China’s food deliverers: ‘Online order platforms don’t treat their riders well. They don’t have kind hearts’

It was 7am in one of Beijing’s business districts and Liu Wei was studying his phone as he waited outside a cafe for the first order of the day. As one of more than six million drivers in China for the food delivery platform Meituan, Liu works at least 13 hours a day seven days a week.

An algorithm determines how long each delivery should take from the moment the customer orders it until it arrives at their home. Almost half of the 38 minutes Liu has been given for this order have already passed but he is still waiting for it to come out of the kitchen.

“In general, the time given by the platform is enough as long as you run through red lights or drive the wrong direction down one-way streets. I don’t have any choice. I can’t follow the traffic rules if I want to take more orders,” he says.

“If the restaurant is late, the rider can file this on the platform and they will give us additional minutes for delivery. But if I still can’t deliver the food on time, I will get fined by the platform.”

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His phone pings and Liu goes into the cafe to pick up the order, which he puts in a large, square box on the back of his electric scooter before driving off. He bought the scooter himself and he also had to pay for the yellow and black Meituan uniform and his helmet.

Liu, who is 45, started working as a food delivery driver when he moved to Beijing three years ago from his hometown of Harbin in the far north of China. His wife came with him and she works in a restaurant in Beijing but their 20-year-old son stayed at home.

‘Although I am very tired, I am very fulfilled. I took a total of 50 orders and earned RMB350 (€44.72)’

—  Deliverer Liu Wei

In Harbin, Liu worked for a subcontractor that provided painting and decorating services to a local factory and things were going well until the coronavirus pandemic.

“Life at home was pretty good but I came to Beijing because the economy there was in recession,” he says. “The factory didn’t close down but its financial situation was not good and there was no money to be made.”

With more than a million food deliveries a day in Beijing alone, platforms like Meituan and its rival, Ele.me, have become giants in China. Meituan announced on Friday that its revenues for the last quarter of 2023 were up 22.6 per cent compared to the same period the previous year.

Revenue rose to RMB73.7 billion (€9.42 billion) compared to RMB60.13 billion (€7.8 billion) in the last three months of 2022. And the company reported a quarterly profit of RMB2.2 billion (€280 million) compared to a loss of RMB1.08 billion (€140 million) the previous year.

The results may have cheered Meituan’s shareholders but there is growing concern in China that the profits of such platforms come at the cost of the welfare of drivers like Liu. With 200 million people working in the gig economy in China, the government in Beijing last month told online platforms to take steps to improve their conditions.

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New guidelines issued by the ministry of human resources and social security said platforms should ensure drivers earned at least the local minimum wage and that they should be able to take time off. The ministry acknowledged “pronounced problems” in the industry, including excessively long hours and the lack of access to channels for rights protection.

The guidelines said the platforms should send push notifications to drivers reminding them to take a break and that they should listen to complaints from the workers. But Liu says that insofar as the companies follow such guidelines, it is mainly for form’s sake and has no impact on the drivers’ real working conditions.

At 9.40am every day, for example, Liu and the other 30 or so drivers on his team gather for a short meeting where they grab breakfast and listen to advice about driving safely. But the allotted window for delivering each order is so tight that drivers cannot fulfil them if they keep to the rules.

“I have no other choice. I have to go very fast,” he says.

“There are a lot of accidents, especially on rainy days. We have to ride fast but the road is very slippery and people can easily have accidents, like a car crash or falling off the bike.”

Liu pays for his own accident insurance and he has no cover for sickness so if he cannot work, he does not receive any pay. Neither he nor Meituan has made any social security payments on his behalf since he started driving for the platform, despite the government urging companies to make sure their workers have access to social security.

When we meet during his single, 30-minute break at 3pm, Liu is pleased with how the day is going and he has already delivered 33 orders. He shows me on his phone the real-time performance rankings for his team and he is in fifth place.

‘If I can’t deliver the food on time, I will get fined by the platform’

—  Liu Wei

As a “medium-level senior driver”, Liu earns RMB9 (€1.15) for each order he delivers so that if he works 13 hours a day, seven days a week, he can earn RMB11,000 (€1,405) a month. This compares to between RMB5000 (€639) and RMB8000 (€1022) for lower-level drivers.

“The platform evaluates your performance based on the number of orders you delivered. You have to work more than 12 hours every day to remain a medium-senior lever rider,” he says.

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“I can take time off if I want to rest, but I can’t make money if I take time off. I never take time off because I want to make money.”

If the drivers want to take a rest between orders they usually do so on the side of the road but Liu says there is little time for the drivers to chat. His wife is worried about how the long hours are affecting his health.

“She cares about me and she will tell me ‘take a rest, it’s very tiring’. But I refuse, I’m reluctant to rest because I’m here to make money. When I’m at home I rest, but in Beijing not making money means spending money, and I don’t want that,” he says.

Meituan changed its payment system last year so that Liu now has to make more deliveries to make the same amount of money. The company has a 69 per cent share of the market and Liu is not tempted to move to the rival Ele.me, which he says is just as bad.

“They are the same. These two platforms don’t treat their riders well. They don’t have kind hearts. Nobody monitors them or controls them. As drivers, we can do nothing about this at all,” he says.

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He plans to continue working as a driver for one more year and then to go back to Harbin where he hopes to be able to make just enough to pay his bills. In the meantime, he cherishes days like this when he works from 7am until 10pm.

“Although I am very tired, I am very fulfilled. I took a total of 50 orders and earned RMB350 (€44.72). Although it’s not a lot, it’s the result of hard work and I am very happy. Whenever I deliver food to customers, I am very satisfied when they say thank you,” he says after he finishes work.

“There are times when the restaurants don’t produce the food in time and I’m worried that the delivery time will be delayed. There are also incidents where customers leave the wrong delivery address and the delivery time is delayed. But this is the daily life of delivery workers. Although my job is very ordinary, I try to do my ordinary work as well as I can.”

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