"Wherever people see someone wearing this gray and pink t-shirt, that
person is treated like garbage." ---- The incessant development oftechnologies in production systems and the further new frontier of
Artificial Intelligence, incorporating more and more living labor into
dead labor, determine that phenomenon, described in economic literature
as “polarization of labor”. ---- Polarization that consists in the
significant reduction of jobs for those middle-level figures that
involve routine and therefore automatable work, a reduced increase in
the most qualified and best paid jobs, compared to a development and
increase in the number of people employed in less qualified jobs.
This is the case of the so-called “gig economy” sector, which now has
about half a billion workers in the world and which increasingly
represents one of the few income possibilities for the new generations.
This investigation, carried out in the major metropolises and cities of
Asia, Latin America and Africa, bears witness to the reality of this
young proletariat, net and outside the narratives of a presumed
“cognitive capitalism, for which the fundamental unit of measurement is
still the interminable length of working hours and days, over 15, 16
continuous hours, in addition to the inhumane conditions of real
exploitation inherent in elementary regulations, such as breaks, rest
periods and lunches that are totally non-existent.
---------------
Rest of World asked over 100 gig workers in 10 cities how they take a
break between one activity and another[1].
Sophia Ibrahim Gedo, a ride-hailing driver based in Nairobi, had a
customer in the back seat when she felt the need to use the bathroom.
Usually, Gedo would find the nearest gas station, shopping mall, or
restaurant, and if she was lucky, they would let her use their
facilities. But when she stopped at a gas station, the bathroom was
locked. Her customer was getting impatient, so Gedo got back in the car
and kept driving.
“That was my longest trip. “When I was dropping off this customer, I was
sweating,” Gedo, who is in his 40s, told Rest of World. “I almost peed
my pants.”
Whether they’re ferrying passengers or delivering food orders, gig
economy workers often work 10- to 12-hour days to make ends meet. As
they traverse their cities, these workers scramble to find facilities to
meet their basic needs: toilets, clean places to eat, and safe places to
rest. Through trial and error, many gig economy workers have created
their own invisible maps of cities, identifying places where they can
stop for a break.
Rest of World spoke to 104 drivers, couriers, delivery people, and
cleaners who find work through apps in 10 cities: Dhaka, Hanoi, Hong
Kong, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Karachi, Lagos, Mexico City, Nairobi, and
São Paulo. to better understand how often they take breaks and where
they go to use the bathroom and eat.
Our survey respondents painted a worrying picture: A third of workers
said they either don’t take any breaks or just relax a bit between
calls. More than half said they were denied access to public places like
malls and restaurants; some said they were frequently chased away by
police, landlords, security personnel and shopkeepers who perceived them
as loitering. Meanwhile, platforms like Grab, inDrive and iFood are
trying to build facilities like pit stops and lounges, but few workers
have access to them.
“Most drivers prefer no rest, take very short breaks and sleep very
little,” Tobias Kuttler, a research associate at Fairwork, a work
project of the Oxford Internet Institute and the WZB Berlin Social
Science Center, told Rest of the World. “[I] saw drivers with average
shifts of 17 hours. Those drivers were visibly sleep-deprived and in
poor health, and were taking medication to combat pain.”
There are nearly 435 million gig workers worldwide, and our survey
showed that for most, rest is a luxury. Only 18 of those surveyed said
they have flexibility and choice over the number of breaks they take,
while 35 said they couldn’t afford more breaks even if they wanted to.
“[The] platform economy encourages riders to make as many calls as
possible, to maximize their earnings, to cover their expenses, to avoid
being penalized by the platform,” Mark Graham, director of Fairwork,
told Rest of World.
Wallace Miguel, a delivery driver for iFood and Lalamove in São Paulo,
can only relax in the few minutes he spends waiting at the restaurant
for an order that isn’t ready yet. “The restaurant usually has benches
and water, and I use them,” the 22-year-old said. Basil Faraz, a
25-year-old Foodpanda driver in Karachi, told us he can only rest
between orders. He spends that time sitting on a cluster of rocks and
bricks under a canopy of trees in the city’s upscale Defense Housing
Authority neighborhood, where many other delivery workers also rest.
Even then, Faraz is constantly staring at his phone, refreshing his food
delivery app, and waiting for his next delivery request. “Obviously I
can’t go into an air-conditioned mall [to rest],” he said, chuckling.
“They would look at me and tell me to go away.”
