Children working as riders for food delivery apps – BBC investigation
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Should just be made legal, at least they're trying to do something legal when drug dealing is always an option. Used to be completely normal for teenagers to work these sort of jobs.
> Children working as riders for food delivery apps
> The family of a 17-year-old who died while working as a Deliveroo rider...
A 17-year-old is not a child. He's a minor, yes, and it's possibly illegal to have him work some jobs (although not all jobs, not everywhere), but calling them "children" is disgraceful.
And of course if it is deemed too dangerous for them to join any of these professions, your local military recruitment center, acceptong applicants aged 16 and above, is right this way...
Do you seriously think it's acceptable to just hand a child tools that can easily get them hurt or killed, with zero supervision or training, and expect them to be fine? It is already a nightmare for commuter cyclists in metropolitan areas who prioritize safe routes and dedicated cycle paths. You think people this young have the ability to effectively manage the risks of working on the road whilst under time pressure?
We define a child as anyone who has not yet reached their 18th birthday. This is in line with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and civil legislation in England and Wales.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/case-management-guidance/definit...
In an article for the general public, the use of the term is disingenuous IMHO, because people usually don't think of 17-year-old persons as "children".
17 year old persons are children.
1. continue to A/AS-level taking 1 to 2 years, and then optionally onto collage or university;
2. do apprentiships or traineeship that take 1 to 5 years;
3. part-time employment and education/training.
From http://www.gov.uk/child-employment:
1. children aged 13+ can perform part-time work except in television, theatre, and modelling;
2. from age 16 to 18 (if not in education) you must spend 20 hours working or volunteering;
3. from age 18 you are elligible for full-time work.
Therefore, it is perfectly valid for the 17 year old to be working as a driver and the BBC is trying to incite outrage against food delivery apps with this.
And I'd imagine it's driven by the incentives/constraints of the job. I never see anyone ride that crazy.
I'd say a 17-yo doesn't have the maturity to understand that this is not worth a daily dose of a milimort.
Further complicating things, Deliveroo riders aren't even employees (maybe that's changed recently). They are contractors and so the risks of doing a dangerous job are offloaded onto them by the company. An employer would be liable for eg setting delivery times that necessitate reckless riding, a B2B contractor is expected to do their own risk assessment.
So I think it's fair to treat these 17-yo as children in this context, and certainly as exploited.
Sure they do, but we all know that you drive differently and in different places when you aren't doing it for payment and dealing with those sorts of constraints (if I'm not fast enough, I'll get bad ratings/tips, for example).
It also used to be normal to not finish high school, not allow women to get a bank account without a man's signature, and to beat your kids. Segregation was normal, too. Just because something used to be normal doesn't mean we should still be doing it.
And I'll point out that folks would deal drugs even while working was normal. Heck, some folks (including teenagers) use jobs as a way to deal more drugs. It isn't work or drugs. I'm not sure why teenagers need to do anything other than learning about the world and going to school. School often already takes the time of a full time job.
Some teenagers don't have what to eat.
I mean, realistically I know that some folks don't have real choices, and that includes whether or not they get to concentrate on school or whether they need to work - but it doesn't have to be that way so often.
A couple of thoughts:
1. Working is a way to learn about the world in a low risk way (losing a job as a teenager is often more a lesson than a set back, for example). It’s also a way to earn your own income, which is obviously useful.
2. Not every teenager has the luxury of living in a stable home with one or both parents/guardians. Even then, some teens are better off spending more time away from those people beyond time spent in school.
Seriously! Roads are not a joke! Bikes don't have crumplezones! A significant minority of drivers actively target cyclists! The teenagers in these scenarios are also effectively operating under coercion when they swap with a registered driver! How could any of this be low risk?
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/24/22548504/deliveroo-self-e...
Whoever owned the account and decided to engage a substitute worker without checking their right-to-work or complying with additional requirements that they agreed to when signing up for Deliveroo is at fault here.
The end situation is that these delivery apps are providing a back-door route to work for vast numbers of people without that right. It's very easy to say "it's the contractor who didn't do diligence at blame" - but when there's thousands of contractors and the barrier of entry to become a "contractor" is almost nothing, you have a systemic problem.
Yes, and it's a systemic problem that govt should be handling. It's already illegal to give/pay someone who you know has no right-to-work (or you should've reasonably known / didn't do your due diligence on) a piece of work, it needs to be investigated and enforced properly.
