DELIVERY ROBOTS

A pandemic had struck. One of the many firsts it brought was a complete disruption of the visual landscape of the city. The streets once congested with cars, humans and animals became a deserted space. Work from home became the modus operandi. For some.

The streets were dead but not empty. If one looked out the window they were greeted by streams of men clothed in light blue, black or red uniforms, large delivery bags on their backs or resting precariously on the backs of their bikes. They usually congregated around local eateries and grocery stores, zooming across empty roads or taking a moment’s pause on the side of the road. Local delivery service drivers became central figures in the city’s visual landscape. This was, however, indicative of a larger truth. They became a key lifeline for the city as a whole. This continues till date. These apps have become central to the way we function in the city. Yet, how much do we actually understand about the wider ecosystem of delivery apps?

As consumers, our interactions are primarily limited to just the app. I can look through thousands of options, choose the items I want, place the order, pay for it, track my “delivery partner” through a standardised cartoon version of them, follow them from the time they pick up the order to the point they reach my location and finally pick up the order at my doorstep. This is the IP of the app. Ease of access, ease of use. Everything you need at your fingertips. But is this the full picture?

The technology presents itself as a seamless, painless service. However, it also invisibilises the labour that allow for this service. Cumulatively, app-based delivery platforms employ more than 5 lakh delivery partners who drive the service just in Bangalore. The cartoon image one tracks to follow the delivery partner’s location, the thirty-second phone call to the partner and the handover of the package are the only interaction a consumer has with this workforce. This is reified through public representations of the service one sees in advertisements as well. Delivery partners are caricaturised as robotic smiling entities who simply exist for the function of the seamless delivery. This system distances the consumer and worker and dehumanises the worker and their experience. The delivery partner is reduced to their function, nothing more.

When the lockdown was lifted, my colleague and I decided to look behind the curtain. What does it actually mean to work for a delivery service platform? What is the labour that drives this, which is currently completely removed from common discourse around gig economies and app-based technologies? We signed up to ride as delivery partners for Swiggy and Zomato in Bangalore and began to run deliveries. We worked part time doing three-to-four-hour shifts during the day over a period of three weeks. We attempted to film the experience using our phones and a GoPro. Our findings were expected but nonetheless remarkable.

Over a day’s shift we earned a maximum of Rs 300 to 400. In spite of running three to five deliveries and travelling twenty-five plus kilometres, we never met our incentives. Thus the money was minimal for the work we did. Delivery partners working full time on twelve-to-fourteen-hour shifts told us that they earn a maximum of Rs 1000 to 1200 a day. This is without accounting for fuel and other costs of the work. These findings are well known and recorded in a number of other reports on gig-economy workers.

The means of work is gamified as a way to increase performance. Each day you log in, you are met with a series of incentives. If you make x order in y amount of time you will receive a bonus. There are two to three bonuses, increasing in value as the required number of order completed increases. The truth is that the amount of money you can earn off the app is negligible without these bonuses. It doesn’t get that much better including them, but it’s at least a bit more. The bonus thus becomes the carrot at the end of a stick that you must chase; not catching the carrot makes the whole exercise almost worthless. For us, the incentive wasn’t as important. We were not running deliveries as a primary source of income. But for a delivery driver—given the money earned, low margins and lack of opportunities outside of this gig—there is only one way to do this job: to work endlessly towards these bonuses. These are, however, extremely hard to reach. Working four-hour shifts and riding thirty to fifty kilometres daily, we never once reached the first incentive. The only way to earn these bonuses is to work non-stop for twelve-hour shifts. This is how most delivery partners work. By gamifying the income source and not maintaining a fixed income, the companies force delivery partners to play this game. Why play the game? The simple answer we got from numerous partners: “What’s the other option?” Within the current economic situation, opportunities for income are scarce. This at least provides a little bit of money. The model is fundamentally based on the exploitation of a vulnerable labour force. This is what makes delivery service apps a viable business model.

The more intriguing aspect of our findings was the tactile experience we had of actually carrying out the work. The central figure is, again, the app. From the moment we logged on to the moment we logged out the app essentially governed our every movement. The how, where and when of our lives was completely controlled. The app siren rung shrilly and punctuated our day. A new order, arrival at pick-up and drop-off, navigation to the next location, warnings we’d been in one place for too long, reminders to speed up, reminders not to call the customer, order delivered, new order not accepted, etc., etc. Our sense of time was distorted. The time of day was irrelevant. Specific time demarcations by the app were the most important: expected time to pick up and drop off the order and the amount of time the navigation app told us it would take to reach the location. Were we moving fast enough? Should we speed up more to ensure the real time matched the app time? This is how time worked on the job, a constant cycle moving from one order to the next. By the time we finished the previous order, we were notified of the next and had to move again.

The app creates an anxiety by allocating time in this manner and breaking down the day into this repetition of tasks. There isn’t much room to pause or breathe. It’s non-stop. The app allows the delivery partner to reject two or three orders in a day. And, of course, a pre-determined reason has to be selected for rejecting an order. You are accountable to the app. Beyond that, you are warned that repeated cancellations may result in a lower rating or even being kicked off the app. Taking a day off requires you to input a reason or you can expect a call from the company.

The anxiety is made real by these repercussions, the need to constantly provide reasons for your decisions and the fact that you are constantly being monitored. Through the app the company knows where you are at all times. While this may be viewed as a means of ensuring smooth deliveries and accountability to consumers who can track their package, it also enables micromanaging the delivery partner. If you’re not moving, your alarm goes off, questioning the reason for you being stationary. This could be due to a number of valid reasons—a toilet break, an accident, filling petrol, a delayed handover by the restaurant or even just that one needs a minute’s pause. The app does not care for this. Any of these can be read as non-movement for “too long”, as an inefficiency which must be corrected or accounted for. You essentially are a drone.

The road is not kind to the delivery partner. Our experience was short-lived and we couldn’t have truly understood the brunt of it. We were but exposed to the smaller details. The sore back from riding hours on broken roads, the inability to take a minute’s pause, the loneliness of it all and, to an extent, the dehumanisation of the body as someone looked at as doing a lesser kind of work. Most interactions in real life on the job are purely transactional. At least at the restaurant one is offered a glass of water or allowed to use the toilet. Deliveries are a completely different story. You would be lucky to receive a glance or an acknowledgement of your existence, let alone a smile, thank you or a tip. In fact, the only times we actually had any interaction with the customer was when we were late or got lost. This was usually to question the reason for our tardiness or to put the blame on us for getting lost, in spite of the fact that the location was entered wrong. (The extra distance was not accounted for by the app).

This is just the surface. Conversations with riders and numerous reports online indicate there is an even darker side to working as a delivery partner. Late-night deliveries often result in unreported muggings of delivery drivers—their bodies and bikes trashed with little to no assistance from the parent company. Other delivery partners warned us of areas we must avoid at night, where orders are simply bait to steal the bike or even just the food. As independent contractors there is no safety net. Apps may mention insurance schemes or support but the bureaucracy to attain this is almost as painful as the accidents or muggings in the first place.

Working as a delivery service partner is a thankless job, literally and figuratively. You are essentially reduced to a significant but invisibilised cog in the machine, a drone controlled by app-based technologies to ensure the seamless running of a service industry. While app-based delivery platforms are publicly presented as pioneering tech companies, the truth is they are essentially contractors, similar to the ones at construction sites or garbage collection services. The oppressions are the same as one finds in most low-income contract work—the difference is that the human contractor who interacts with the worker is replaced by new technologies.

Nihal works at Maraa, a media and arts collective, as a facilitator, researcher & practitioner.