Food Warriors: App-Based Delivery on Electric Micromobilities

Electric micromobilities (EMMs), including electric bikes, standup kick-style electric scooters, and electric unicycles are highly efficient and low impact modes for urban food delivery. However, the mobility they and their associated algorithmic platforms afford is implicated in a set of work practices and relations that reinforce precarious employment outcomes. Our interviews, observational and autoethnographic research in Vancouver, Canada, revealed that food delivery platforms promise flexibility and high earnings while motivating workers to toil for variable and low wages and engage in high-risk behaviour. We focused on food delivery workers using EMMs because barriers to accessing an EMM are lower than for a car, while affording greater mobility on congested city streets, incurring no parking fees, and delivering zero emission operation. However, ostensibly low financial barriers to entry mask the requirement for considerable knowledge of, and navigational skills within, the physical and virtual environments that workers must master to resist the control exercised by platforms (apps) in an intensely competitive playing field. App-based food delivery using EMMs implicates workers in a game that requires upfront investment, skill and the navigation of risk. It is a stacked game, in which mostly the house wins.