‘We can’t let this happen’: Uber Eats driver
Couriers say new pay system dropped wages
TORONTO — $3.99
It’s enough to buy a loaf of bread or two litres of milk, but far from Ontario’s $14.25 minimum hourly wage.
And yet Uber Eats couriers working in the province say they’re earning as little as $3.99 per trip before tips, months after the food delivery service implemented a new pay policy in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’m making so little now that I’m thinking what is the point of even getting out there if I’m just going to make this much and it’s getting worse?” said Spencer Thompson, a Toronto man who has been dropping off meals for Uber Eats since 2016.
He spent hours tabulating his 2020 pay and discovered what so many of his fellow couriers have long suspected: their wages are shrinking at a time when people are relying on food delivery more than ever before.
Thompson, for example, made about $10 per trip — sometimes involving multiple stops — in January 2020, but by December, that had sank to as low as $3.99 per trip before tips.
The 60 per cent drop came in a year where Thompson worked in Toronto’s downtown core nearly every day of the week during the lunch and dinnertime windows, where pay tends to be higher. He averaged two or three trips an hour.
Couriers like Thompson, who are not formally employed by Uber but use its platform to pick up work, worry the situation could worsen and they’ll be left with few other job alternatives as COVID-19 continues to spread, unemployment remains high and companies increasingly see the benefits of the gig economy.
“We can’t let this go on and we can’t let this happen because if we do, then the future will be all work like this,” said Brice Sopher, an Uber Eats courier and organizer with the Gig Workers United union, who recalls making $9 or $10 per trip at the start of 2020, but now averages half that.
While couriers like Sopher and Thompson have long warned of the gig economy’s low pay, no job security and lack of health coverage, their concerns became even more alarming after last June.
That was when Uber scrapped its earnings structure offering couriers fixed amounts based on pickups, drop-offs, distance and time and a series of bonuses for using the service during busy periods or in high-demand neighbourhoods. By taking advantages of bonuses and more rewarding orders, Thompson would land as much as $12.15 per trip before tips at the start of 2020.
Under the new system, some workers were even making a little more than before, but slowly the bonuses decreased, he recalled.
“They did it little by little, so that you wouldn’t notice,” he alleged. ‘But you would have this sneaking suspicion.”
The changes made tips more important than ever before, but customers are notoriously unreliable when it comes to tipping couriers, said Thompson. Some will be generous, while others avoid the extra handout altogether.
Uber, whose Eats service was first piloted in Toronto in 2015, said in an email to The Canadian Press that it made changes to its wage structure, including reducing base fares, to better reflect each trip’s total time, effort and distance and include travel to the restaurant.
A $3.99 trip, the company said, is extremely short in duration and one priced at that amount with two stops is quite rare but can happen.
“Uber Eats is committed to transparency in pricing: before a delivery person accepts a trip, they are able to see the expected earnings for each trip. And, as always, 100 per cent of tips go directly into their accounts,” the company said in an email.