Food delivery: very low-paid, zero job security, and, if you do it on a bike, brutal on your body. There’s a reason why most “riders,” as they are called, count their time in the food-delivery sector in months, not years.

The industry chews up and spits out workers at a rapid rate, knowing that many of those who stay don’t intend to stay long: riding is a stopgap, a means to sustain themselves while they look for something better, and the working conditions are bad.

But a small number of riders have dedicated many years of their lives to delivering pizzas and burgers for an algorithmic boss. They’ve found something about the job that keeps them coming back for more.

What motivates them to get back on the bike each day, for years on end? I spoke to three such veterans of Europe’s food-delivery sector – one in London, one in Berlin, and one in Copenhagen – to find out.

“The fear is gone now,” Shaf Hussain says in a slightly haunting tone. “I have had so many accidents and scrapes, it’s just not there anymore.”

In London, Hussain was last injured just a month before we meet. He couldn’t work for four weeks. Yet despite the bruises and some broken bones, he’s back at work on London’s slippery, sometimes icy streets the night we meet.

“I love cycling,” he says. “But the main thing about this job for me is the adrenaline. Weaving through rush-hour traffic on my bike at twenty miles an hour, that’s the biggest adrenaline high you can get. I need that adrenaline high.”

Hussain first started as a courier all the way back in 2016. There are few riders who manage to stay in the job for so long. They are scythed down from their bikes or motorcycles by poverty, injury, demoralization. Or – more positively – they find an opportunity for something better.

For Hussain, the physical toll of eight years carrying up to fifty kilos on his back is the single biggest factor pushing him to the exit door.

“I’m thirty now and I feel like I’m fifty years old,” he says. “I’ve got back issues, neck issues, shoulder issues, legs, palms.… It’s getting to the point where I need to quit, or I’ll be thirty-five years old with chronic back pain.”

Hussain, from a working-class family in London’s East End, took the typical route into food delivery: discontent with low-paying jobs. In his case, working in the upmarket grocery store Waitrose, on a one-month contract and with a line manager who wouldn’t leave him alone. The prospect of a job without a boss to tell you what to do and when to do it made the gig economy sound like an appealing alternative.

In the beginning, it paid reasonably well too. After costs, Hussain could make $620 a week, supplemented with the $500 a week he earned in another contract job doing package delivery, leaving him some money left over for investment.

“I bought Coca-Cola and Microsoft stocks. Not Uber,” he says.

Around 2018, Hussain noticed that the amount he received for each Uber Eats or Deliveroo trip had started to drop. Over the next year, pay rates fell again, and they kept falling year after year. Now, six years on, earnings have collapsed to the point that many riders are working twelve hours a day to survive. Hussain manages to get by only because he lives with his parents and keeps his operating costs as low as possible.

“A lot of the new riders get these big electric bikes that cost about $1,000–$3,000 each year just on maintenance and repairs. I’ve got a cheap bike with tires that run for a year each time, and if it gets stolen it doesn’t cost me much for a new one.”

But that doesn’t mean the falling pay rates don’t anger Hussain. He recalls one delivery in London’s affluent Soho district, a world away from his home in the mostly impoverished East End. He had delivered steaks worth $100, but his earnings from the delivery amounted to just $4.24.

“The gig economy is zero-rights and zero-protection,” Hussain says. “All the riders are in the same boat; it’s us against the companies.”

Increasingly, riders are turning their anger into action. Before entering the food-delivery sector, Hussain didn’t know what a trade union was. Now, he’s chair of the courier and logistics branch of the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain. In February 2024, he helped organize a massive strike on Valentine’s Day. Across London, riders abandoned their vehicles: instead of picking up deliveries from restaurants, they formed picket lines outside them. The companies profiting from Hussain and his colleagues’ hard work sat up and took notice. Uber Eats and Deliveroo doubled or even tripled their regular pay rates, hoping to convince riders to return to work and end the strike.

“I think the strike died out because the riders are not prepared for the long game. They thought we could strike a couple of days, and we’d get what we want, but it’s not like that. That’s why we need a union, because there are people there who are prepared to go the extra mile. But with the strike, you felt that unity,” Hussain says. “You feel that there are people out there who feel what I feel, who are sick and tired of it.”

