Sep 23, 2025 11:41 PM
Food delivery apps depend on cheap immigrant labor to survive, Concordia research shows
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1099424
EXCERPTS: Émile Baril, a postdoctoral researcher at Concordia’s Institute for Research on Migration and Society who worked briefly as a food courier himself, cowrote the paper with Mircea Vultur at l’Institut national de la recherche scientifique. The researchers conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with delivery couriers in Toronto and Montreal to gain insight into their working conditions and experiences.
The couriers found the work was difficult and paid poorly, and low barriers to entry led to over-recruitment, creating further precarity.
In Toronto, workers tended to be international students, usually from South Asia, who were forced to work long hours to pay for high tuition fees. Many of the workers in Montreal were also students or were awaiting diploma recognition. They primarily came from French-speaking parts of Africa or the Caribbean, particularly Haiti. Couriers in both cities were overwhelmingly young and male.
“We began looking into this just before the COVID-19 pandemic, but when everything went into lockdown, the food delivery industry exploded,” Baril says. “Platforms like Uber Eats found an opportunity to significantly lower pay floors for their workers. By 2022 or 2023, as conditions deteriorated, the Canadian-born part-timers — who were largely students or artists working a side gig — began flowing out of the industry. Economically precarious immigrants and international students began flowing in.”
Baril says working conditions are generally worse in Toronto, given its greater geographic distances, higher cost of living, lack of bike lanes and larger labour pool. [...] Baril speculates that recent changes to Canadian immigration policy, including lowering the cap on international students, may lead to better conditions as labour markets tighten. But he believes there will always be a group of economically precarious workers willing to do this kind of work... (MORE - missing details, no ads])
PAPER: http://dx.doi.org/10.52975/llt.2025v95.007
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1099424
EXCERPTS: Émile Baril, a postdoctoral researcher at Concordia’s Institute for Research on Migration and Society who worked briefly as a food courier himself, cowrote the paper with Mircea Vultur at l’Institut national de la recherche scientifique. The researchers conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with delivery couriers in Toronto and Montreal to gain insight into their working conditions and experiences.
The couriers found the work was difficult and paid poorly, and low barriers to entry led to over-recruitment, creating further precarity.
In Toronto, workers tended to be international students, usually from South Asia, who were forced to work long hours to pay for high tuition fees. Many of the workers in Montreal were also students or were awaiting diploma recognition. They primarily came from French-speaking parts of Africa or the Caribbean, particularly Haiti. Couriers in both cities were overwhelmingly young and male.
“We began looking into this just before the COVID-19 pandemic, but when everything went into lockdown, the food delivery industry exploded,” Baril says. “Platforms like Uber Eats found an opportunity to significantly lower pay floors for their workers. By 2022 or 2023, as conditions deteriorated, the Canadian-born part-timers — who were largely students or artists working a side gig — began flowing out of the industry. Economically precarious immigrants and international students began flowing in.”
Baril says working conditions are generally worse in Toronto, given its greater geographic distances, higher cost of living, lack of bike lanes and larger labour pool. [...] Baril speculates that recent changes to Canadian immigration policy, including lowering the cap on international students, may lead to better conditions as labour markets tighten. But he believes there will always be a group of economically precarious workers willing to do this kind of work... (MORE - missing details, no ads])
PAPER: http://dx.doi.org/10.52975/llt.2025v95.007