Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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FOOD DELIVERY WORKERS have hailed new legislation passed by the Legislative Yuan as a victory. The new laws will require delivery workers to be paid at least 45 NT per order. The delivery time of orders will also be used to provide a minimum wage no less than 1.25 times the minimum hourly wage. The Ministry of Labor will be the competent authority for the labor rights of migrant workers and will be required to draw up provisions for pay calculation, contract termination, and etc. The Taiwan Delivery Industry Union Alliance and National Delivery Industrial Union have hailed the bill as a victory after six-and-a-half years of campaigning, then.
Food delivery workers began to organize in 2021 and call for the formation of a nationwide delivery workers union. This was in reaction to new salary calculation formulas announced by both Uber Eats and Foodpanda that would have cut their salaries by 10% to 30%. While workers could have made between 65 NT to 75 NT on a delivery last year, now workers will make between 43 NT to 50 NT on the same delivery. As such, workers will need to work more hours while making less pay. According to Chen Yu-an, one of the union conveners, while he previously made 9,600 NT by delivering 110 orders in a week, after the changes, he made 9,000 NT by 164 orders.
Workers were critical of the fact that these changes, which severely affect their livelihood, were announced without consultation with workers by Uber Eats or Foodpanda. As such, they criticized the new salary calculation formulas as decided through a “black box.”
Likewise, the changes increased the odds of accidents for delivery workers. The average rate of accidents in central Taiwan for delivery workers increased from 1.4 times per month to 4 times a month after the new changes in salary calculation were implemented in 2021. Workers then called for accident compensation to be raised to at least 100,000 NT.
Under the new laws, platforms that fail to report accidents within eight hours will be fined 30,000 NT to 300,000 NT. Platforms that violate pay regulations will be fined 100,000 NT. Companies will also be required to provide group accident insurance and liability insurance for delivery workers.
In particular, the new changes strengthen protections for delivery workers in line with regular employers. Previously, classifying delivery workers as formal employees but as temporary contractors served as a means to deny them benefits that they would otherwise be owed as employees.
Uber’s entrance into the Taiwanese market as a ride-sharing service was a contested one to begin with, with Uber registering as a software company and not a taxi company to try and evade regulation as a taxi company, and racking up continual fines because of its refusal to stop operating in Taiwan. This is part of what originally led to the shift toward Uber providing food delivery services in Taiwan, seeing as legal challenges prevented Uber drivers from directly operating as a ride-sharing service. Eventually, a compromise was found with Uber registering as a taxi company.
Yet with Uber facing resistance from local taxi unions at that point in time, Uber sought to frame the issue as one in which the Taiwanese government was failing to adapt to trends in global innovation, through its failure to make way for Uber. Consequently, Uber sought to depict taxi unions as conservative forces bent on preventing innovation, thereby miring Uber in old frameworks of employment.
Indeed, the rise of the “gig economy” has allowed companies such as Uber, Foodpanda, and others to skirt regulations by framing worker exploitation as technological innovation. In 2024, news broke that Uber and Foodpanda planned to merge, which proved concerning to delivery workers in that the monopoly over the food delivery industry that would result could allow for their rights to be further constrained. Eventually, the merger bid was rejected by antitrust authorities. Yet the new legislation serves to uphold that delivery workers are not, in fact, exempt from the worker protections that they should enjoy. It is to be seen as to enforcement of the new laws going forward.