A-Infos (en) Italy, FDCA Cantiere #29: Workers' Inquiry: Taking a Break: How Gig Workers Rest - Lam Le and Zuha Siddiqui (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr) [machine translation]

"Wherever people see someone wearing this gray and pink t-shirt, that 
person is treated like garbage." ---- The incessant development of 
technologies in production systems and the further new frontier of 
Artificial Intelligence, incorporating more and more living labor into 
dead labor, determine that phenomenon, described in economic literature 
as    “polarization of labor”. ---- Polarization that consists in the 
significant reduction of jobs for those middle-level figures that 
involve routine and therefore automatable work, a reduced increase in 
the most qualified and best paid jobs, compared to a development and    
increase in the number of people employed in less qualified jobs.
This is the case    of the so-called “gig economy” sector, which now has 
about half a billion workers in the world and which increasingly 
represents one of the few income possibilities for the new generations.
This investigation, carried out in the major metropolises and cities of 
Asia, Latin America and Africa, bears witness to the reality of this 
young proletariat, net and outside the narratives of a presumed 
“cognitive capitalism, for which the fundamental unit of measurement is 
still the interminable length of working hours and days, over 15, 16 
continuous hours, in addition to the inhumane conditions of real 
exploitation inherent in elementary regulations, such as breaks, rest 
periods and lunches that are totally non-existent.
---------------
Rest of World    asked over 100 gig workers in 10 cities how they take a 
break between one activity and another[1].
Sophia Ibrahim Gedo, a ride-hailing driver based in Nairobi, had a 
customer in the back seat when she felt the need to use the bathroom. 
Usually, Gedo would find the nearest gas station, shopping mall, or 
restaurant, and if she was lucky, they would let her use their 
facilities. But when she stopped at a gas station, the bathroom was 
locked. Her customer was getting impatient, so Gedo got back in the car 
and kept driving.
“That was my longest trip. “When I was dropping off this customer, I was 
sweating,” Gedo, who is in his 40s, told Rest of World. “I almost peed 
my pants.”
Whether they’re ferrying passengers or delivering food orders, gig 
economy workers often work 10- to 12-hour days to make ends meet. As 
they traverse their cities, these workers scramble to find facilities to 
meet their basic needs: toilets, clean places to eat, and safe places to 
rest. Through trial and error, many gig economy workers have created 
their own invisible maps of cities, identifying places where they can 
stop for a break.
Rest of World spoke to 104 drivers, couriers, delivery people, and 
cleaners who find work through apps in 10 cities: Dhaka, Hanoi, Hong 
Kong, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Karachi, Lagos, Mexico City, Nairobi, and 
São Paulo. to better understand how often they take breaks and where 
they go to use the bathroom and eat.
Our survey respondents painted a worrying picture: A third of workers 
said they either don’t take any breaks or just relax a bit between 
calls. More than half said they were denied access to public places like 
malls and restaurants; some said they were frequently chased away by 
police, landlords, security personnel and shopkeepers who perceived them 
as loitering. Meanwhile, platforms like Grab, inDrive and iFood are 
trying to build facilities like pit stops and lounges, but few workers 
have access to them.
“Most drivers prefer no rest, take very short breaks and sleep very 
little,” Tobias Kuttler, a research associate at Fairwork, a work 
project of the Oxford Internet Institute and the WZB Berlin Social 
Science Center, told Rest of the World. “[I] saw drivers with average 
shifts of 17 hours. Those drivers were visibly sleep-deprived and in 
poor health, and were taking medication to combat pain.”
There are nearly 435 million gig workers worldwide, and our survey 
showed that for most, rest is a luxury. Only 18 of those surveyed said 
they have flexibility and choice over the number of breaks they take, 
while 35 said they couldn’t afford more breaks even if they wanted to.
“[The] platform economy encourages riders to make as many calls as 
possible, to maximize their earnings, to cover their expenses, to avoid 
being penalized by the platform,” Mark Graham, director of Fairwork, 
told Rest of World.
Wallace Miguel, a delivery driver for iFood and Lalamove in São Paulo, 
can only relax in the few minutes he spends waiting at the restaurant 
for an order that isn’t ready yet. “The restaurant usually has benches 
and water, and I use them,” the 22-year-old said. Basil Faraz, a 
25-year-old Foodpanda driver in Karachi, told us he can only rest 
between orders. He spends that time sitting on a cluster of rocks and 
bricks under a canopy of trees in the city’s upscale Defense Housing 
Authority neighborhood, where many other delivery workers also rest. 
Even then, Faraz is constantly staring at his phone, refreshing his food 
delivery app, and waiting for his next delivery request. “Obviously I 
can’t go into an air-conditioned mall [to rest],” he said, chuckling. 
“They would look at me and tell me to go away.”

