1. David vs Goliath

The news comes sooner than anticipated. A groundbreaking decision from Ontario's Labor Board could have far reaching implications for people working in the so-called 'dig economy'. I dashed to the Toronto Star newsroom where I work as its Labor reporter to make some calls. My first call is to Ivan Ostos. Ivan is a career with several food delivery app companies that operate here in Toronto, including Fudora. Fudora's bike careers stand out with their bright pink jackets and pink insulated bags. They're also the group that launched a historic fight to become the first app-based workforce in Canada to join a union. Ivan has led the charge in this David versus Goliath battle, a battle that could transform the gig economy. This is a big deal because we knew we had to win this to basically move forward with everything out. It's February 2020. After months of hearings, the Ontario Labor Relations Board has ruled that Fudora careers do have the right to unionize. So this is going to be used as a pressure for every other case in Ontario and for that matter it could be used elsewhere in Canada, so it's a big deal. It's the first decision of its kind and it's the first step towards what careers hope will be more protections on the job. Well, I think it's a clear message that we're not entrepreneurs or any such thing. We're very much workers working for an algorithm. For careers, everything was moving in the right direction until it wasn't. We begin tonight with new warnings about the coronavirus known as COVID-19. The people delivering our food went from invisible to essential. Their working conditions became a public health issue. It has begun to spread rapidly outside the epicenter of China and countries are bracing for the medical and economic impact. It seemed like suddenly we were paying attention to a job many had taken for granted. We were relying on food delivery more than ever and then so a surprising development in the food delivery industry. Rick, do you tell us about that? It's Fudora, one of the more popular food and alcohol delivery apps that out of the blue this afternoon said, hey, we're pulling out of Canada. Raising questions about what protections workers have when their boss is an app. I'm Sarah Morsh to head Zadeh. This is Hustle. Over the past five years, I've reported on the toxic legacy of aging factories looked into abuse faced by migrant workers and gone undercover as a temp in an industrial bakery. In this podcast, I'm following a scrappy group of Toronto food careers as they take on a multinational company. This is a story about ambitious underdogs who took on a powerful business model. A story about a global crisis that revealed gig workers value and their vulnerability. A story about an app company's sudden unraveling. And what that tells us about how the gig economy really operates. I just got this like three months ago. Yeah, it's electric so. Ahmed Jarbou has been working as a bike career for five years. The brand is Vault Bike. It's nice. It's amazing. But I enjoy regular bike more actually. But for making more money and more efficiency, this one is better. Ahmed moved to Lebanon from Syria because of the war and had to leave his careers and engineer behind. His first career job was in Beirut. When he was able to join his family in Toronto as a refugee, his bike became his livelihood again. You can go 32 kilometers per hour. This is the maximum. And it's not allowed to go more regular bike. You can, if you were very strong, you can go like the average 22, 24. Ahmed works through several apps, including Fedora, which was one of the first food delivery apps in the city. Fedora is owned by Delivery Hero, a Berlin-based company that operates around the world. Delivery Hero made two billion dollars in revenue last year. There's two tables. So there's two chairs. Ahmed suggests we meet in a cafe that doubles as a bike repair shop. He's between shifts for Fedora dressed in a fluorescent yellow windbreaker. Ahmed insists on holding the door and buying me a cup of tea. The pandemic hasn't hit yet, so we can sit together inside. And then when you arrived in Canada, what happened when you started looking for work? I didn't work in my field for a long time, which is like around three years. So I also knew that it wasn't easy to work as an engineer here. What's your favorite part of the job? The best thing is a freedom. For me being outside like very important. When I stay indoors for one or two days, I feel very bad at the end of the day. So being outside every day, this is amazing. The first rating marks that you are not able to have the rights which you should have. And that sometimes it's slow, so sometimes for in one hour, you get an order or you don't get an order. So it's not a stable job. There's something I've noticed during my time as the reporter at the Toronto Star. Whenever I write an article about the gig economy, I invariably get emails from readers. And at least one of those emails says something like these youngsters should just get a real job. According to a recent survey, more than half of respondents in the Toronto and Hamilton area consider their employment precarious. And those surveys say they are more than twice as likely to have mental health problems. Five times more likely to delay starting a relationship and three times more likely to hold off having children. Jobs have become more insecure for many of us. Most recent statistics suggest about 8% or 1.7 million Canadians are employed in the gig economy. For AFMA, this isn't a side hustle. This is his full-time job and has been for years. But when you don't have a choice, like it's the only job that you have or if you are doing it because you prefer doing it for many other reasons than other jobs. Because you, for example, you like biking and you don't want to work as a cashier or in another survival job indoors. So you don't have choices. So what exactly is the gig economy? I think in popular understanding the gig economy has come to refer to people who are working through these various digital on-demand platforms like Uber drivers and