That stark contrast between the solidarity of the strike and the day-to-day loneliness of delivery work inspired Hussain. In 2016, food delivery was less commonplace in London, and it was easier to get to know other riders. It was also easier to make money, meaning there was more time for chatting and less competitiveness. But all that has changed, he tells me.

“It’s so big now that it’s mainly people from the same background chilling together; you’ll see the Algerians all together, the Indians all together. It’s harder to make friends than it was. Sometimes the job feels quite isolating. I just do my thing and then go home.”

Most couriers in London are migrants. Food delivery has low barriers to entry: you don’t have to pass a job interview or speak English fluently to do the job. You simply sign up and go. That makes delivery easy to get into, but Hussain says the low pay makes it hard to leave.

“If you come to this country as an immigrant, you want to get to a position of stability, but because the pay is so bad you can’t change your situation,” he says. “You are working twelve hours a day, so you don’t have time to try to do anything else. You’re stuck in this game.”

Hussain is looking for his way out of the industry, but it’s not easy for him either.

“When I had my accident, it derailed my plan to leave the sector because I lost a lot of money,” he says. “For the past two years I’ve been saying ‘I might end it,’ but it’s not happened yet.”

In Berlin, “Mo” has been riding for Lieferando since 2018 (the same company as Just Eat in the United Kingdom and Grubhub in the United States). In contrast to Hussain, he thought delivery work would be a welcome break from organizing. Compared with the hyperactivity of student organizing he was used to at university, food delivery promised a change of pace.

“I like to have no boss on my back and to take a break when I want. Plus, I like to be outside, and I enjoy biking. I thought I’d do this for two years, take a bit of a break, and maybe do a bit of tenant organizing at the same time,” he tells me.

That all changed when Covid-19 hit. As Berlin went into lockdown, demand for food delivery exploded and the number of couriers multiplied. So did the problems they faced, especially around health and safety. Delivery companies seemed interested only in the bottom line, so riders started organizing to meet the challenges themselves.

“At first, I didn’t get involved because the meetings clashed with my reading group of Karl Marx’s Capital!” But in the end, Mo tells me, he couldn’t resist getting active.

“It was a very small group at first, about five to twenty people. We just met in the park.”

“I like to have no boss on my back and to take a break when I want. Plus, I like to be outside, and I enjoy biking.”

The Lieferando Workers’ Collective (LWC) was born. At first the group focused on helping workers on an individual, issue-to-issue basis. But most riders would come to the group for help only when they needed it, then go back to work as normal when the problem was solved. Mo felt they weren’t building real power for workers in the company. So LWC developed a new strategy.

Unlike most food-delivery platforms, Lieferando riders are legally employees of the company, not self-employed contractors. In Germany, employees have the right to establish a works council that gives them “codetermination” rights within their company, including a seat on the board and the right to be consulted before significant changes are introduced.

Mo saw the works council as a chance to build real institutional power at Lieferando. When LWC won a majority of seats in the first Lieferando works council election, Mo was one of the riders elected to serve on the new committee. Since then, he’s earned a reputation as a highly dedicated representative of his fellow workers.

“I’m a very pragmatic person,” he says. “I don’t like to think about things that feel very distant to me. What I get frustrated with a lot is that people talk about the revolution at night, but when you ask them to wake up at nine in the morning and really do the revolution, they don’t show up.”

Since then, the works council has won a string of concessions from the company, especially in health and safety. Riders now have the option of carrying deliveries in a basket on their bike rather than porting sometimes heavy containers on their backs – a big reason why chronic back pain is widespread in the industry. Before the works council, the jackets and gloves Lieferando provided were shoddy, the cheapest money could buy, Mo tells me. Now they keep you warm in winter and stop your hands from blistering.

Lieferando riders used to have to complete two one-year fixed term contracts before they had a chance at being made permanent. Now, after the probation period, all riders get permanent contracts – a degree of security in a precarious line of work.

“To achieve those things has been a lot of work; we’ve had to apply a lot of pressure,” Mo says. “But I can definitely say that it’s a better job now than it was when I started at Lieferando. I’m very proud of that.”

