Food delivery apps have grown exponentially. As researchers show, this growth depends on the cheap labour of young and immigrant workers

Food delivery couriers and their e-bikes are fixtures in many neighbourhoods. From midday on, they gather on streets dense with restaurants. All this waiting time is unpaid. And even when orders do come in, couriers often spend more uncompensated time waiting for them, says Émile Baril , a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Research on Migration and Society at Concordia University in Montreal. Article content

“The unpaid waiting time is huge for bringing down minimum wage for precarious workers. They’re logged on to the app, but they’re not technically working, so they’re just unpaid, waiting for orders.” Article content

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