Fudora delivery riders. Jim Stanford is a Canadian economist who works with the center for future work. But the origins of the term gig actually are much longer standing than that. Long before smartphones were invented, musicians did gigs, right? Construction workers did gigs. Lots of different technical workers did gigs, which means you're performing a particular task for a particular employer for a particular period of time and getting paid for that work rather than being on a permanent salary or hourly wage. The gig economy has largely come to refer to jobs in the digital world where apps on your smartphone connect you to workers. In a few short years, platforms like Uber Eats and Lyft have become embedded in our daily lives. But most of the people doing this work across North America, they're not classified as employees. That means they're not entitled to minimum wage. They can't earn overtime or join a union. In fact, they have no protection under employment laws at all. Now in the last generation, we've kind of undone many of those protections. And I think that that changing social and political context is crucial for understanding the resurgence of precarious work in general and the digitized gig jobs in particular. Most gig workers in Canada are hired as independent contractors. The law pretty much everywhere says independent contractors are essentially entrepreneurs. They choose their working conditions and don't really report to anyone. They're exactly what the title suggests. Independent. Companies like Fudora and Uber maintain their merely the conduit, connecting consumers who need a service with independent contractors who can provide it. So that basic idea that employers would try to hire people without making any guarantees about continuing employment or continuing income. That idea is as old as capitalism, there's really nothing innovative about it. All that's new is there's a new greed of employers, a new greed of entrepreneurs who've used digital technology. Like most gig workers, this is the massive legal hurdle that Fudora careers need to overcome on the road to unionization, challenging their classification as independent contractors. Where do you guys usually gather in the park? We're kind of just getting closer. It's a place. I'm walking through Trinity Bellwood's park with Fudora career Chris Williams. Oh, past it, I mean, wherever there's a convenient picnic table. Right. It's an expansive tree-studded space in Toronto's West End, and before COVID it was a popular gathering place for careers. Closer to the dog pit over there. It's where Chris was first introduced to the idea of unionizing. I started to know a few people, and I wasn't in a community I don't think, but I guess it was only a matter of time before I got invited to a career party. What happens at career parties? People drink and talk about work. With pay-per-delivered companies, you kind of do run into co-workers at the office in the morning and at the end of your shift, that's not true for food delivery, so you kind of have to go out of your way to meet your co-workers. So I went to the party, and I just realized that there's a lot of people like me who did this job. More people talking about forming a union at that point, or were there sort of whispers of it? Definitely a whispers, which I caught on to pretty quickly, and that was all I needed because I was basically itching to do something useful. At that time, what were the sort of things that you thought, you know what, we needed union to address these issues? The broader issues are around health and safety, wages and dignity, and all of those kind of stem from this other issue, which is Fedora's misclassification of their careers, calling them independent contractors instead of employees or dependent contractors. And that misclassification allowed them to avoid taking any responsibility for careers. We talked about the kind of the goals of forming a union, and one of them was dignity. Why is that so important? It's the hardest issue to define, but in some ways it's the most important careers have value, and I think it's the most important because that's personally, by the way, I think it's the most important, because I think it's the one that justifies everything else. That's why wages are so important, and many ways for me is because it's hard to live a dignified existence if your wages are too low or uncertain. If you don't know whether you'll make your daily quota today or not. And obviously health and safety connects to dignity because it's hard to be mal. When you're worrying constantly about your health, you know. That takes a toll. It takes an effect. A study done in 2019 for Harvard Law School found that classifying workers as independent contractors can reduce business costs by as much as 30%. So it's cheaper for companies to use workers who aren't employees. Fudora Canada declined all our interview requests for this podcast. But in a statement, the company said the independent contractor model gives workers "flexibility," allowing them to dictate when they work and for how long to accept or decline orders and to choose when to take time off. This pretty much sums up the position of most app companies. In exchange for freedom and flexibility on the job, gig workers give up the rights they would have as employees. "Anyways, come on in. Did you want some coffee or anything?" Dean Aladdin has been confronting gig work since before smartphones even existed. I work for an organization called the Workers Action Center. So we are a nonprofit organization that works with workers in precarious jobs. Historically, we haven't really called it the gig economy because for lots of immigrant workers, they've been doing this work for a long time. Many of these workers have been told for decades that they're independent contractors. But you're not allowed to classify workers this way if they meet the legal definition of an employee. Can you just quickly list some jobs where a misclassification is common? Absolutely. Sales, trucking, driving, career work, I would say, healthcare. We started to see some restaurants