Food delivery companies Meituan Dianping and ELEME Inc. are being publicly criticized after an investigative article went viral, heating up concerns over labor rights at the companies.
An article "Those Delivery Drivers Stuck In The Internet System" published in the monthly magazine Nothing But Storytelling, detailed how food delivery riders on heavily used apps including Meituan Dianping and Alibaba's ELEME struggled under unreasonable delivery deadlines. Drivers who deliver for restaurants that offer money-back guarantees need to complete orders under deadlines as short as 30 minutes - or risk losing income or even being fired.
The article said between 2016 and 2020, the delivery deadlines had decreased successively from one hour to 30 minutes. More than half of the drivers said their earnings weren't enough to support family expenses. Only 2.15% of riders earned more than 10,000 yuan ($1,460) a month. China's minimum wage is 2,550.00 yuan but monthly living expenses for a single person in big cities like Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen are between 5,000 and 6000 yuan, according to travel information source Sapore di Cina.
CCTV news anchor Bai Yansong said in his Tuesday night program the food delivery industry was treating drivers as robots rather than human beings.
ELEME immediately posted a statement that it would launch a new feature soon that will allow customers to push back the delivery deadline by five or 10 minutes. Meanwhile, Meituan Dianping said it would introduce an eight-minute flexibility system in case of unusual circumstances such as bad weather and accidents.
However, the companies' response aroused online protests. Some respondents said the companies were simply paying lip service but in reality were transferring responsibility, and a sense of guilt, to the customer.