In countries like Kenya, laws prohibit ride-hailing drivers from working 
more than eight hours in a 24-hour period. So drivers often switch 
between apps, sometimes working up to 19 hours a day, Justin Nyaga, 
president of the Kenya Online Drivers Organization, told us.

Tran Van Tu, who works for the ride-hailing and food delivery platform 
Be in Hanoi, believes his algorithm incentivizes him to work harder. 
“The more I work, the more calls I get,” the 33-year-old told Rest of 
World. He said he works between 13 and 16 hours every day.

Workers who acknowledged the toll the long hours had on their bodies 
said they couldn’t do anything about it. “Working 14 hours is very 
dangerous for both me and the customer,” Julius King’ori, a 45-year-old 
ride-hailing driver for Uber and Bolt in Nairobi, told Rest of World. 
“I’m a human being, I need more breaks. But we can’t afford to take more 
breaks because of the amount of money we make from our rides.”
“Everywhere people see someone wearing this gray and pink shirt, that 
person is treated like dirt.”
To maximize their time on the road, several Nairobi ride-hailing workers 
choose not to go home in the evenings. Instead, they sleep in cars 
parked at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport because locals have 
bathrooms they can use to shower, Emmanuel Ochieng, who works for the 
ride-hailing company Little Cab, told Rest of World.
“You’ll find [the workers] queuing up to shower because they couldn’t go 
to their homes. There is also a lady who comes to the parking lot to 
sell food,”
Ochieng said. “Even when the app reserves time for rest, it will not be 
useful for a driver. The best thing the apps could do is adjust their 
wages so that they can rest comfortably.” Of the 104 gig workers 
interviewed, 36 said they sleep an average of six hours or less every day.
Even when gig workers do find time to relax, they have to be wary of 
harassment and robbery. Nearly half of the respondents (49) said they 
had been harassed or assaulted while resting in places such as malls, 
restaurants, parking lots and residential areas. While a dozen 
respondents said they had been chased away by security guards, 15 said 
they had been robbed while resting. “Restaurant guards chase me away if 
I sit outside while waiting for an order to be prepared and packed,” 
Muhammad Kamran, a 43-year-old Foodpanda worker in Karachi, told us.
According to Tariq Noor, another Foodpanda rider from Karachi, gig 
economy workers’ uniforms are taboo. “Wherever people see someone 
wearing this gray and pink shirt, they are treated like dirt,” the 
39-year-old told Rest of World. “If I go to a store and I’m not wearing 
this shirt, I’m treated better and I’m not told to wait outside.”
The survey found that female workers are particularly vulnerable to the 
challenges that come with being mobile all day. Of the 18 women 
interviewed who spoke to us, six said they had experienced some form of 
harassment at work. Phuong Mui May, a 26-year-old delivery woman for 
ShopeeFood in Hanoi, said she was harassed on the street by a passerby 
while waiting to pick up an order. She now takes breaks in an alley with 
other delivery men to feel safe.
“It’s clear that women are doubly at risk,” Savita Bailur, senior 
director at Caribou Digital, a consultancy that researches digital 
platforms, told Rest of World. “One, because there are typically fewer 
women in [gig] work, and two, because they don’t always have the 
infrastructure support that men have.”
Women workers said they have to plan a lot for a simple bathroom break; 
safe, hygienic facilities aren’t easy to find. “In Mexico and Uganda, a 
lack of bathrooms and bathroom breaks has been linked to higher rates of 
UTIs [urinary tract infections] for female workers, which ultimately 
prevents them from working for platforms in the long term,” said Graham 
of Fairwork.
Bridgette Muthoni Munene, a 39-year-old ride-hailing driver from 
Nairobi, stresses every time she drinks water during the day. “[The 
toilet] is a big challenge for women working in this industry,” she said.
Angela Chukunzira, a labor activist and researcher at Ukombozi Library 
in Kenya, told us that several Uber drivers have told her stories of 
struggling to find a place to change sanitary pads during work hours. 
“In some malls you have to pay to use the toilets, so it becomes a 
hassle and an additional cost for them,” Chukunzira said. “[The 
platforms] are not built for workers. It’s all about profitability… If 
they don’t give them basic resources, like a car that you need to do the 
work yourself or even a mobile phone, I think a toilet is a bit excessive.”

In some cities, workers have organized and created spaces where they can 
safely use toilets, relax, and socialize. For example, in Jakarta, 
workers have set up dozens of community-run base camps — makeshift 
structures made of wood panels or tents — where they hold meetings, 
chat, and eat food while waiting for orders.