start to call their servers independent contractors. After the minimum wage went up, just trying to think of others. Oh my god, yes, construction is massive, massive, massive. Oh my goodness, we've also had cases of bakeries as well. Yeah, it can go on and on and on, dish washing, a lot of airport work. To dinner. All that's changed is the technology. Those characteristics of the cleaning sector of the truck driving delivery sector are in some ways, I think, very much the same for now what's called these gig workers. Again, told that they're independent contractors, told that they're free to work for whoever they want, but while they're working for them, their conditions are completely controlled by the company again, however the way they get their instructions is through an app. And it's that, the app itself that seems to have focused people's attention. In some ways, I think the app makes it more kind of visible, whereas for some of the workers that we work with, they've been in these kind of gig-like employment relationships for many years, a lot of those workers are people who work during the night as cleaners and they are not seen. And I think that because they can't speak English or because they are people of color, I think that there has been less attention and less care given to them 30 years of transformation and lack of attention by our ministries of labor to actually enforce the rights that we have as workers has failed and so, and the same thing with trucking and driving and career work, which I think has been this steady decline too, the fact that now you have food delivery workers, right? It's a continuum. It's something Jim Stanford sees too. I think it's really important to look back at the history if you like the fall and then rise again, very precarious or insecure forms of employment. In the post-war era, we've come to think of manufacturing work as a relatively good kind of job associated with kind of middle-class incomes and a certain amount of stability and benefits and decent wages. But there's nothing inherent in manufacturing that makes that work middle-class. It only became middle-class because we made it so. That's the type of change careers like Chris are striving for. But the fight was about more than challenging a job classification. It was also about changing stereotypes. In the 1986 movie Quicksilver, Kevin Bacon plays a stockbroker who loses it all on the trading floor. So he reinvents himself as a bite career and takes to speeding through the streets of San Francisco, wearing a jaunty red beret. Kevin Bacon's character immerses himself in a new, free-spirited crew. He wins a variety of dangerous-looking street races, and of course, he gets the girl. Heroic seems really glamorous, but at the end of the day, it's just another job. Chris doesn't wear a red beret or embody the brash spirit of a Hollywood bike messenger. He's an English literature grad who wears glasses and a wool sweater and pauses thoughtfully before speaking. There's been a lot of young careers who have sort of realized that their futures are no longer. There's nothing certain about our futures in this job. And along with that, it comes with a lot of commitment to just seeking something better. He says the image of a daring young Kevin Bacon, careening around on his bike, doesn't fit reality. It's a huge, diverse fleet. For one thing, most careers aren't unemployed stockbrokers. And many of them aren't even cyclists zooming around the downtown core. They're also drivers who work in sprawling suburban areas. Is there a difference in kind of demographic or culture between bike careers and drivers? Oh, yeah, we're 100%. The demographics skew differently, for sure. Like, cyclists tend to be younger, for example. Would you say that drivers are more likely to be supporting a family or? That's the sense I get, yep. middle-aged, raising a family. A lot of newcomers, you know, too. Precarity isn't just a problem for white college students. It's a problem for middle-aged parents. It's a problem for international students. It's a problem for everybody. I've spoken with dozens of gig workers over the past year. Almost everyone tells me the same thing. Isolation is one of the hardest parts of the job. Aloneliness just kind of impoverishes your life probably, just generally speaking. But it also makes like, it means that you're probably unsupported. So if you get in an accident, you know, it's actually quite, it's quite a safety hazard because no one's going to come to you at the hospital. And especially if your boss isn't helping you out, you need to rely even more on your co-workers. So when you don't know your co-workers, your vulnerable do a lot more risk. Chris felt early on that forming a union was key to overcoming that loneliness. But the nature of the job made it hard to gather support. Couriers work alone and the app provides no way to communicate with each other. It became obvious that it was necessary to like, not just rely on people being attracted to the meeting, but actually go out and meet people directly to talk about this subject. And when you started doing that, that sort of like proactive bit, what was people's reaction overall? Like, were people receptive to the idea of joining a union? Yeah, I'm mostly receptive. Some hesitation, of course. But even the people who were hesitant quickly got on board. There's also just this basic recognition that Fedora does not have our best interest at heart. And we could all get screwed tomorrow. And we'd have no recourse whether we're in a road accident or whether they decided to kind of arbitrarily change our wages or lower our wages basically. We have no means of defending it ourselves. In late 2018, Fedora couriers approached the Canadian Union of Postal Workers. They had been amongst themselves as couriers talking about their working conditions and wanting to organize and just not really knowing yet what their options were. Lisa's Go Field is an organizer with the union. People were describing the day-to-day experience of really putting themselves at risk on the road, working under all conditions, working