The example of the works council in Berlin has inspired delivery workers elsewhere: to date, there are around twenty delivery works councils in cities across Germany. Mo is thinking about what his legacy will be when he finally calls it quits in food delivery.

“I would like it if there would be a second generation who can take over from us at LWC,” he says. “My family gets annoyed and my partner as well because I am not always there for them when I should be. I’m getting old for Lieferando. I always say, ‘These riders are getting younger and younger,’ but it’s just that I am getting older! Whatever I do next, it will be something to do with organizing.”

Rasmus Hjorth learned the hard way about the risks of standing up to the delivery giants. After two years riding around Copenhagen for Wolt, a Finnish platform owned by the US multinational DoorDash, he was abruptly fired. Or in the parlance of the gig economy, his app was “deactivated.”

“Our partnership is not working,” Wolt wrote in a letter to Hjorth. “We run a business and a partnership that you fundamentally disapprove of. You accept our offer of partnership while taking every opportunity to criticize its foundation, its premise.”

Over his two years at Wolt, Hjorth did increasingly disapprove of how the company was run. On paper, individual riders were independent operators, “partners” contracted by the company to deliver food as a construction firm might be contracted to build an office. In practice though, Hjorth had found that there was no real partnership: riders were dependent on Wolt for their livelihood. He decided that Wolt had to accept its role as an employer. The company should be willing to sit down and talk with unions, like Hjorth’s own, 3F, about negotiating a collective agreement with employment contracts for the riders.

Once Hjorth started to get somewhere, building support for a grassroots strike organized by migrant riders in the city, the company decided it was time to cut the cord.

“When I was sacked, it never really occurred to me to stop working as a rider, because I like it,” he says. “The termination was sad, it hurt my confidence for a while, but it was important for me to keep working in the sector. I have done office jobs before, and I didn’t want to do that again.”

Within weeks Hjorth got a job at Just Eat, where he had started his career as a rider in 2020, and where workers do have employment contracts. He dove straight into trade-union organizing again.

“I come from a union family,” Hjorth says. “When I left home, my mum said to me, ‘Clean your clothes, don’t ever ask us for money, and pay your union dues.’ So the idea of being a trade unionist was always there.”

Hjorth has a special talent for building relationships. Over his five years as a rider, he has built strong links with the migrant communities that make up most of Copenhagen’s food-delivery workforce.

“I am a very sociable person, so striking up a conversation with others is not difficult for me,” he says. “We created a WhatsApp group chat that was the start, and now we have the union club where all the riders meet together regularly. That is really important: you can’t do anything without the collaboration of other people. You need to build a community.”

Hjorth’s union club started out with just ten to fifteen people. It now has around 420 – a good chunk of the city’s riders.

“Now I feel like we are really building that solidarity with one another. We have a union slogan: ‘You will never ride alone.’”

Hjorth is currently the 3F shop steward for Just Eat and was involved in negotiating a new collective agreement in 2023. It increased the length of contracts workers get, increased sick pay, and secured a commitment from the company to pay for sunscreen during the summer. But after five years of cycling and organizing, is he not starting to get tired?

“No, I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else, at least not for the moment,” he says. “When I do stop, I can’t see myself in a union job, working in an office. That’s not me. If I wasn’t connected to the workers, I wouldn’t be interested.”

While Hussain, Mo, and Hjorth’s decisions to become riders may have been motivated by a desire to escape the suffocating atmosphere of office jobs or supermarket work, delivery work has become about more than just the job for them. They have each developed a passion for defending their fellow workers – and all have developed skills in organizing workers that they’ll take with them to whatever they do next.

These experiences also show something else: food delivery isn’t necessarily doomed to always be a bad job. Even in the gig economy, it’s possible for workers to band together, connect with one another, and make a change. Even if that change is very small or superficial to begin with, it’s the experience of fighting for your rights alongside others that fosters community and dignity at work. And who knows, if enough Hussains, Mos, and Hjorths leave their mark on the industry, maybe one day work as a rider won’t be a last resort or a temporary gig, and to be a veteran of the food-delivery sector will no longer be something out of the ordinary.