Over the last decade, working in the gig economy has became shorthand for the gruelling reality of capitalist society. Ride-hailing app drivers, quick-turnaround couriers and food delivery app workers – by the late 2010s, these roles were in every city (even in most towns), their prominence emphasised during the pandemic. As the industry grew, so did public awareness of the exploitation that sometimes comes with such jobs. It became clear that the services could be cheap because the wages were low and workers received few, if any, benefits. Granted their new status as “key workers”, there was an eventual awakening about how bad these jobs were, and this work became the centre of popular campaigns pushing for greater legal protections for these roles.
But perhaps this newfound awareness and empathy was short-lived. Now there has been a shift where, rather than being viewed as potentially exploited individuals, they are often seen as something closer to indentured servants. On social media, jokes emphasising this perspective regularly go viral, with people complaining about drivers trying to have a conversation when escorting riders or delivery workers asking that you come to the door when they deliver your meal. They are now at risk of villainisation and treated as an ever-present threat. This type of mindset showed up in a popular post last week on X, when one user argued: “[I don’t care] if this makes me a Karen, if your UberEats profile picture shows that you’re a woman and my delivery person shows up and they’re a cis man then I will report every time and so should you!!!”
At the time of writing, the post has been viewed more than 20 million times and has been liked by just shy of a quarter million people. It received hundreds of replies agreeing with the poster’s sentiment, saying how frightening male workers are to women receiving deliveries alone. “I cannot get over the fact that this has been a thing for so long,” the user added in a follow-up message. “It is such a huge safety issue!!!”
This post was especially popular, but it reflects a refrain on social media that encourages hypervigilance from women when encountering male delivery workers. But is this feeling aligned with reality? While there are stories of women being attacked by delivery workers, this is not a common occurrence.
The real risk that then arises is not to women, alone and vulnerable, getting a takeaway late at night (or the even nicher argument that women are being attacked by male drivers posing as women in order to cause harm). The risk is the rise of a completely manufactured fear that creates real concern and panic, which also wrongly targets an already-exploited group in dire need of support, not alienation. This paranoia is indicative of a now pervasive, larger false belief about how delivery services have come to be seen as a whole: as a right, rather than a total luxury. This helps obscure the reality that delivery workers are far more likely to be at-risk of harm and exploitation as a result of working in this industry than the person with the means to get a takeaway on Deliveroo or UberEats. It encourages the idea that workers deserve high levels of scrutiny and surveillance around this “needed” service – and should be met with punitive repercussions if they don’t meet individuals’ standards.
In some rare cases, such as those for who are disabled and housebound, a need for these services is more justified. There are also situations where gig economy workers do cause harm to service users and should be reported and removed from these apps. But the overwhelming reality is that these services thrive because most of us are indulging a bad habit – electing to order last-minute groceries rather than walk five minutes to the shop, or to order a meal in rather than cook something that takes less time to prepare than a delivery. Each time we do, there may well be a vulnerable person on the other end whose exploitation makes that extravagance possible. And yet, even when you get your meal, your milk or your ride home, these are the people at the centre of a backlash for not providing a frictionless service.
The responsibility to change these services so that workers receive fair treatment and pay falls on those writing the laws on how the gig economy can function, as well as the actual service companies themselves. But we only make it easier to allow this exploitation to continue when, as consumers, we encourage even worse treatment and greater scrutiny than these workers already receive on paper. We are creating imagined enemies out of the losers in this economy, and are at this stage guilty of playing dumb to the realities of such work. We can’t continue to pretend anger towards these people isn’t maliciously misplaced.
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