in the snow. We were meeting in December. It was pretty crappy weather at the moment. And they were all just coming from work. We were meeting in between a shift. They're all covered in salt and sleet. They looked reg it. And when they described, you know, how fast they work just to try and make enough money to try and survive in Toronto, I thought this is the direction our union needs to take. Some were skeptical even within the labor movement. They told Lisa that trying to unionize such a disconnected group of workers was crazy. But that's not what she found when she hit the streets. I have never had a more positive experience of approaching workers, you know, right off the bat, like cold on the street being like, "Hey, do you work for Fedora? Can I talk to you about your work? Have you ever heard of the union? Are you interested?" And I'm kidding you not. Like 99% of the time, those conversations went the direction of before I even said union, they would say, "You know what we need? A union." And I've never seen that before. I've never had that before. There was just like an atmosphere in the air of people wanting change and needing to see it in their lives. Speaking with careers like Chris and Ahmed, you can see why. Both have years of experience. Ahmed estimates that on average, he can make $18 to $20 an hour working with Fedora on his bike. A step up from earning minimum wage in a restaurant or retail job. But that's only when times are good. In January, I was sick for five days, which happens, like having cold or in this bad weather. And I'm not able to work in these days and I'm not able to take sick days. And I am losing this time, like five days. So I should work in the other 25 days, like too much. Because here you can't like change your expenses, you know. Life in Toronto is very expensive. Yeah, it must be stressful. It's too much stressful. Now, for example, I should work double to cover the money which I lost in just because I was sick for one week. And when orders on the app are slow, Ahmed has almost no income. We are now just like a tool or a machine used by them to do their job. We are not employees at all. Not valued. Yeah, exactly. Low earnings are common in the gig economy. A recent statistics Canada study found that the median income for a gig worker is $4,300 a year. The study found that while around half of gig workers had other jobs, the other half relied solely on this income. Fudora says as independent contractors, its careers are free to work for any of its competitors. That's what Ahmed does. But he says juggling multiple gigs is more of a necessity than a choice. If you want to depend on Fudora, for example, and you can't find like more than 20 hours in the week working with Fudora, then you need something else. Many people will work just on Fudora. They have like 30 hours minimum every week, for example, and they are getting minimum $20 per hour. For example, if we are sure that I am making the amount of money which covers my expenses and my rent and my life, so why the headache of doing many, with many companies? App-based companies present flexibility as a virtue. Most careers I spoke with did value being able to have some control over their hours. But Chris Williams thinks it doesn't need to be a trade-off. I know that the company frames it like a kind of while you either get traditional employment rights or you have flexibility, which do you really want? Do you want health benefits or do you want to be able to work whenever you like? And I just think that that's unfair or it's just wrong to say that it's one or the other. I think that we can protect the flexibility of this job well, getting, making the job safer. Most people are aware that without a union we're basically just hoping that Fudora treats us well. I'm just hoping that the industry stays healthy, but we need more than hope. We also need certainty. What was the messaging when they kind of first learned that you were trying to form a union? Essentially that the union is like a foreign body that's going to disrupt the healthy and harmonious relationship between the company and its careers. Were they sending out emails to people or what? Emails and text messages. Oh, also they did send out some messages through the app, which was-- I got copies of some of the messages. Fudora wrote that it would no longer be able to quote directly support workers if they joined the union. In a written statement, the company told me it had provided careers with, quote, clear and factual information to help them make an informed decision. They have the right to tell people that they should vote no, but you know, the point is they were taken advantage of their position to unfairly influence workers to view the union as a threat. Yeah. To their income. By the fall of 2019, careers had gathered enough support to hold a vote, but the results were sealed until the labor board ruled on the key question. Do careers have the legal right to even join a union? And as the pressure mounted on Fudora, I decided it was time to find out for myself what life in the gig economy is really like. Next time on Hustle. Ooh, I have a delivery. Oh my gosh. Whoa, holy crap. That's a $383 order. 20 custom salads. I feel okay. I feel like that's not going to fit in my bag. Maybe they're small. Well, let's hope so. Hustle was jointly produced by the Toronto Star and Antica Productions. It was written and produced by myself and Antica producer Laura Regare. Kathleen Goldhar is our story editor and executive producer at Antica. Mitch Stewart is our audio producer, mixing in sound design by Phil Wilson and Stewart Cox is president of Antica Productions. Janet Hurley is senior editor at the Toronto Star and Irene Gentle is editor in chief. Hustle is made possible thanks to the ongoing support of the Atkinson Foundation. If you liked this podcast, please subscribe to the Toronto Star's daily podcast. This matters. Posts Adrian Chang, Sabah Etizaz and Raju Mudhar discuss stories of Canadian cultural, economic and political importance. You can find it at thestar.com or wherever you listen to your podcast.