Food-Delivery Couriers Exploit Desperate Migrants in France | Hacker News Reader

Food-Delivery Couriers Exploit Desperate Migrants in France

nytimes.com

82 pointsl33tbro85 comments

>>Uber Eats and competitors including Stuart, a French app, and Glovo, based in Spain, said they were aware of misconduct. “We’re concerned because these are illegal practices in which people are profiting from the vulnerability of others,” said Nicolas Breuil, global marketing manager for Stuart.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

Uber et al have for years argued that driver/riders are not employees. If they aren't employees then they are contractors. One of the basic definitions of contractors is that they may subcontract. To call subcontracting "illegal" is a stretch. It may be a violation of a clause in the contract, but it isn't a crime. Use of illegal labourers is a crime, but the simple act of having someone other than the original contractor deliver the food isn't.

If Uber wants to deal with a particular person and ensure that only that person handles the actual labor, Uber is free to HIRE that person.

I believe the (official) problem here is that the subcontracted workers can't be employed because they are underage, illegal immigrants etc.

As I said, using illegal labourers is a crime. But "profiting from the vulnerability of others" is the basis of Uber's business model. It's laughable to hear them complain about someone else sidestepping labour standards to pay people less than a minimum.

I think they are just upset that someone has managed to shave profit from their system. Uber is jealous that it cannot access this ultra-cheap labour pool itself.

It's not laughable because they aren't hypocritical but cynical. They know they can get away with this, and do.

> French labor law allows independent contractors to outsource to legal workers, but Uber Eats, Stuart and Glovo said they prohibited subcontracting.

"Use of illegal labourers is a crime, but the simple act of having someone other than the original contractor deliver the food isn't."

Yes, and the issue is using illegal labourers, not the subcontracting itself.

It should also be made illegal to pay so few fares to couriers. It's under the level of acceptance

What about safeguards? Stuart's couriers need ID so they're legally accountable for their actions. To subcontract is to skip a background check.

Shouldn't the the contractor be responsible for running a background check on the sub-contractor..?

If the sub-contractor fails, then the contractor is on the hook.

> To call subcontracting "illegal" is a stretch.

Legal does not equate to moral.

The subcontracting going on here, illegal or not, is reprehensible because it is exploitative. On top of that the rent-seeking itself is morally bankrupt. It's extracting something from others essentially for free. I'm a socialist, but only the worst kind of capitalist or libertarian would think this is ok.

Employing those unable to work is probably a serious crime it certainly is in the UK - Gordon Browns cleaner had used a forged passport and he got fined about £10k

> Uber Eats and competitors including Stuart, a French app, and Glovo, based in Spain, said they were aware of misconduct. “We’re concerned because these are illegal practices in which people are profiting from the vulnerability of others,” said Nicolas Breuil, global marketing manager for Stuart.

They should look inward: basically the entire gig economy is people profiting from the vulnerability of others. If these companies could cut out the middle man and pay people as little as these subcontractors are being paid, they would.

Tax driver a respectable career that earned its drivers good pay until it got exploited by billionaire capitalists, I mean disrupted.

Care to elaborate a bit more? Where’s the exploitation?

Edit: typo

Taxi drivers were once largely independent operators, or they worked as employees of taxi companies. In recent decades this was "disrupted". Drivers became contractors who rented their cars and licenses (medallions) from wealthy investors. That's how NYC medallions started being worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now a taxi driver neither enjoys the freedoms of being independent nor the security of being an employee. They live the worst of both thanks to the disruption of the industry.

Taxi drivers also provided a terrible experience, had dirty cabs, refused to pick up people, would lie about the fare, take the long way, etc. Uber and the other apps took a one time anonymous transaction where the cab driver didn't care about repeat business and made it accountable. Much like yelp/trip advisor hurting business for tourist trap restaurants. It aligns the incentives.

Much of those problems with Taxis stemmed from the aforementioned previous disruption of the industry. You care a lot less about your car when you don't own it. You care a lot less about customer experience when you are not free to deal with customers directly. You don't care about response times when you are only ever dispatched from a central office, are forced to follow a GPS, and so have no home territory or local knowledge. Taxis are bad today, but they weren't always like that.

