Delivery in the city: The gig economy’s many faces

This article is part of Taming the Gig Economy, a special report from POLITICO’s Global Policy Lab: Living Cities. Sign up here.
BRUSSELS— People often think about bike couriers delivering meals when they envision the gig economy.
That image is incomplete.
A decade ago, companies like Uber and Deliveroo made gig work mainstream. In that time, the number of workers carrying out small tasks or providing a specific service through an app or platform has grown consistently — including in Europe. And it’s not just food delivery.
Across the continent, local authorities, politicians and judges all grapple with the gig work phenomenon.
Politicians must juggle the new world of mobile work while ensuring that workers have adequate protection. Judges have had to mediate tussles between gig workers and the platforms through which they contract. In cities, meanwhile, gig work can be another source of nuisance, in the form of packaging waste, dark kitchens and bike couriers working in oppressive heat.
Rather than being embodied by the stalwart image of a lone food-delivery worker, the complex gig work ecosystem has many faces.
In 2021, about 28 million people in the European Union worked through a platform, the European Commission estimated at the time. That number is set to grow to 43 million by 2025.
However, as the study pointed out, delivery is only one of many forms of platform work.
Other examples listed included transport, pet care, child care and repair work, or even wholly online jobs such as data entry, translation services and software development. In all those jobs, the person offering their services could connect with a customer through an app.
While some forms of gig work don’t need a specific skill set, others are very specialized. Some can be carried out in a city’s streets, while for others, a worker can remain behind a screen or in someone else’s home.
“The platform economy is much broader than the typical image that everyone thinks about, of a young man with [a] migration background, who cycles through the city with a colorful backpack,” said Elief Vandevenne, a platform economy researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
“It’s a heterogenous group and these [workers] have at times contradictory interests,” she adds — which is also why gig economy policy is so incredibly tricky.
EU legislators got a taste of that in the past two years, when they negotiated the EU’s Platform Work Directive — an attempt at improving platform workers’ labor conditions.
But the whole exercise turned into an excruciating, protracted journey, centered on one fundamental question: Are gig workers employees or independent contractors?
The issue wasn’t resolved entirely, with much leeway for every EU country to stake its own position on the subject. France, for example, before the EU’s gig work rules were finalized, sided with state-owned delivery startup Stuart in a case over “unreported employment.” Spain, on the other hand, fined delivery platform Glovo €79 million over its labor practices.
Such country-by-country differences are themselves a result of gig workers’ heterogeneity.
“People that do a couple of hours of platform work per week to earn a little extra, they will be less eager to fight for the statute of employee than people who are really dependent on it,” Vandevenne said.
It’s an argument that platforms pushed heavily during the two years of talks: Gig workers value flexibility and should not be given employee status by default. Just Eat Takeaway CEO Jitse Groen, whose company employs couriers, also warned that rival platforms would seek to “circumvent” the new rules.
Yet, employee status is often the gateway to protection and oversight, the lack of which can make gig work prone to all kinds of illicit activities.
There have been examples of undocumented migrants or minors buying another person’s food-delivery courier account to circumvent identity checks. Deliveroo, Just Eat and UberEats earlier this year agreed to conduct more rigorous security checks in the United Kingdom in a bid to tackle illegal work on their platforms.
“I’ve seen that in my field research with delivery couriers,” Vandevenne acknowledged.
It’s a reminder that while these problems are not exclusively attached to the gig economy, they tend to pop up there more quickly, which pushes politicians and regulators to engage — and to try to understand this group with many faces.