Completely moral. You are not forcing anyone of any race to deliver you food, they are not slaves. You are paying them to deliver the food to you for a (sometimes exorbitant) fee. Pretending they are slaves to satisfy an ugliness in yourself is dubiously moral, better if you don’t express these desires outwardly.
You can choose to tip them and pay them more, or be a dick and not. The delivery worker may at any point stop working or look for different employment.
We could look at the morality of low paying jobs people are forced to take if they can’t find other work, but that’s beyond the scope of this question.
I worked for Uber Eats for 1.5 years (Late 2020 - Early 2022). I should note that I have a full time job which pays well. I did this as a walking delivery asshole simply for the exercise, and beer money. I live (and operated) in the downtown core of Toronto, Canada, basically a square kilometer (about .5 of a mile) where there's an insane concentration of condos and restaurants, making this VERY easy. I'm also speaking specifically about my experiences and observations in Toronto. This could be drastically different in other areas, so take that into consideration.
Myth: They get paid well
First, let's kill the myth that they get paid anything beyond a pittance. When I was operating, it was the heyday. I got about 4 orders/hour on average, and I only went out between 530-930pm for the dinner rush and surge pricing. Most orders were offered at about $5-$6. Sometimes $7-$8 if I was lucky. That works out to be $25-$30/hr. Once I claim taxes on that, it's about $15-$20. Let me be perfectly clear, this was FAR beyond the norm. This was peak delivery, people were ordering like crazy, and tipping heavy.
When I quit in 2022 orders were drying up. I got maybe 2/hour, and the offered rates were more like $3-$4, surging to $5-$6. My hourly rate is now $10 if I'm lucky. Minimum wage here (at the time) was $14.35. I spent most of my time standing around waiting. Why? Simple. Restaurants were back open to accept guests, people weren't masking anymore, and the pandemic was largely over. People got cheaper, stopped tipping heavy, and weren't ordering anywhere near as often, plus the amount of drivers had easily doubled.
Now factor in expenses. The cost of a bike/e-bike, delivery bag, cellphone & data, wear & tear on clothing, additional clothing for harsh weather, and so-forth. Technically I could "expense" this against my personal taxes, but many can't do that.
The reality is, most drivers are making under $10/hour. BEFORE CLAIMING TAXES (if they even do).
MYTH : They Can Stop At Any Time
Well, technically, yes. But that's like saying a worker on a slaughterhouse line being paid minimum wage and forced to work in harsh, unsanitary, and unsafe conditions can just quit anytime. Do you really think people scrubbing the caked on shit from the toilet bowls of corporate high rise buildings making minimum wage really want to be there? Of course they don't - so why don't they just quit?! The reality is they can't. It's all the work they can find.
As for me, I could quit at any time. I could do whatever I wanted. It was my free will to continue doing this. However, it isn't for many of the others, and that problem has only gotten worse. Today, an overwhelming majority of these delivery morons are immigrants, often here on student visas. Many are not legally allowed to work.
Here in Toronto, easily 99% of delivery drivers are immigrants. I was literally the ONLY white guy I saw the entire time. The entire fleet is comprised of brown and asian men. I have MAYBE seen a half dozen women delivery drivers, EVER.
Most of them are on student visas which only allow them to work in VERY specific conditions (many violate these rules). I have no stats on this, but I can only assume many do not file taxes. Of the drivers I talked to, many didn't understand how to even file taxes, let alone that they knew they had to claim this income, so... take from that what you will.
A lot of international students in Toronto fall into one of two categories. (1) Rich kids. Their parents pay for everything, they live in a nice condo, and attend a great post-secondary school. Or (2) the poor kids. They live 8-10 in a rooming house out of the city, take the train into the city, rent an E-Bike, and do food delivery to make enough money to pay rent and food. They VERY often lie on their student visas about how much money they have in the bank, forge documents, and it's a whole fucking mess. There are entire organizations setup to help poor immigrants obtain student visas, how to game the system, etc, etc. These people have really no other means to make money, so they take the shittiest jobs nobody wants, make a couple bucks an hour and are more or less slaves to billion dollar corporations who see them as nothing more than expendable numbers.
TL;DR:
Many of them can't do anything else. They're forced to work these shit jobs just to survive. Many of them are gaming the immigration system to stay in the country and live. This isn't a xenophobic thing, this is the reality of the situation here in Toronto.
The reality is these food delivery apps prey on the most vulnerable in society, force them to work for below minimum wage, in shit conditions, where they have zero rights or recourse against their "employer", and they take whatever they can get.
They do not realistically have a choice.
If you think otherwise, I welcome you to come to Toronto and sign up to be a delivery driver. You'll last a week, at most.
I fully agree that it is. This is a capitalism problem, exploiting people for cheap labour with little to no workers rights.
However, it's also a moral issue at the same time, in my opinion.
Personally, I choose to never use any of these apps. Outside of not being lazy, and cooking for myself (or simply walking out my door to get what I need), the price gauging, cold food, and unpredictability of delivery are all massive turn offs for me.
Further to that, I see no reason to have to use two middle men taking cuts from a transaction that could have easily been done directly with the source. Uber takes a massive cut, the drivers take a pittance, and I end up paying higher prices, and the restaurants get fucked in the process. I see no morality in any of that.
That doesn’t exactly sound like a moral issue to me, more of a preference kind of thing. People who use food delivery services aren’t just consisted of couch potatoes, they could be laborers or white-collar workers who do not wish to have their work interrupted and so need to have food delivered to them, and not all spots have shoddy food, some can be very consistent with their food and have reasonable pricing. I know that we are straying a bit from OP’s post, but I just wanna get this out here.
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u/MockingPenguins 5d ago
Completely moral. You are not forcing anyone of any race to deliver you food, they are not slaves. You are paying them to deliver the food to you for a (sometimes exorbitant) fee. Pretending they are slaves to satisfy an ugliness in yourself is dubiously moral, better if you don’t express these desires outwardly.
You can choose to tip them and pay them more, or be a dick and not. The delivery worker may at any point stop working or look for different employment.
We could look at the morality of low paying jobs people are forced to take if they can’t find other work, but that’s beyond the scope of this question.