They are not. They inform the reader that this system exists. Then little cherry on the cake, this system eventually leads to child labor. Plus chocolate toping, eventually someone died.
Given that you've spelt it as "labor", I'm going to explain how this works in the UK:
Deliveroo's discretionary policies aside, you are allowed to work when you reach school-leaving age in the country you live in (subject to some common-sense restrictions) within the United Kingdom. There is nothing illegal about this whatsoever. Someone aged 17 is not a child and is considered entitled to work (either as an employee or as someone self-employed) just as they are entitled to join the army, start a family or drink alcohol in a restaurant.
In England, the intention is for this to happen alongside training or further part-time education but there is no criminal offence committed by a young person who decides they would prefer to occupy their time in full-time work and e.g. save money. That's their choice to make.
> Plus chocolate toping, eventually someone died.
The article has no information about how this happened. If they got into an accident because of another reckless driver on the road, then the article should've been about improving road safety. If the accident was their fault, then we should probably have a conversation about the mandatory CBT training in the UK that riders will have gone through and how it approaches safety topics.
The problem is not that substitution works the way it does.
Imagine needing to invest tens of thousands in a van just to have a chance of an underpaid and unthankful package delivery job.
>The system appears open to abuse.
No, the system appears designed for abuse.
It turns out a driver can pick up their delivery van, drive around the corner and hand it over to their buddy (an undocumented migrant, who can't get the job themselves), then go work another job, and meet up again at the end of the shift to return the van. Then they split the wages.
Even without the 'independent contractor' stuff, it is extremely difficult for a delivery company to stop drivers from doing this.
If there are requirements for replacement drivers that their substitute won't meet they can simply not report the substitution, instead sharing a login or sharing a phone.
But it's extremely easy to not build in features explicitly to facilitate it.
I was working at Pizza Hut when I was 14, kids in the UK have paper-rounds, does it really matter if a 17-year-old is doing this?
The account-lending scheme is weird though.
Have they not been to any restaurants lately?
The major problem is the same issue with things like prostitution or drugs. If you ban it, you lose oversight and make it less safe.
I'd rather them allow kids to work, but put proper controls in place.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/child-employment/restrictions-on-child-em...
They just need to be in education, doing an apprenticeship or training part time.
However, I was interested by whether this would be legal or not.
https://www.gov.uk/child-employment/restrictions-on-child-em...
So there appears to be limits on when someone who is under 18 works, and what type of work. Additionally, it appears permits are needed for the employer, and the employee.
I picked Kirklees at random for more specific council laws: https://www.kirklees.gov.uk/beta/employment-information/pdf/...
It appears that things not being done in this scheme:
Sign off by the parent Sign off properly by the employer (in this case, the person renting the account) A risk assessment
However, it appears "leaving school age" is 16, even though adulthood is 18? So I'm not sure any of it would apply to a 17 year old.
On the other hand, minors are often underpaid, minimum wage laws (at least in my country) are different for underage people, which in essence is age discrimination if they do the same job.
And what's the minimum age for a kid working on his family's farm?
It's no secret that young people are at high risk for accidents in real-world jobs, and need serious training and tight supervision.
My Reaction: This story is about delivery-app workers because that is one of the few real-world jobs which is still visible from inside the well-gentrified little world-bubbles of the BBC's readers.
I'm not convinced by this sweeping statement (which would have more impact on non-uk readers). Grauniad readers, perhaps.
/s?
Paper rounds? In 2023?
However, there are incentives in place to not regard it as such: we don't want to pay extra; businesses don't want to pay a grown-ass adult with responsibilities; and adults don't want to make children's live's easier if they had it rough when they were growing up.
Disregarding other's rights of existence and rights of having a labor-free infancy will always come to bite us in the end: it's "fine" until you're replaced by an easily-exploitable teenager that can be underpaid because they're not aware of their labor rights.
I understand the theory but the reality would just be more children dying on the road.
If the children are going to school and have decent social lives, I'm not sure what the harm is, especially if they _want_ to work so that they can buy their own things.
FWIW I started (legally) working after-school shifts when I turned 13. One manager tried to convince me to skip a final exam so I could provide shift coverage. That manager was an idiot.
It also spurred me on to study harder in school because I realised delivery jobs were not a great career.
I think if we had more kids with menial jobs they might end up less entitled.
You could have picked example of child employment that does not harm, but somehow you picked the one that had done significant damage to them.
Cynicism is fine, but it's better to pull up the numbers than go by personal experience and anecdotes, because that's n=1.