The street came to a halt, and pedestrians gathered around a motorcycle rider who had fallen to the ground after losing consciousness. One of those around him removed the helmet from his head, and a volunteer examined the unconscious man’s head, finding that the delivery worker’s temperature was high. This made sense, as the delivery worker had been working since early morning in temperatures that sometimes exceed 45 degrees Celsius in the shade, especially as Cairo is witnessing continuous tree cutting, leaving the streets without shaded areas that ease the feeling of high temperatures. Only minutes passed before Ahmed Hussein, in his thirties, as his ID card showed, had arrived at Umm Al-Masriyeen General Hospital in Giza to receive the necessary first aid.
Khaled Abdel Aziz, an employee of the Egyptian Ambulance Authority, tells Zawia3 that Hussein’s case is just the tip of the iceberg, as it is one of dozens of cases the authority receives daily from motorcycle and bicycle riders. Abdel Aziz describes delivery workers as “victims”, since, in his words, they are “burning because of the extremely harsh heatwaves Egypt has been experiencing since mid-May”.
The modern technology revolution has led to the growth of the profession of delivery workers on bicycles or motorcycles. With the spread of parcel and online order delivery apps, demand for their services has increased, as they now roam the streets of Egyptian cities delivering meals, urgent postal parcels and daily needs such as groceries and basic necessities. Their tasks were not limited to that, but expanded to include delivering products from e-commerce platforms, making them a vital artery feeding the wheel of e-commerce in the digital age.
The “pilots”, as delivery workers on motorcycles are known, face many challenges on top of the difficulty of their work in high temperatures, as assaults against them recur, and we hear of their growing suffering from harsh working conditions that lack the most basic rights of decent work. According to human rights experts, this group is considered “black labour”, as they enjoy no social guarantees or formal contracts regulating their work. Added to that is the difficulty of counting them, as they belong to the categories of “irregular labour” that the Ministries of Labour and Social Solidarity have been trying to count for years (according to data from the Central Agency for Statistics for 2022, their number reached about 11.8 million people).
A Marginalised Group
In one of the side streets off El-Eshreen Street in the Faisal area of Haram district in Giza, Hussein Farid rushed out to deliver orders from the Kafr Ghattati area in Haram to a customer in Nasr City. He was asked to deliver a bag to a shop, and although the cost, according to what was recorded on the app, did not exceed EGP 150, he was surprised by great generosity from the customer. When he happened to pass by this shop a few days later, he found it closed, and when he asked about it, he learned that its owner dealt in drugs and had been arrested two days earlier.
Farid, in his twenties, tells Zawia3: “I was terrified, especially since we have heard dozens of stories of people working like me being exposed to similar situations, and many of them spent time in police stations for various reasons, including the burglary of a home to which a delivery worker had delivered an order some time earlier, or a murder. The bottom line is that we work on a knife’s edge, as the Egyptian saying goes.”
According to the testimonies of many workers in this profession we spoke with, they are constantly at risk of being dismissed, through complaints from clients and customers or for any other reason, in addition to the road hazards they face, including traffic accidents because Egypt has no dedicated lanes for motorcycles and scooters, as well as high temperatures, working long hours across districts and areas, and speeding because the worker is committed to delivering orders in under 45 minutes whatever the road conditions. Added to that are increasing thefts as a result of high economic pressures, as many of them are exposed to the danger of road gangs seeking to steal their vehicles, as described by those we spoke with.
6 Million Workers
The growth of logistics companies relying on smartphone apps (online order delivery) has contributed to the rapid increase in their numbers in recent years. The only estimate of the number of delivery workers, or “pilots”, came with the Ministry of Social Solidarity’s announcement of the “Your Road Is Safe” initiative, when Mervat Sabreen, assistant to the Minister of Social Solidarity for protection and social safety nets, estimated the size of activity in this field at USD 2.5 billion, and the number of people working in the profession in its various activities at six million young men and women. According to the Ministry of Social Solidarity, the order delivery market in Egypt grew by about 8% in 2021.
The initiative, launched in 2022, aimed to draft a protocol to bring order delivery workers under the umbrella of insurance protection, in addition to contributing to establishing a services association for workers in this sector. But according to what the assistant minister of social solidarity for protection and social safety stated, the ministry distributed a number of helmets to workers in this profession working for the “Mrsool” app, one of the well-known delivery apps, and after that, over two years, no data emerged on this initiative.
