“For Hong Kong delivery workers, Foodpanda and Deliveroo’s Covid-19 support ‘too late’, ‘too vague’, says concern group”

When Covid-19 brought the airline industry to a standstill in 2020, Waqas Fida left his job at the airport and decided to eke out a living by delivering food.

As his family’s sole breadwinner, the 28-year-old Foodpanda courier spends six days a week delivering food in Tsuen Wan, working from 11am to 10pm with a two-hour break.

Being a rider is tough, especially amid the pandemic. For Fida, who came to Hong Kong from Pakistan in 2018, discrimination is common. Most couriers also battle hazardous work conditions, unstable pay, inadequate insurance coverage and rude clients.

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Working without sick pay, Fida expressed his concern about contracting Covid-19: he fears not only infecting his two children, but also not being able to bring money home.

At the start of the pandemic, he said Foodpanda provided some protection for workers, but it did not last long.

“They gave us a mask and sanitisers, and they took care of us to show it to the people,” he recalled. “But after all [that], it’s nothing. [Now] we have to buy masks by ourselves – everything by ourselves”

In January, Hong Kong recorded its first case of a food delivery worker contracting Covid-19. Foodpanda and Deliveroo, each with about 10,000 couriers in the city, have established funds for infected workers, but riders have complained it is difficult to access the money.

[T]wo founders of Riders’ Rights Concern Group, launched last October, said the aid from both delivery companies “came too late and was too vague which gave riders a false hope”.

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Raja*, a part-time Deliveroo courier who has worked in Sham Shui Po since 2018, struggled to get support from the company after he fell ill. [...]As he could not work, Raja applied for a HK$20,000 fund that he had seen on Deliveroo’s website, and sent them an email with the required proof of his infection.

But at the time of this interview, the rider said he was still in dispute with the company about whether he was eligible for the fund.

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