“I remember biking along Wellington,” Jennifer Scott says. “There was a lot of traffic. It was really loud. It was really busy. I didn’t have a lot of space to maneuver. I could feel the coffee spilling and burning down my back.”
Scott has been a food delivery worker in Toronto for eight years, working for Foodora, Uber Eats, Skip The Dishes, and DoorDash. At the time, she was delivering an order for Uber by bike. The customer had ordered four extra-large coffees.
“It was unsafe for me to stop cycling, there was construction at the light. The safest thing to do was literally just to bike to that condo and pull into the driveway,” she recalls. “And so for, like, maybe six minutes while this super hot coffee is burning down my back and my legs, I couldn’t stop.”
“When I got there, the customer was actually outside waiting for me. All the coffee is pouring out of my bag still. He saw me pull out this empty, squishy, soft cardboard tray. And he just, like, kind of grimaced and went inside. I had a big red burn down my back for a while.”
This is just one of the horror stories Scott tells me about being a food delivery worker in Toronto. She rattles off a few more: “Men drivers telling me that they’re gonna kill me. Drivers following me at night.”
Most people in Toronto have ordered from apps like Uber Eats or Skip The Dishes. But the people who deliver food for these apps — weaving through traffic, braving rain and snow for lousy pay — are some of Toronto’s least appreciated workers.
Mahamudul Hasan Evan has been an Uber Eats delivery worker for three years. He started out delivering food by e-bike for eight to 10 hours a day as a student newly arrived from Bangladesh. Now, he works 40 hours a week as a security guard, and another 30 hours a week for Uber.
“It’s not that I want to work that much, but the living expenses and the pay rate [are] not really in favour of us,” he says. That day he had biked seven kilometres to drop off two different orders in the same trip. “Uber only paid me $3.50,” he says. Pay for the same work often changes, as workers have long known and the Toronto Star documented last year.
Three or four times, Evan has fallen off his bike when his tire got stuck in streetcar tracks. “I had a bad cut on my hand. And on my leg, I got a pretty bad pain,” he says. Twice, he’s been hit by a driver making a right turn without checking their mirrors.
But the endless construction, road rage, rude customers, and lack of bike lanes aren’t at the heart of the bad working conditions. Beneath it all is the enormous pressure that apps put on workers.
Apps promise customers their food will be delivered at unrealistic speeds, “and then reprimand us and sometimes deactivate workers for not meeting those timelines,” Scott explains.
Today, Scott is also the president of Gig Workers United, a union fighting for better working conditions. Before that, she organized with Foodsters United, the union that won the precedent-setting right for Foodora workers to unionize. Then Foodora shut down operations in Canada, and — thanks to Foodsters United — was forced to pay its former workers in a $3.46-million settlement.
Since then, the app companies have been able to keep paying people as “independent contractors,” not employees. They don’t get a minimum wage, health insurance or unemployment insurance. “They primarily target migrant workers and newcomers as workers,” says Scott, and companies “are counting on the fact that workers don’t know their rights and won’t be able to organize.”
But she says this work doesn’t have to come with a backpack full of horror stories.
After Foodora workers in Norway successfully unionized in 2019, she talked to the workers involved. They told her “once they had negotiated the contract, and they had a guaranteed hourly wage, they didn’t feel the pressure to rush to get from one location to another in the same way — as if it was the difference between paying rent, the difference between keeping their job.”
“Because they knew that they were gonna make their wage,” she says. “They knew that they could bike safer.”
This article appeared in the 2025 Summer issue.