Bullshit. There has never been a time when riding in a taxi in NYC was pleasant. It was always a terrible experience. And not just in contrast to better options, it’s objectively bad and always has been.

My theory is that it’s because there’s no incentive for any individual driver to improve. The odds of getting the same driver twice is effectively nil so all they care about is not getting in trouble with the owners or the taxi commission. Outside of that, anything to improve the service is a cost borne solely by them which is not worth it.

So? There's no question that Uber/Lyft/etc made taxi services better, but the improvements have nothing to do with the exploitation of their workers. They would still have cleaner cabs, transparent fares and routes, etc, even if they made drivers real employees or paid living wages. Instead, they try to cut corners wherever they can at their drivers' expense. That's not innovation or progress; it's just the people who happen to come up on top trying to extract as much as possible from the people who do not.

Everything comes at a cost, though. You use the services of large corporations because they are some of the only structures that can present such convenience. But then you end up in a world where most people are pauperized and no longer have any bargaining power in the face of these changes. You end up in a situation where you have entire cities prostrating themselves in front of Amazon so that they might deign install themselves there.

The incentives are aligned for now, until the venus flytrap snaps shut are you wake up to a wall of monopolies all around you.

Maybe we should look at why these people are vulnerable in the first place.

I suspect we would be way more likely to succeed in empowering undocumented people by removing barriers, rather than erecting new constraints against them and a way to earn a living.

But then again, few probably care about the long-term future of illegal immigrants. A charity budget is a way easier number to show-off than a small-looking % increase in spending power through economic activity... Who cares if hundreds of thousands of people waste away their productive years in legal limbo, as long as they don't disgrace our country by working for less than the minimum wage we decided on.

It's an extension what already happens in industries such as construction. If you want to remodel your home in Florida, you'd hire a local contractor who then subcontracts people who are almost certainly illegal immigrants from Mexico to do the actual work at a much lower rate than if they hired Americans.

The reality though is that it's not really exploitation because these often illegal workers don't really have any other options. Anyone who has been to Paris will tell how expensive it is. Ideally the arbitrage between the legal contractor and the illegal sub-contractor is as small as possible but until they have better options, to them this is better than nothing.

Using someone else's limitations (e.g. inability to work legally) as leverage for your own gain (e.g. paying them an extremely low wage) might as well be the textbook definition of exploitation.

The dynamic you've described is no different than a licensed professional hiring unlicensed worker to work under them. The employer has some legal status that is required by the government to do that business and to make the most money off of it they have more people doing under their license. Sure they technically bear responsibility for the work but 99.9999% of the jobs won't require the full skills of a license holder so sending an apprentice to wire a ceiling fan or un-clog a drain is no big deal.

Sure, I guess the plumber's apprentice could just get a job bagging groceries but the illegal immigrant could panhandle or collect cans. At some point it just becomes an exercise drawing arbitrary lines with regard to how much money one needs to survive.

Personally I think the government should get out of the business of saying who can work or who can do what work since that's what's creating the opportunity for this labor arbitrage/exploitation.

> The dynamic you've described is no different than a licensed professional hiring unlicensed worker to work under them.

The key here is the second part, where that limitation is being used to coerce them into accepting disadvantageous terms.

> Sure, I guess the plumber's apprentice could just not work but so could the illegal immigrant at some point it just becomes an exercise drawing arbitrary lines with regard to how much money one needs to survive.

Perhaps we could implement some sort of "minimum wage" to ensure employers pay enough for their employees to survive.

Minimum wages are great for people already in the legal labor market. For people outside it, it creates incentives to find a way in (honestly or otherwise). For businesses, it can create incentives to find a way to get access to the less than entirely legal labor pool with a wink and a nudge for deniability.

To be absolutely clear, a minimum wage is in no way a bad thing! It's just worth bearing in mind that incentives are complex things.

In some cases this is also slavery - for example some recent cases in the UK with gamemasters effectively holding homeless people in captivity.

Isn’t that just the definition of negotiation? Do you routinely expect fairness in business negotiation when the reality between the parties are anything but that?

They're two sides of the same coin, aren't they? "Exploitation" is just a very one-sided negotiation.