In countries like Kenya, laws prohibit ride-hailing drivers from working
more than eight hours in a 24-hour period. So drivers often switch
between apps, sometimes working up to 19 hours a day, Justin Nyaga,
president of the Kenya Online Drivers Organization, told us.
Tran Van Tu, who works for the ride-hailing and food delivery platform
Be in Hanoi, believes his algorithm incentivizes him to work harder.
“The more I work, the more calls I get,” the 33-year-old told Rest of
World. He said he works between 13 and 16 hours every day.
Workers who acknowledged the toll the long hours had on their bodies
said they couldn’t do anything about it. “Working 14 hours is very
dangerous for both me and the customer,” Julius King’ori, a 45-year-old
ride-hailing driver for Uber and Bolt in Nairobi, told Rest of World.
“I’m a human being, I need more breaks. But we can’t afford to take more
breaks because of the amount of money we make from our rides.”
“Everywhere people see someone wearing this gray and pink shirt, that
person is treated like dirt.”
To maximize their time on the road, several Nairobi ride-hailing workers
choose not to go home in the evenings. Instead, they sleep in cars
parked at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport because locals have
bathrooms they can use to shower, Emmanuel Ochieng, who works for the
ride-hailing company Little Cab, told Rest of World.
“You’ll find [the workers] queuing up to shower because they couldn’t go
to their homes. There is also a lady who comes to the parking lot to
sell food,”
Ochieng said. “Even when the app reserves time for rest, it will not be
useful for a driver. The best thing the apps could do is adjust their
wages so that they can rest comfortably.” Of the 104 gig workers
interviewed, 36 said they sleep an average of six hours or less every day.
Even when gig workers do find time to relax, they have to be wary of
harassment and robbery. Nearly half of the respondents (49) said they
had been harassed or assaulted while resting in places such as malls,
restaurants, parking lots and residential areas. While a dozen
respondents said they had been chased away by security guards, 15 said
they had been robbed while resting. “Restaurant guards chase me away if
I sit outside while waiting for an order to be prepared and packed,”
Muhammad Kamran, a 43-year-old Foodpanda worker in Karachi, told us.
According to Tariq Noor, another Foodpanda rider from Karachi, gig
economy workers’ uniforms are taboo. “Wherever people see someone
wearing this gray and pink shirt, they are treated like dirt,” the
39-year-old told Rest of World. “If I go to a store and I’m not wearing
this shirt, I’m treated better and I’m not told to wait outside.”
The survey found that female workers are particularly vulnerable to the
challenges that come with being mobile all day. Of the 18 women
interviewed who spoke to us, six said they had experienced some form of
harassment at work. Phuong Mui May, a 26-year-old delivery woman for
ShopeeFood in Hanoi, said she was harassed on the street by a passerby
while waiting to pick up an order. She now takes breaks in an alley with
other delivery men to feel safe.
“It’s clear that women are doubly at risk,” Savita Bailur, senior
director at Caribou Digital, a consultancy that researches digital
platforms, told Rest of World. “One, because there are typically fewer
women in [gig] work, and two, because they don’t always have the
infrastructure support that men have.”
Women workers said they have to plan a lot for a simple bathroom break;
safe, hygienic facilities aren’t easy to find. “In Mexico and Uganda, a
lack of bathrooms and bathroom breaks has been linked to higher rates of
UTIs [urinary tract infections] for female workers, which ultimately
prevents them from working for platforms in the long term,” said Graham
of Fairwork.
Bridgette Muthoni Munene, a 39-year-old ride-hailing driver from
Nairobi, stresses every time she drinks water during the day. “[The
toilet] is a big challenge for women working in this industry,” she said.
Angela Chukunzira, a labor activist and researcher at Ukombozi Library
in Kenya, told us that several Uber drivers have told her stories of
struggling to find a place to change sanitary pads during work hours.
“In some malls you have to pay to use the toilets, so it becomes a
hassle and an additional cost for them,” Chukunzira said. “[The
platforms] are not built for workers. It’s all about profitability… If
they don’t give them basic resources, like a car that you need to do the
work yourself or even a mobile phone, I think a toilet is a bit excessive.”
In some cities, workers have organized and created spaces where they can
safely use toilets, relax, and socialize. For example, in Jakarta,
workers have set up dozens of community-run base camps — makeshift
structures made of wood panels or tents — where they hold meetings,
chat, and eat food while waiting for orders.