“This is the disaster of black labour,” says human rights lawyer Malek Adly, director of the lawyers’ network at the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights. He adds: “This is labour tied by work relations to other individuals, and not governed by any umbrella, whether legal or insurance, which is why it is called black labour. They are like workers in brick and tile workshops and street vendors, and they differ from regular and irregular labour, as they are far from the eyes of the state. This black labour is almost a form of slavery, as nothing forces employers to sign contracts with this category of workers.”
Adly explains that there is no link between all those working in delivery, the “pilots”, and the state; there is no insurance and no work documents. He stresses: “We have a major imbalance in Egypt in labour relations, and these workers live in a dire reality, as they face employers outside the law and face great risks, including heat stress and road accidents. This group includes app workers who work on their own personal responsibility, with no umbrella of protection from occupational hazards; a worker may be on the job when he is injured, and this cannot be proven, which is why we describe it as a degree of human enslavement.”
The human rights lawyer attributes many of the crises this group experiences to the absence of deterrent penalties for employers who employ them in difficult conditions without contracts guaranteeing their rights, amid the complete absence of labour inspection offices. Likewise, the absence of labour unions working to address this group’s crises is the biggest driver of the continuing suffering, and unions are the only radical solution to this crisis, as workers are the most capable of organising themselves and pursuing their rights, but this is almost impossible given the security situation in Egypt.
A recent research paper on delivery workers published on the Al-Ishtiraki platform concluded that union organisations and collective bargaining are needed as a means of closing the gaps in rights and protection for these workers, along with multifaceted efforts including improving working conditions and providing a social safety net to reduce the isolation and harshness they face, especially with increasing reliance on logistics technologies.
The research paper explains that many order delivery companies rely on what is known as the outsourcing model, which is characterised by the dismantling of the traditional bond between the worker and the institution to which he provides his services. These companies rely on external outsourcing, contracting employment agencies that in turn recruit delivery workers and employ them under their banner, allowing delivery companies to evade the obligations associated with direct employment, such as providing social protection or job security.
This has led to many problems, most notably the lack of job or contractual security and the lack of comprehensive social and health insurance against occupational risks. Delivery workers also do not receive fixed salaries; rather, their share is determined per delivery they perform. Working hours range between eight and 12 hours a day without breaks, which means severe physical exhaustion. Companies and outsourcing agencies do not provide the main tools and equipment the worker needs to do his job, as the worker has to provide them himself, and he is required to buy the promotional uniform of the company he works for, in addition to a delivery box, a modern phone and additional internet packages, which are necessary for the app through which he works, meaning additional costs he bears. Finally, companies ask the worker to sign trust receipts, which exposes him to prison or litigation if he loses the goods.
The Law Allows a Union
On the idea of establishing their own union, MP Adel Abdel Fadil, head of the Manpower Committee in the House of Representatives, says that Egyptian law now flexibly allows the formation of union entities by notification only, as members of a profession with 50 workers have the right to follow the procedures for forming a union entity, which puts the ball in the delivery workers’ own court, as they are best placed to determine their needs and form union entities that seek to meet those needs and resolve their crises.
Regarding the possibility of legislative intervention to solve this group’s crises, Abdel Fadil explains that delivery workers face great risks, but as far as the law is concerned, the principle is that there is an employment contract between the worker and his workplace, and there are oversight mechanisms by insurance bodies that supervise the documentation of that relationship, and therefore “we cannot enact a law for every profession”.
He adds: “This does not preclude the government’s role in monitoring social phenomena and studying the most appropriate mechanisms to address them, because it is the one able to monitor and analyse a phenomenon of this size, and then decide the most appropriate way to intervene, whether through security or legislative mechanisms. Of course, we have an oversight role in this regard, which we will work on in the coming period.”
For his part, economic researcher Elhamy El-Merghany, vice president of the Socialist Popular Alliance Party, says that the talk about the ease of establishing unions by notification alone is a reality only on paper; dozens of attempts to establish independent unions are stopped, and everyone knows the risks of that, along with the obstacles placed by the government bodies concerned.
