Beneath the helmet, behind the mask: Meet the Forgotten Heroes of the Pandemic

It's been nearly two years since life as we knew it was suddenly snatched away by the pandemic and replaced with "the new normal". I don't need to arbitrarily cover old ground about how tough life has been for people since then. We've been locked down for months on end, missed out on opportunities, and experienced loss - the likes of which this generation has never seen before.

From the outset, the coronavirus pandemic was always framed in military terms rather than ones pertaining to a public health crisis. We've been 'battling' covid, and our government 'fought' to save Christmas.

Like all battles, we looked to heroes to be the light in the dark. We clapped every Thursday at 8 pm for NHS workers on the frontlines, and heaped praise on Rishi Sunak for giving us half-priced Nando's during the summer. However, there's a group of people that has consistently been excluded from this heroism narrative despite playing enormous roles in our lives these past two years - gig economy workers.

More specifically, I'm talking about food delivery drivers. Though the first nationwide now lockdown often feels like a distant memory, there was a point at which this army of masked men on mopeds was the only thing standing between the restaurant industry and financial ruin.

Of course, living in Cambridge made it impossible to notice the role gig economy workers now played in our lives. All you had to do was take a stroll into town, head towards Market Square and look at the now-closed Don Pasquale Restaurant which became a hotspot for Deliveroo riders waiting for their next deliveries.

Whilst contact-free deliveries have played a vital role in keeping both us, the consumers, and the delivery drivers safe, what they've also done is removed the human element from these fleeting interactions.

For this project, I wanted to look beneath the helmet and behind the mask to hear first-hand from the riders themselves about what it was like soldiering on despite the risk posed by the pandemic.

Shakill

The first person I spoke to was Shakill Uddin, a rider for Deliveroo who I met outside the Rose Crescent McDonalds branch in Cambridge. He hadn’t been in the country for very long, and as such he answered my questions in broken English. Still, this was my first time having an in-depth chat with a food-delivery driver about the experiences they’d had working in that role.

Apart from the obvious challenges you might expect as a gig economy worker in the midst of a global pandemic, Shakill didn’t have too many complaints about working for Deliveroo. He began riding with the company in February 2020 just before COVID-19 began to gain a foothold in the United Kingdom. This meant that he was forced to take an abrupt break from his new job as soon as he started.

As the world slowly opened up for the rest of us, however, things were still pretty bleak for food delivery drivers. A lot of us had the luxury of working or studying from home, from limiting our contact with other people where possible and sticking to open spaces. Shakill told me that a lot of riders faced deep anxieties about the element of their jobs which required them to come into contact with multiple establishments and customers every hour.?

Of course, this is where contact-free deliveries came into play. A vital measure to make the process of food delivery safer for all parties involved, I was interested to find out the way in which they impacted the social side of the job. Most workers in the culinary side of the gig economy are already denied a central hub, so how did things stand now???

Well, unsurprisingly the opportunity for connection and communication grew even smaller. Most buildings, including Cambridge colleges, require drivers to wait outside the reception so interactions are kept to a bare minimum.?

Despite the difficulties Shakill outlined during our conversation, he ended it on a rather cheery note. He told me that he hoped to stay in the food delivery sector and was overall satisfied with the job because it paid him enough and allowed him to work flexibly.

It wasn’t the answer I was expecting, but I was happy for him and wished him all the best on his journey. My next interviewee had been in the job far longer than Shakill and would go on to speak slightly more candidly about how he felt about his job and indeed his employers.

Silva

From a portrait photographer’s perspective, taking Silva’s portrait excited me the most. On his face, he wore an expression of a man who'd been pushing a bike in the sun all day. His nails, callous hands, and worn-out gloves, too, reflected the physically gruelling nature of being a food delivery driver. His story was even more interesting to me than his appearance.

Under kinder circumstances, Silva would usually find himself in a kitchen barking orders to his team in his capacity as a head chef.

“My normal work is in the kitchen, I’m a Head Chef. But now I work for Deliveroo again because over the last year the coronavirus situation was really bad for my industry.”

“ I cannot say it's wonderful. It's enough to pay the bills, get some fresh air, we meet new people as well, and we keep healthy, that's it. Not too much to say. But, we just continue to work and just try to survive. Sometimes this last year has been really really hard.”

Everything about my interview with Silva made me feel as though he was carefully trying not to come across as ungrateful, even though he had evidently felt the effects of the pandemic in a harsh way.

As a consumer, I was intrigued to know if there was anything that Silva and his peers wished we, the customers, knew when ordering food from these apps.

He responded by telling me that his problem was not with the customers, but instead with his boss. Some days he’s been forced to ride upwards of five miles on a bike for just over ￡2. To put that into perspective, that’s a journey that could take you from Girton College all the way to Addenbrooke’s, and take around thirty minutes.

“For the customers, it’s alright. They get the food and it’s hot, but for us it is not easy. If you? can imagine twelve hours on one pushbike, you get to the end of the day and you don’t feel your legs.”

Still, there are, according to Silva, things that we as consumers can do to make the job a little easier. He told me that he appreciates when customers open the door with a smile, and that being treated with kindness and respect is the best tip he could ask for.