> The reality though is that it's not really exploitation because these often illegal workers don't really have any other options.

I'm sorry, but do you not realize how crazy that sounds? It's the equivalent of saying:

> "I’m not exploiting dehydrated hikers in the desert by selling water at $20/liter. It’s their only option"

Your example is a clear-cut case of exploitation.

The thing is they shouldn't be allowed to enter the desert in the first place, people that are legally allowed into the desert can buy water at a fair price.

Literally can't tell if this is parody or not. But people are now being prosecuted for supplying water to people in the desert.

If illegal people can't access water in the desert, they won't go to the desert.

I might be wrong but I think that is what the government wants.

No, they'll go through the desert and some of them and their children will die. And this will be on the heads of those preventing them from having water.

That's certainly exploitation, agreed. I'm not sure why anyone would use "no other options" to argue something isn't when that's almost a requirement for exploitation.

That said, the desert metaphor also gets us to the usual issue: arresting the water-seller without doing anything else still makes life much worse for the hikers. I don't accept the libertarian argument that exploitation can't be immoral if it's mutually beneficial, but it seems accurate to say that the exploitation is usually not the most immoral thing happening. It's a more active harm, but having one unpleasant option is still better than having zero options.

Coming back to the article: earning four Euro per hour to live in Paris is obviously unsustainable. Taking half of someone's already-low wages to (indirectly) provide them with work papers is a callous thing to do, and knowingly designing a company to provide plausible deniability for that practice is alarming. And yet... if someone is living in an abandoned car with no support and no right to work legally, earning 17 Euro a day is still better than earning nothing at all. Any reaction that claims to be about protecting the worker needs to start with those problems before it cuts off their job.

I found this EconTalk episode [0] quite interesting.

The takeway was the idea that all scalper-like transaction had something in common. Most of the time, the law would forbid it, but the underlying "moral" part was that the transaction in that case is not really volontary. So he coined the term of eu-volontary transaction (ie truly volontary).

One of the rule of such a transaction is "Neither party is coerced into exchange by dire necessity, and neither party has enough bargaining power to impose an abusive price." I believe this is the issue here.

[0]:https://www.econtalk.org/munger-on-exchange-exploitation-and...

Regarding the use of illegal migrants in sub-contracting work, their numbers in the construction bussiness is orders of magnitude higher than in the gig-courrier industry. They are usually employed by contractor / sub-contractor, making any kind of control complicated; even then most people are taking advantage of this so there's little incentives to change. The use of illegal workers in construction is apparently driven by a race to the bottom in the construction price, all the while prices are going up, especially in and around Paris, the difference being pocketed by land owners/promoters.

Regarding the deliveries services, I've never used them, but they are imposing externalities on everyone with their motor scooters parked in front of busy fast-food places and drivers (not all of them, though) with little regard to the traffic code (though it's in part caused by the incentives to deliver as quickly as possible).

International workers labor away for the profits of international capital. People wonder why nationalism is rising...

International labor is taking advantage of the arbitrage that exists due to wealth inequalities between different parts of the world.

Without the use of force (or natural borders via land, lack of information, or language), wealth will flow from societies that have it to those that don't, because the labor will be cheaper. Same situation as having a new store open in town selling the same items for cheaper. Buyers will flock to it and the original store will have to lower prices or offer a different product. Or put up new barriers to entry (immigration, etc).

The restaurant business itself is one of the largest users of illegal/migrant labor.

It's the government that is accepting these people into the country while at the same time telling them they can't legally work. They have to survive somehow.

It’s hard to say that they were « accepting » if they arrived clandestinely.

I’d rather claim that a colonizing country has the responsibility of taking care of the people it colonized if it’s going to plunder its resources, but not sure if this is the right venue for that.

I don't know the situation in France, but in the UK it is possible to arrive with the knowledge of government, be documented and allowed to stay, and still be disallowed from working.

There are a significant number of people in this situation, and as you can imagine, it causes them great harm when it goes on for a long time, as well as hardship to their friends who provide them with support (housing, food, etc).

When does that responsibility end?

Should Europe still be taking care of people in the new world?

> When does that responsibility end?

After it starts, of course.