El-Merghany explains that one cannot “imagine finding solutions to any crisis without a real will to count those affected and find representatives for them, especially as this profession is constantly growing with increasing technological progress, and the coronavirus crisis revealed how important it is; there is no economic field in Egypt in which this profession has not been part of its activity.”
Sexual Exploitation
The nature of this profession indeed makes those working in it vulnerable to many crises, the latest being attempts at sexual exploitation in its various forms by some customers, especially with women also entering the field as delivery workers in recent years. “Shallata”, as his colleagues nickname him, says: “One time when I was delivering, I went up to the customer on the seventh floor, and he asked me to come into the apartment to have some juice, but I was surprised to see him holding a tube of cream and asking me to massage his lower back, claiming he could not reach it on his own. I felt then that the customer was harassing me, so I withdrew immediately.”
The situation was different for Sameh, whom a woman asked to contact her by phone after the first time he delivered food to her, on the pretext that she would order directly from him and he would bring the order himself. Sameh, 19, recounts: “That same night she contacted me by phone, told me details about her life and assured me she was divorced and felt lonely. The next day she called me and asked me to deliver her orders myself, and as soon as I arrived she opened the door in immodest clothing, but I refused outright to enter the apartment, left the place and refused to deal with her again.”
Criminal Liability
The security dimension is one of the worrying crises for delivery workers. Assessing the current reality of this category of workers, Major General Refaat Abdel Hamid, an expert in criminal sciences, says: “First, we value young people’s pursuit of work in legitimate professions, but this must be established by law, not by temporary legislation. This law should define the roles and conditions of the machine used, the person driving it and his criminal liability, as well as the person running the business, and there must be a clear definition of the criminal liability of the person ordering the delivery, especially since this group knocks on homes at any time of day, which increases the risks to them and from some of them.”
Regarding the current reality and the security handling of this group, Refaat says that traffic officers are lenient with this group in the streets because of the living conditions citizens in Egypt are going through, but they certainly will not let through an unlicensed machine or one whose driver has no licence. As for placing delivery workers under suspicion, this is unacceptable, he explains: “In reality, he is questioned by the security forces as a way of providing information to the police, not as a suspect, since he is the closest person to the incident and the most familiar with the area; in this he is like a building doorman or an employee of a security company in the area.”
Commenting, Major General Fouad Allam, a security expert, says that the idea that people in this profession are exposed to great security risks is exaggerated, despite the repeated incidents, which is due to the huge number of people working in the profession; the matter is measured by the volume of crimes compared with the number of those working in it.
On the idea of regulating the status of motorcycles, Allam explains that the law exists, but there is a kind of leniency in applying it so as not to put pressure on these young people. However, the security authorities must re-evaluate this group and apply the law firmly, so that the commercial use of motorcycles is regulated, with what that entails in terms of insurance to provide protection and compensation for this group against road hazards.
New Groups in the Profession
During Zawia3’s tour among delivery workers, it was noticeable that new groups have entered this profession. In front of a shop selling beauty supplies on Faisal Street, Yasmine was waiting outside, sitting on her motorcycle, minutes away from the order she was due to deliver.
She tells us that “delivery is a good job for me. I now support my two children after my husband divorced me and left, and at the same time I can work at times that suit me.”
Bilal Abdel Aal, an English teacher who works on the Uber and inDrive apps, says he turned to this profession to find a source of income during the holidays, and despite the temperatures he cannot let a day pass without working, as he has four children, and delivery is now his main source of income. Meanwhile, Sayed Hashem, a bank employee in downtown Cairo in his twenties, tells us: “I need huge sums to set up a home, and I found that working an hour before bank hours and two hours after brings me a good income that helps with life’s circumstances.”
He explains: “I need an apartment to own, because I will not be able to pay a monthly rent that has exceeded EGP 8,000, and even government apartments have become for the rich only. Here I say to the President: look at the people of our profession. While I work in a bank, my older brother has been working in this profession for five years and has no other income, and not a year passes without him having an accident that he pays for with his body and health, and he finds no alternative, support or compensation.”
Delivery workers remain among the marginalised groups of workers in Egypt, finding no way to obtain their rights, and unable to secure social and insurance guarantees that would help protect them from the risks of work and life, leaving the question: when will the authorities pay attention to these marginalised groups?
