They are there, perched on their bike, leaning on their scooter. And they are waiting. A few minutes or even hours, the notification on their phone will tell them that an order has been placed in one of the fast food restaurants around them and is waiting to be delivered. We are place de Clichy, in the 17e arrondissement of Paris, one of the places in the capital where two-wheeled delivery people gather.
These work for the American platform Uber Eats. Amidou, a 37-year-old Ivorian, in France since 2019, first “worked a little in the building”. “I was putting up scaffolding but the guy wasn’t paying so I joined some friends who were doing deliveries. » All the rides he made were recorded on the Uber Eats app. It shows us what a ” good week “ : more than seventy hours worked, paid 500 euros. Another week he accumulated ” only “ fifty hours for 263 euros, or just over 5 euros per hour. His colleague Aboubakar, a 25-year-old Guinean, has posted no less than 12,000 races since joining the platform in June 2020, for an average income of 400 euros per week.
That day, all those crossed place de Clichy are undocumented. “If you have French papers, you are not going to be a delivery man”assures Aboubakar. “French delivery men, I don’t know any”abounds Amidou.
“Degradation of working conditions”
It is difficult to gauge the share of undocumented migrants who run platforms like Uber Eats. To join the fleets, they sometimes use the account that a compatriot in good standing rents to them for a hundred euros a week, or use falsified identity documents.
Practices that led Uber Eats to recently deactivate more than 2,500 worker accounts identified as fraudulent, out of a total of 60,000 active accounts. In protest, on September 12, several hundred undocumented delivery men marched through Paris (350 according to the police, 750 according to the organizers), and went to the French headquarters of Uber Eats. Usually confined to discretion because of their irregular administrative situation, these delivery men have decided to come out of the shadows to demand their regularization.
Doctoral student in sociology at the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts (CNAM) and author of a thesis on meal delivery platform workers, Arthur Jan recalls that when the platforms were launched, “there were a lot of students or young people with few qualifications, attracted by the promise of flexibility, independence and the practice of cycling”. ” But wages have fallen, and as working conditions have deteriorated, more and more immigrant workers have been seenhe says. For two years, we have seen a population massively made up of foreigners who arrived less than five years ago and, for many, undocumented. »
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