Not according to Charles de Gaulle:

"Have you seen the Muslims with their turbans and their djellabas (traditional, hooded, long wool coats)? You can see that they are not French. Try and integrate oil and vinegar. Shake the bottle. After a moment they separate again. The Arabs are Arabs, the French are French. Do you think that the French can absorb ten million Muslims who will tomorrow be twenty million and after tomorrow forty? If we carry out integration, if all the Berbers and Arabs of Algeria were regarded as French, how would one stop them coming to settle on the mainland where the standard of living is so much higher? My village would no longer be called Colombey-les-deux-Eglises [the two churches] but Colombey-the-two-mosques."

> Try and integrate oil and vinegar

Yeesh, CDG never heard of mustard. He must have had something against Dijon.

> Try and integrate oil and vinegar. Shake the bottle. After a moment they separate again.

You just need a emulsifier.

>I’d rather claim that a colonizing country has the responsibility of taking care of the people it colonized if it’s going to plunder its resources, but not sure if this is the right venue for that.

Why should this be the case?

France doesn't control its borders. The border of the schengen zone is long and porous (like all borders). I don't want to underestimate the difficulties for refugies getting a start in France. People with no papers can enrol their kids in school and get some health care. To get expelled from the country, in addition to having no papers, you have to be a threat to public order, or be caught working illegally. So people 'employed' by gig workers would be exposing themselves to expulsion.

You could say that Spain, Poland, and Hungary are controlling France's borders, since those countries (that I know of) that have land borders with countries outside the EU.

You seem to forget that a lot of the refugees are coming from the sea (by boat), so that adds those that border with the Mediterranean, including Greece, Italy, and oh yeah, France.

> France doesn't control its borders.

This is reductive to the point of misleading. France does control its borders, but has chosen to accept the freedom of movement of Schengen, become a party to the Dublin Regulation, and participate in Frontex.

The idea that France is helpless to deal with the question of how it treats the migrants and the asylum seekers within its borders because of these agreements is to absolve them of responsibility towards people that they have taken on through those choices in addition to their own domestic law.

Telling people they can't work at all in your country, when they have nowhere else to go, is cruel. That is a choice France -- and other countries like Germany -- have made, and should be held responsible for.

(PS, I also disagree with the characterisation of the European borders as 'porous', given how much money, manpower, and how many human lives are expended enforcing them. If they were porous, people would not be drowning in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe.)

> when they have nowhere else to go

Which is not the case of most migrants, including those that arrived illegally / whose stay is illegal: they are economic migrants who just want access better conditions of living (or take advantage of Jus soli/free education/free healthcare). Regardless of why they are here, they aren't refugee whose return to their country of origin is blocked by civil war.

You clearly have strong points of view on the subject, but did you read my comment? France's physical borders with all neighbouring countries except Switzerland are open. You just drive, or walk, or ski across. The Italian one is notionally open but police pass in the trains and the police presence near the border can be noticeable. The Swiss one is notionally controlled but tens of thousands of cars pass every day and hardly any are stopped. A brown friend skiing out of a French resort wasn't aware of crossing the border, but still spent his whole day in a Swiss border post.

Nowhere do I, or would I, try to absolve France or any other country of its responsibilities. If you're in France with no legal basis, you can work. You can sign a regular work contract. Moreover, a work contract or the promise of one, will (at least in theory I've never tried it) let you get papers to stay. The instructions are [here](https://www.legalplace.fr/guides/promesse-embauche-sans-papi...). If you apply for asylum, you cannot work for 6 months, but you will receive an allowance during this time. Instructions [here](https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F2741). France has at various times taken in "lots" of refugies. Most recently returning colonists from Algeria, but also Spanish, Portugese, Russian and Armenian, as well as "poor" immigrants from a string of places. France, unlike some of it's neighbours, operates a "droit du sol" citizenship policy. Immigrants and/or their children can become French.

They're not "accepted" by the government, the French/Schengen borders are porous for a number of reasons. They can work legally if they get asylum.

This is very sad. Regular earnings from Uber eats or similar are already way too low to live in a city like Paris, so as a sub-contractor, I cannot imagine how those people live. We are back to the 19th century and Victor Hugo novels.

