Deliveroo

Most Deliveroo riders are paid per drop, pay for their own equipment and service their own bikes. If it’s a quiet time of day, that can mean clocking into work on your app, waiting around and being paid nothing. Each worker is assigned a zone – a city such as London is divided into dozens of them – to make deliveries. But the riders tell me the zones are being constantly expanded in size, meaning it takes longer to make deliveries; meaning less money.

Not quite accurate. The equipment is free now aside from your bike/car/scooter obvously. You aren't assigned zones, you are free to work in any zone you like (as long as there is availability in them).

Those who do the most drops get first dibs to choose the most lucrative time slots to work, which is nowhere near as fair as it sounds. “You sell it to the riders in this really macho way, that if you’re really speedy and committed to the company you’ll make loads of money,” says Dewhurst. “But the reality is there are so many variables out of your control: restaurants taking too long, customers not being in, bike punctures.”

He's got this a bit wrong. You are given priority on the shifts based on a) the percentage of booked shifts that you've attended over the last few weeks b) the percentage of shifts you have cancelled within 24 hours c) the number of shifts you have attended over the last 4 weeks from 19.00-22.00 on Friday, Saturday, Sunday. It takes those values and then ranks you relative to other riders in a similar area. Best statistics get priority on shifts. It has nothing to do with how many drops you do. You could do 0 drops and still have first pick of the shifts. What's more one could argue that the system rewards you for doing less work as the chances of you having to cancel/miss a shift are reduced if you do fewer shifts.

I think he's conflated the rider's complaints about how many orders you can do (= earnings) with complaints about shifts. Restaurants being slow shouldn't affect your ability to get a shift except maybe in some exceptional circumstances where they make you late or something.

If you find yourself in a shift working for less than the minimum wage and log out, that’s a black mark...

Not quite. You have to attend a shift within the first 15 minutes to be on time but you only have to be logged on for literally seconds for it to count towards your statistics. If it's so quiet that you decide not to attend a second shift (for example) then yes it'll affect your statistics.

leaving you forced to get a less lucrative shift next time around.

Not quite. You can always do any shift you like, it's just that other riders will have access to book the best shifts before you do. My stats are bad occasionally (because I work full-time on my PhD and like to go away at the weekends, leaving no time for Deliveroo) but I can still get the Friday/Saturday/Sunday night slots if I want to. Usually I find people drop out at the last minute on weekends because (I assume) they decide they want to go to the pub instead. As soon as a slot opens up it's fair game for anyone.

I think he's picked the wrong target slightly; all told I personally think the shift system is very fair. Riders who show up every time get slightly easier access to the shifts, which is hard to argue with. And it's great that for someone like me that I can book a shift literally minutes in advance if I decide I'm free after all.

The real problems with this work are mismanagement of demand and oversaturation of riders. From Deliveroo's perspective there is no downside to having 20 riders sitting around, doing nothing, earning £0ph. They never want to be in the situation where there are too few riders to deliver every order. For the riders obviously this is a problem. With some sort of minimum fee per hour I would be happy.

The only other problem as far as I am concerned is the lack of security - people up here have been sacked without notice which obviously pulls the rug out. All I would ask is for here is more warnings, rather than immediate termination of the contract, and for Deliveroo to side with riders in he-said-she-said cases rather than sacking us immediately. (They can just hire new riders - there is plenty of demand - so aside from paying out for the equipment and the new rider perhaps being slower on average, there's not really much of a downside to just sacking us. Here, again, what's best for Deliveroo is worst for the riders.) In the specific case that I am thinking of the rider was sacked without warning for an unspecified complaint from a restaurant, but she was completely unaware of what it might have been about. There have also been people sacked on pay-per-hour contracts because their acceptance rate for deliveries was too low, again without any warning and no stated minimum acceptance rate anywhere in the terms etc.