In Vietnamese cities, several restaurants have partnered with apps to 
provide a separate area for ride-hailing drivers to sit and wait, Nguyen 
Thi Minh Chau, a researcher at the Southern Institute of Social Sciences 
in Ho Chi Minh City, told us. Last year, 100 restaurants and cafes in Ho 
Chi Minh City put up “free toilets” signs after the local government 
struggled to build new public restrooms due to a lack of land. In some 
places, ride-hailing platforms have been expanded to create dedicated 
restrooms for workers. These rest areas, often called pit stops or 
lounges, typically provide restrooms, drinking water, and space to sit 
and charge devices. Some offer additional amenities like microwaves to 
heat up food. InDrive’s lounge for its drivers in Jakarta is part of the 
company’s mission to address “injustice in the ride-hailing industry,” a 
spokesperson told Rest of World. The lounge also serves as a venue for 
events and training sessions for its workers, including one recently 
completed on first aid. Super-app Grab, meanwhile, operates three 
“GrabBike Lounges” in Jakarta, which offer not only essential services 
but also Wi-Fi, a prayer room, a motorcycle workshop, a barber shop and 
even a “helmet spa” [a machine that sanitizes helmets]. Grab’s app has a 
“fatigue reminder” safety feature, reminding drivers to take a break 
“when they’ve been driving for long hours,” Radhi Juniantino, Grab’s 
director of trust and safety in Indonesia, told Rest of World. “These 
reminders are based on the app reading of the driver’s online and 
offline hours, which provides an indicator of fatigue levels.” In Sao 
Paulo, food delivery platform iFood offers more than 170 “support 
points,” two of which are fully operated by iFood, and the rest in 
partnership with local authorities, private companies and restaurants, 
the company said in an email. But most of the support points — operated 
in partnership with restaurants — only offer water, access to restrooms 
and space to wait for an order to be ready. They don’t provide restrooms 
or access to amenities like microwaves and charging points. A number of 
platforms — Uber, Gojek, Bolt, SweepSouth, Chowdeck, Jumia, Mano, Be, 
Pathao, Rappi, Careem and Deliveroo — declined to respond or didn’t 
respond to questions about their efforts to support gig workers in terms 
of rest.
Many platforms resist setting up rest centers because they require 
financial investment to maintain them, and also because they are not 
responsible for this lack of infrastructure, Ainan Tajrian, a research 
associate at Fairwork in Bangladesh, told Rest of World. “Recognizing 
workers as independent contractors also shifts this burden away from the 
platform,” he said. There was a time when Foodpanda worker Faraz could 
beat Karachi’s notorious summer heatwave under a shed the company had 
installed outside one of its stores. But local authorities removed the 
shed this year, Faraz said. The Karachi city government told us it was 
removed because Foodpanda did not have a building permit for the site. 
Foodpanda has rest areas called “rider hubs” in Pakistan, Cambodia and 
Singapore, a Foodpanda spokesperson told Rest of World. “We care about 
[our delivery workers’] well-being and… actively encourage our delivery 
partners to take short breaks throughout the day to help them recharge.” 
Some companies have also taken extreme weather into account while also 
catering to gig workers. Food delivery startup Glovo, for example, has 
set up drinking water stations in countries like Morocco and Ivory Coast 
during the summer, and hot tea stations in places like Ukraine and 
Kazakhstan during the winter, a company spokesperson told Rest of the 
World. Glovo, which has a large presence in Africa, has set up “courier 
hubs” in several African metropolitan cities that serve as designated 
rest stops for its workers. The Glovo app, the spokesperson said, also 
has a policy that limits work to eight hours a day, which is “critical 
to ensuring our couriers have the downtime they need to maintain a 
healthy work-life balance, while safeguarding their safety and overall 
well-being.” But five Glovo riders in Lagos said they all worked more 
than nine hours to earn a decent living, given their low wages.
One Glovo rider, Philip Saheed, a 20-year-old who supports a family of 
six, tries to take a break at the six-hour mark during his nine-hour 
shift. But too often he needs to keep working. “When there are 
back-to-back orders, I stop to buy snacks on the way to deliver and use 
the short waiting time to eat.”
Sahedon doesn’t want more breaks, though. “I want more work so I can 
make money,” he said.

Notes:

[1] This article was originally published in English at 
https://restofworld.org/2024/gig-worker-rest-breaks/ Lam Le is a Labor x 
Tech journalist at Rest of World based in Hanoi, Vietnam. Zuha Siddiqui 
is a Labor x Tech journalist at Rest of World based in Karachi, Pakistan.

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