personal finance

How do Deliveroo and Uber workers cope with precarious pay?


How do people cope when they don’t know how much they will earn from one month to the next? A report this week found that three-quarters of all workers do not receive the same pay packet from one month to the next – with the problem most acute for low-paid workers in the gig economy or on zero-hours contracts.

The Resolution Foundation found that for those on the lowest annual incomes, the average monthly fluctuation in pay was £180 – which can make the difference between paying the rent or feeding the family. Many are forced to turn to crippling payday loans or high-cost credit cards to make it through to the end of the month.

Guardian Money spoke to fourworkers currently trying to survive in the gig economy.

“All you get is £20 to £25 a day. Then my motorbike was stolen”
Arjun, 32, (not his real name) is a Deliveroo rider in west London

“You log in to work at about 6pm or 6.30pm for the evening rush, and you find that there are already 20 other people at the branch waiting for work. You often sit around waiting for an order. By 7.30pm there might be 50 people logged in. All you end up getting is about £20 to £25 a day. I only work for Deliveroo. I used to do work for Uber Eats but they blocked me after a customer complained that I hadn’t delivered something, when I had.

“Because there are so many other workers there now, I usually end up doing about five deliveries, using my motorbike. My bike has been stolen twice. Once I managed to recover it, but everything was broken. The bike cost £1,600 so this has been really bad for me.

“I don’t have a full-time job during the day. What I’m trying to do is make some money by buying and selling stuff on eBay, but it doesn’t make much. I’m trying to build my own website.

“I have a wife and a young child. We pay £650 a month for a room in a two-bed flat, which we share with someone who rents the other room. My wife does some part-time teaching work but generally we live very much day to day. I have never been able to save any money. Whatever comes in just goes out straight away.”

“At times it’s comfortable. But then you find yourself living on baked beans”
Dan Martell, 26, is a Deliveroo rider in Brighton

“I’ve worked for Deliveroo for the last two years. For the first year it was a bit of an adventure. It was possible to make a comfortable, if not particularly high level of living. It was the summer of 2016, there weren’t too many other Deliveroo cyclists around, and I was picking up £10 to £12 an hour. I was able to start paying off my overdraft. It was flexible, you could earn money, or take a day off, it was really good.

“Then I got a knee injury. I couldn’t work for three months, and there was no sick pay from Deliveroo. I got a bit of statutory sick pay and my grandparents gave me £50 a week, but it soon became a beans on toast life.

“I came back to work to find a lot of the other couriers struggling. Loads of the orders were going to the scooter guys. One ice-cold day in February 2017 there were 20 of us waiting outside all day for orders. In the end I earned just £4 that day.

“I’ve had to get side jobs on building sites and pubs. I switched from bike to scooter with Deliveroo and started getting more drops. It was brilliant again. Then I got hit by a car. It was months before I was able to work again. Above all, it’s a very precarious living. My plan is to try to make a living in the music business, and our jazz band, No Little Trouble, is beginning to get noticed.”

An Uber car



Some Uber drivers can make reasonable money – but others find their income unpredictable. Photograph: Seth Wenig/AP

“I can make good money – about £700 a week. I’m happy with that”
Colin Dodds, 48, is an Uber driver in Glasgow and Edinburgh

“Yes, you don’t know how much you are going to earn each week. But if I wanted that, I’d work as an employee. I like being self-employed. I have a target every day – some days are quiet, others very busy.

“There are many more Uber drivers around now, but I’ve not seen a drop in fares or my income. I think it’s because Glasgow and Edinburgh had such a cap on hackney cab drivers.

“I make good money. I work about 48 hours a week and it comes in at about £700. My income has actually considerably increased because of Uber. But in Glasgow, when the students go home, my income drops a fair bit.

“It’s definitely safer working for Uber. Bad things are less likely to happen. When I was a private hire driver I was involved in a stabbing. And I’d get women touching my leg when driving. Don’t laugh. You wouldn’t laugh if it was a female driver saying that.

“Uber can be harsh: I know a pal taken off for five days after a complaint from a customer. There were five of them, and it’s illegal to have more than four. But they said to Uber he was rude, and Uber believed them. That’s the thing with Uber – they give you no right of reply, they just take the money off you.

“And I hate it when the customer says ‘I’ll give you five stars.’ I just wish they’d give a tip instead.”

James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam



James Farrar (left) and Yaseen Aslam after they won an employment tribunal case against Uber. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images

“Uber should be forced to do in London what’s happened in New York and ensure a minimum wage”
James Farrar is a former Uber driver who won a court case over the minimum wage. Uber is appealing.

“No Uber driver is ever given the benefit of the doubt. If the customer makes a claim, Uber suspends their account and it can be three weeks before they are back on. What I’ve been doing is fighting for better terms and conditions.

“Uber used to publish a benchmark figure for the earnings of a ‘top driver’. They said a top driver would pick up £18 an hour gross and work a 48-hour week. So that’s £850 or so. But you have to pay 25% commission to Uber. Most drivers rent their cars – typically that’s about £270. Then there’s another £100 for fuel. In reality, it can bring a driver’s income down to little more than £5 an hour, which is less than the minimum wage.

“New York brought in a new system where Uber drivers are effectively guaranteed $15 an hour after costs. The idea is that for every hour the driver is logged on to the system, Uber has to top up the driver’s pay if they don’t reach the threshold through fares. What it means is that Uber no longer has any incentive to oversupply the platform with drivers. The tragedy of the system in the UK is that the only way you can make up for lack of fares is to work more and more hours.

“Consumers know fares are too low and they will wear higher fares. But because Uber is doing an IPO [stock market flotation] it wants poor people to subsidise its multibillion-dollar float.

“We’re going to continue with strike action, and we’re urging people not to cross the digital picket line. We won in court, Uber appealed and lost, now it’s the court of appeal and, if it loses that, it will probably go to the supreme court. It could take seven years from start to finish.”



READ SOURCE

Leave a Reply

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.