They live similarly poor or poorer lives in the country of their origin also.

So does this make it fine to let them live poorly in our countries? I don't think so, we can certainly do better.

Yes we can't have them live poorly, they must be either paid fairly or denied any money so as to leave. In other news Gig Workers create jobs for underprivileged and unemployed immigrants.

This is never either-or. Those jobs should come with fair pay and benefits. In whose interest is the new class of servants?

As a software developer, I know I am highly prized in the current market - but this might change, and the people who are treating drivers and couriers as disposable cogs would do the same to me given half the chance. Fighting for worker's rights is self-preservation as much as it is a question of ethics.

Paying them more will drive up costs. When costs go up, less people use the apps. When less people use the apps, delivery drivers get less money. Nothing exists in a bubble and it's important to look at underlying issues rather than crying foul play

My comment was intended to make the reader reflect on what the problem really is:

That there are people living poorer quality of lives than legal Parisians within a certain distance of Paris, or that there are people living poorer quality of lives regardless of their location? The sub contractor's quality of life is too poor for you, but it's obviously better than where they came from.

If the goal is to remove people living poorer quality of lives from a certain distance around people living better quality of lives, then the answer is to deport them and build barriers to entry to the country.

If the goal is to stop people from living in drastically poorer quality of life conditions, then the answer is wealth redistribution.

I think that's better than nothing, I have a friend that he lived in Milano thanks to that.

Nobody wanted to hire him (cash in hand / illegal), and the only way to make anything was delivering food while he's status changed to permanent.

Isn't this just normal in the US? I'd expect 3/4 of the delivery guys in NYC to be illegal too.

Same thing is happening in Mexico, Colombia, Perú and Argentina with YC backed Rappi. The fact that most of their recruits happen to be desperate Venezuelans fleeing their country makes this practice all the more glaring.

"The fact that there is less money from the platforms has pushed poor people to outsource to people even poorer than them,” said Jean-Daniel Zamor, a courier organizer in Paris". It's welfare, not exploitation. But on the dark side, those who exploit are less guilty than the giant gluttony-firms that have no end to their greed.

I’ve wondered what’s going on with Uber in Paris. Almost all drivers are from Francophone Africa, and, until recently, we’re almost all driving fairly nice Peugeot 507s, as if a fleet was operating them.

The car-mix seems to have changed a lot recently. Dunno why.

I found out about this from the mailing list of community bicycle workshops. I have seen zero coverage in French press. I'm glad the NYT is as shocked as I was.

What a bizarre use of the word "exploit". The government is prohibiting migrants from working, to the point where their only option is "stealing or begging on the street." So of course the NYT places the blame on people who provide an alternative, rather than go after the anti-life state policy.

Replace migrant with child. Does this hold?

If the other options are begging or stealing, as per the article, then yes?

Depending on a country’s level of development, yes. In areas where child labor is prematurely banned, children are forced into more difficult and dangerous work, especially the sex trade.

In the west, effective bans on teenage labor leave gangs as the only employer.

But, in this case, we are talking about adults.

It doesn't. Children have parents or legal guardians who must provide for their livelihood. If they don't the government provides it. Such is not the case for migrants.

Wouldn’t the « landlord » of the account be subject to a lot of taxes?

_Illegal_ migrants, to be clear.

NY times won't show me the article if I'm in private mode. Do anyone know why would they do that?

Edit: the site also detect Edge in non-private mode as running in private mode

NYT recently started recognizing private mode. Wait for Chrome 76. Or jump over paywall using other means.

https://www.ghacks.net/2019/06/14/chrome-76-blocks-sites-fro...

Or you know... pay?

This is one of other means possible

It's so they can spot people reading more than 5 articles a month, which is their "free quota" before they hit you with the pay wall, if i recall correctly.

It's 5 articles time the number of installed browsers on your computer; at least it's what I do when I hit the paywall.

Or just clear cookies after 5 articles.

Depends on the browser. On Firefox, it tries to access indexedDB. On Safari, it tries to access localStorage. On Chrome, it tries webkitRequestFileSystem.

Search for the function "971y" in their main.js on the page.

Disabling javascript is enough to bypass the paywall on Firefox.

+1 works on chrome as well

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