I’ve been called a bitch. I’ve been called a slag.
I’ve been asked, “What the f**k are you?”
There was another woman who stayed off work for a week
because she was on her period
and had nowhere to go and change her tampons.
When you pick up your phone,
and you look on Uber or Deliveroo or whatever the company is
when you’re ordering that,
I don’t think you’re thinking of the labor.
I’m not sure how people would react if they knew
the real full scale of how bad it can be working for these companies.
This job has broken me.
I’m now left to pick up the pieces.
I wouldn't suggest it to anyone.
[Informer]
[Delivery Driver]
I’m a food delivery driver,
and I’ve been working for two and a bit years now.
We didn’t get so much as training.
It was just a short sort of 15-minute briefing,
and then I was on the road the next day, basically.
I think some of my first concerns were around pay.
We get paid weekly,
and our pay tended to get later and later each week.
And then some weeks it was like,
“We’ve got issues with payments,”
or they’d pay us wrong.
They wouldn’t pay us for certain slots that we’d done,
which meant that obviously,
I, myself, have got into quite bad financial difficulty.
But then also realizing that me being
a lone female-presenting person
in a pretty s****y area, really,
I didn’t feel safe.
You could message support and say,
“I feel unsafe in the area.”
They’ll either say, basically, “Just do it.”
And if you’re on slot,
if you cancel and say you don’t want to do it
because it’s a safety issue,
that means you lose your minimum guarantee.
It definitely leaves you sometimes
do jobs that you don’t feel completely safe with.
So it definitely feels like, in a way,
we’re being punished for trying to feel safe.
I think there’s always going to be rude customers.
You’re not going to have a nice experience with them.
I’ve had sexual comments made to me by staff members in KFC
and various restaurants.
A particular member of staff who works there,
when I walk into the restaurant, will very loudly proclaim,
“Oh, it was great last night, wasn’t it, babe?
I'll see you there again tonight.
I can’t wait for a f**k.”
It’s a male-dominated industry,
and women don’t belong there.
I’ve got to a house before, and it’s like,
“Oh, you’re a girl!”
There’s the funny kind of side of it
where it’s just silly offhand comments that you can brush off.
And then there’s the side of it where people get more aggressive
and feel entitled to more than that takeaway.
My worst experience was delivering to a house in quite a remote area.
When I got there,
he asked me to come inside and f**k him,
grabbed me by the arm, pulled me.
And I just elbowed the inside of his arm
and basically pushed him off me,
got into my car, had a huge panic attack,
and managed to drive back home.
That traumatized me quite a lot,
and that stopped me from going to that sort of area for a long time.
When all the restaurants closed in lockdown one,
they were closed completely,
so there was nowhere that we could go to the toilet.
And then, as they started to reopen,
we’d ask to go to the toilet and be told,
“No, you’re not allowed. Staff only.”
And we were like, “Well, we are staff.”
“No, you’re not. You’re an independent contractor.”
There was a woman, a cyclist in London
who averages about 50 to 100 miles on her bike every day,
and she told me during the height of summer last year,
she did not drink water during the day
because she did not want to need to go to the toilet.
She was that scared of having to urinate in public.
Some of the worst stories, I think, were from couriers saying,
“I’ve literally just had to change my tampon in the street,”
or, “I’ve literally just had to go for piss behind a bin
because there’s nowhere; they won’t let us in.”
It’s completely demoralizing, and it makes you feel about this big.
I think people have kind of got an idea
that it’s not a very nice job to work in,
but I don’t think they know the full extent of
how severe this job can be.
How it can drain you financially, drain you emotionally,
drain you of your friends.
It sucks the life out of you.
I’m now back on all of my benefits
due to the fact that I just can’t afford to work for them anymore.
I think these companies think that they can get away with anything
because they’ve got the money behind them to throw at it.
If we take away gig economy workers from the world,
it stops spinning.