In Vietnamese cities, several restaurants have partnered with apps to
provide a separate area for ride-hailing drivers to sit and wait, Nguyen
Thi Minh Chau, a researcher at the Southern Institute of Social Sciences
in Ho Chi Minh City, told us. Last year, 100 restaurants and cafes in Ho
Chi Minh City put up “free toilets” signs after the local government
struggled to build new public restrooms due to a lack of land. In some
places, ride-hailing platforms have been expanded to create dedicated
restrooms for workers. These rest areas, often called pit stops or
lounges, typically provide restrooms, drinking water, and space to sit
and charge devices. Some offer additional amenities like microwaves to
heat up food. InDrive’s lounge for its drivers in Jakarta is part of the
company’s mission to address “injustice in the ride-hailing industry,” a
spokesperson told Rest of World. The lounge also serves as a venue for
events and training sessions for its workers, including one recently
completed on first aid. Super-app Grab, meanwhile, operates three
“GrabBike Lounges” in Jakarta, which offer not only essential services
but also Wi-Fi, a prayer room, a motorcycle workshop, a barber shop and
even a “helmet spa” [a machine that sanitizes helmets]. Grab’s app has a
“fatigue reminder” safety feature, reminding drivers to take a break
“when they’ve been driving for long hours,” Radhi Juniantino, Grab’s
director of trust and safety in Indonesia, told Rest of World. “These
reminders are based on the app reading of the driver’s online and
offline hours, which provides an indicator of fatigue levels.” In Sao
Paulo, food delivery platform iFood offers more than 170 “support
points,” two of which are fully operated by iFood, and the rest in
partnership with local authorities, private companies and restaurants,
the company said in an email. But most of the support points — operated
in partnership with restaurants — only offer water, access to restrooms
and space to wait for an order to be ready. They don’t provide restrooms
or access to amenities like microwaves and charging points. A number of
platforms — Uber, Gojek, Bolt, SweepSouth, Chowdeck, Jumia, Mano, Be,
Pathao, Rappi, Careem and Deliveroo — declined to respond or didn’t
respond to questions about their efforts to support gig workers in terms
of rest.
Many platforms resist setting up rest centers because they require
financial investment to maintain them, and also because they are not
responsible for this lack of infrastructure, Ainan Tajrian, a research
associate at Fairwork in Bangladesh, told Rest of World. “Recognizing
workers as independent contractors also shifts this burden away from the
platform,” he said. There was a time when Foodpanda worker Faraz could
beat Karachi’s notorious summer heatwave under a shed the company had
installed outside one of its stores. But local authorities removed the
shed this year, Faraz said. The Karachi city government told us it was
removed because Foodpanda did not have a building permit for the site.
Foodpanda has rest areas called “rider hubs” in Pakistan, Cambodia and
Singapore, a Foodpanda spokesperson told Rest of World. “We care about
[our delivery workers’] well-being and… actively encourage our delivery
partners to take short breaks throughout the day to help them recharge.”
Some companies have also taken extreme weather into account while also
catering to gig workers. Food delivery startup Glovo, for example, has
set up drinking water stations in countries like Morocco and Ivory Coast
during the summer, and hot tea stations in places like Ukraine and
Kazakhstan during the winter, a company spokesperson told Rest of the
World. Glovo, which has a large presence in Africa, has set up “courier
hubs” in several African metropolitan cities that serve as designated
rest stops for its workers. The Glovo app, the spokesperson said, also
has a policy that limits work to eight hours a day, which is “critical
to ensuring our couriers have the downtime they need to maintain a
healthy work-life balance, while safeguarding their safety and overall
well-being.” But five Glovo riders in Lagos said they all worked more
than nine hours to earn a decent living, given their low wages.
One Glovo rider, Philip Saheed, a 20-year-old who supports a family of
six, tries to take a break at the six-hour mark during his nine-hour
shift. But too often he needs to keep working. “When there are
back-to-back orders, I stop to buy snacks on the way to deliver and use
the short waiting time to eat.”
Sahedon doesn’t want more breaks, though. “I want more work so I can
make money,” he said.
Notes:
[1] This article was originally published in English at
https://restofworld.org/2024/gig-worker-rest-breaks/ Lam Le is a Labor x
Tech journalist at Rest of World based in Hanoi, Vietnam. Zuha Siddiqui
is a Labor x Tech journalist at Rest of World based in Karachi, Pakistan.
http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/wpAL
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