. Multiple couriers and drivers interviewed for this story made  that request out of concerns their accounts would be deactivated, which  can instantly mean their income is cut off. 

“If anything happens — my rider gives me  one star, or any report, they can suspend us anytime,” said John, who  drives an Uber. John says getting that account reactivation can take  weeks of haggling with company call centre staff. 

“Even to prove yourself, it takes two or  three weeks. You’re losing money all those days,” John said. Another  Uber driver, Barry, described an incident where a customer kicked the  side of his car after refusing to wear a mask — even though that was  Uber’s company policy at the time. 

Unlike food courier apps, Barry says Uber  doesn’t tell drivers what their destination is when they make a pickup,  meaning they have no way of knowing if they stand to make $2 or $20.  Based on their distance to the restaurant and the price of the food  ordered, they have to guess whether it’s worth taking the assignment.

“Any of the smart drivers, their acceptance rate could be as low as 10 per cent,” Barry said. 

Those aren’t the only perils of the job. On  one delivery downtown, Park said an older man confronted him, angry he  had briefly gone onto the sidewalk to deliver an order. Park said the  man shoved him towards the street; he managed to brace himself against a  tree, but otherwise might have gone directly into traffic. 

It was a jarring moment for Park, whose  actual university research focuses on the use of public space and who is  entitled to it. He doesn’t think it would have happened if he was  white.

“I started crying that night. Because it was just a reminder,” Park said. 

In Vancouver, sources interviewed for this  article said many workers are international students or professionals  whose foreign credentials aren’t recognized in Canada. 

Companies like Lyft and Uber have often  argued most of their drivers do the work part time to supplement other  income or their studies. But some studies have suggested many workers are doing it because they have been excluded from other parts of the economy. 

“I get the impression some of the people  can’t really get a full-time job. They have to do this job because they  don’t have the proper paperwork,” Peter said. 

And then there’s the issue of injury. More  than one driver has stories about an accident; a car door hitting their  bike; a robbery or a hard fall that stops them from working. There is no  sick pay or leave on Uber, and they are not covered by WorkSafeBC.

When Park broke his hand, he knew he would be OK. But then he thought about workers who wouldn’t be. 

“I’m in a financially safe place. But it makes me think about people who aren’t in this position,” Park said. 

No one really agrees on what to do about  the sector. On one side, the companies have called for the status quo,  or for government to fund benefits and pension programs. On the other,  some labour groups have asked drivers on such apps to be considered  employees outright. 

Workers interviewed for this story had a  range of views. Most supported stronger benefits and felt the companies  should pay for them. Many wanted more transparency around how the app  algorithms work and how their pay is determined. 

Rose likes the idea of a minimum wage but  thinks it would be hard to implement given many drivers use multiple  apps, sometimes at the same time. “How do you institute a minimum wage  if someone just pops in and works for 45 minutes?” he said.

The result, for now, is a system where  thousands of workers doing the same thing are not colleagues but  competitors, each trying to squeeze money out of an invisible boss  they’ll never see for a company they don’t technically work for. 

“Sometimes you anthropomorphize it,” Park said. “You think ‘I’m going to make the algorithm happy today.’”

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