After hearing Silva's raw honesty about his struggles during the pandemic and the harsh realities of being a Deliveroo rider, I was keen to know, in his opinion, what industry-wide changes he thought would be useful to make working life better for him and his colleagues.

"I think that the company can change some rules, because its not fair when the guys on the scooters go for one mile orders and get six pounds, and you go for five miles on a pedal bike and get three pounds - this is one of the faults of the company."

He also raised the need for "better conditions with safety as well" because they're provided with poor quality helmets that break extremely easily.

Silva's account of working life during the pandemic was much more in line with what I'd expected to from food delivery riders. I appreciated his raw honesty, but also his sense of stoicism and tendency to follow up each of his complaints with an assurance that things weren't all bad. I hoped, for the sake of the food courier community as a whole, that my next interview might be a little more optimistic.

Darren

The final food delivery rider I spoke to was a man named Darren. He initially struck me as quite shy, so I was somewhat surprised when he agreed to be photographed and interviewed by me. I'd been seeing social media ads for Just Eat at the time of recording, so I was intrigued to see what all the fuss was about.

Darren was the new kid on the block, so to speak, having only been in the job for two weeks at the time of recording the interview.

"The new Just Eat hub launched two weeks ago, so I've been doing this since it launched. Before this, I was a healthcare assistant. But, doing those day and night shifts full-time during the pandemic became too much for me. I left that job to look after my nan and my family."

The experiences of Darren and Silva overlapped in this regard, both men had careers that were impacted by the pandemic which led them to food delivery.

Although he was new on the scene, I was keen to know what the social side of the job is like and whether it's as isolating as it might seem from the outside looking in.

Sometimes I get to chat to my colleagues who ride around Cambridge, but I mean, today has been quite slow so there's been a lot of down time. I think loneliness isn't something I've felt just yet but I can definitely see it being a thing that might make the job a bit harder, especially with the pandemic and people keeping their distance.

On the subject of down-time, Darren added that he's luckier than some riders since he's paid by Just Eat per hour as opposed to per delivery like other companies. Couriers who work as part of this model are also entitled to pension contributions and other benefits including holiday pay and sick pay. Another key perk is having access to a central hub in which they can take breaks and use the bathroom, an issue often brought up by food delivery riders.

I asked Darren whether he thinks that the roll-out of Just Eat hubs in cities across the UK should be read as a sign that the industry is changing in favour of riders' rights, and viewed through the same lens as Uber's defeats in UK courts regarding its drivers status as self-employed.

He said yes, and that although riders can make a fair bit of money with other companies, he much prefers the security of having a full-time job with a contract.

To end our chat, I asked him what the hardest part of his new role has been.

Well, it's the first time I've ridden a bike in 14 years! I walk all around Cambridge so getting used to that has definitely had its challenges. But the weather can be absolutely brutal, I started out working in sweltering heat but this week we've had rain and strong winds, biking against that is tough especially if you haven't got an electric bike.

Ultimately, it's good to know that there are companies that are willing to go the extra mile to create a model that puts employee comfort and security at the heart of the operation despite the 'race to the bottom' that Uber EATS, Deliveroo, and Just Eat find themselves in.

The Bigger Picture

Of course, though, there are some glaring issues with the coverage I’ve provided thus far. One of them is the fact that all of my interviewees are men, and although it’s fair to say that male riders make up the vast majority of the food delivery workforce, the experience of women working in these roles has been wildly different.

Take, for example, this piece put together by Vice detailing the horrific experiences of an anonymous woman working in this role. TW // sexual violence

From threats of sexual violence from customers with zero support afterwards to things like not having a place to go to the toilet during a shift, it's clear that even without the threat of a deadly pandemic, things can get scarily ugly for female riders.

Will Shu, the man who founded Deliveroo all the way back in 2013 and is the current CEO, claims to be no stranger to this kind of dehumanisation, albeit on a far less severe level. In an interview with Steven Bartlett for the Diary of a CEO podcast, he brought up a story from a time when Deliveroo was in its infancy about his experiences working on the ground as a rider.

"I definitely know what it was like to walk in their shoes because I did that job for a long time, I did five deliveries last night. That's why treating riders with respect, and making sure their voices are heard is so important to me."

Hmm, something isn’t adding up here.

There's clearly a disconnect between the man sitting in a cosy podcast studio recounting his ￡5 Billion success story, and the man pedalling five miles only to earn ￡2. This disconnect becomes even more apparent once you take a look at coverage of Deliveroo's behaviour in the press.

Whether it's denying riders the right to unionise, or keeping riders' rights in check by ensuring they retain their 'self-employed contractor' status, listening to riders' voices doesn't seem to be anywhere near the top of Shu's agenda, especially if it poses a risk to his booming food delivery empire.

My aim for this piece was to listen to and amplify the voices of the food delivery riders of Cambridge because I felt as though theirs was a story that had been ignored in the heroism narratives that dominated public discourse during the peak periods of the pandemic.

It's been five months since I shot these portraits and had these conversations.

For many of us, the hardships imposed on us by the pandemic are beginning to feel like a distant memory which is, of course, a good thing.

Some might argue that it's inevitable, but I think it would be a real shame if, as life returns to normal, we lose sight of the sacrifices people made and the suffering they endured during this period in our history.