Deliveroo is embroiled in a pay row with its couriers after more than 100 riders staged a protest outside the company’s London offices in a dispute over a new wage structure.
Couriers are rebelling against plans to pay workers £3.75 per delivery instead of an hourly rate of £7 plus £1 per delivery.
Outside the Deliveroo headquarters more than 100 self-employed workers gathered calling for the company to keep the hourly rate. Riders said they often earned less than the “national living wage”, currently set at £7.20 an hour once their expenses were taken into account.
Fahran, who delivers for the firm on his motorcycle, said removing the hourly rate would cause him to struggle. “My phone contract is the same, insurance is the same – everything else is fixed,” he said. “I have two children and I need to pay for them. They are forcing people to take benefits.”
Amir Ali started striking on Thursday. He said it had been a good place to work under the old pay terms. “£7 an hour was okay and if you worked hard, it was good. But now they are cutting it below the basic wage,” he said. “We work in snow, we work in rain. They don’t give you a place to sit down.”
One rider who covers central London said that he thought the company was trying to reduce its costs to boost profits. “We risk our lives every day for the job. Deliveroo is a great startup but without us it is nothing.” He said he believed he would earn less under the new rules. “Sometimes you might be hanging round for an hour for a delivery, he said. “August is a really quiet month – in winter-time when people get lazy you do better. It varies. We need something a bit more consistent, something more reliable. We have kids, we have rent, we can’t deal with uncertainty.”
Deliveroo, which raised $275m (£212m) from investors this month, said it would roll out the pay terms from next week and claimed that couriers had responded positively in early trials. “What we have seen from previous trials that we have been running in other parts of London is that riders have reacted positively to the trial, and fees rise to more than twice what they were over a lunch or dinner, compared to the old payment model,” it said.
The company said that the trial was designed to “better reflect the way that riders work with us … Along with this increased flexibility, we’ve seen average hourly fees for riders in previous trials rise to more than 2.1 times the previous payment model at our busiest times,” Deliveroo said.
Riders for the company said that they had been asked to sign additional clauses to their contracts agreeing to the changes. Michael Newman, an employment lawyer at Leigh Day, said that once workers had signed up to the change in terms there was unlikely to be a move back to the old deal. “This isn’t like trialling a new shampoo – if the new deal isn’t better for people they can’t just go back to the old one. Once you’ve signed a contract the new terms apply,” he said.
If workers had not taken on new contracts he said it would be harder for Deliveroo to push through the changes. “If they haven’t signed the new contracts then the old contracts still apply. Ultimately the employer could fire people and rehire them on the new terms. That could open them up to an unfair dismissal or breach of contract claim, but typically those cases do not get taken.”
Earlier this year, a Deliveroo worker told the Guardian the most he had made was £32 in a three-hour shift and that customers did not tend to pay tips on top of this.
Riders for Deliveroo were asked to sign contracts banning them from taking claims over their employment status to court. The clauses were described as unenforceable by employment lawyers.
‘After an accident or injury, we’re on our own’
As a student and aspiring journalist, a summer full of unpaid internships left me perilously poor come winter. In late 2015, Deliveroo had a heavy recruitment drive on campus looking for cycle couriers, and the job seemed to offer everything I needed: flexible hours I could fit around my degree; no prior experience requirement; and most importantly, above-minimum-wage pay. Over the past nine months, these promises have faded one by one, and this week couriers heard that Deliveroo would be enforcing a new contract that would decimate our income.
A day working for Deliveroo doesn’t start at 9 and end at 5; you begin at 11.30am, work until 1.30pm, then start again at 5.30 until 9.30pm. For many, it makes no sense to go home during the afternoon hiatus, so they continue to work off the clock, meaning they don’t receive the £7 hourly rate. If you see a Deliveroo courier between the hours of 2pm and 5pm, it could well be they’re working for as little as £3 or £4 an hour.
My zone, where I collect and deliver orders, is Marylebone, Mayfair and Soho. Other zones are huge – I have a friend in Putney who regularly cycles three or four miles to a restaurant, then just as many more miles to the customer. Under the new contract, he could earn as little as £3.75 an hour. This is made possible by our being technically “self employed”, which also means that in the event of an accident or injury, we’re completely alone and have no access to legal help or sick pay.
Deliveroo couriers are a diverse bunch – we’re full-time, part-time, students, graduates, uneducated, and we’re from all over the world. Last week, couriers in my area refused to deliver orders from Byron after what that chain did to its employees. Today, we’re striking because it’s our turn to be exploited.
Anonymous
