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> Why is their business model "poor"? Because it relies on exploitation. It offers pennies for work that ha real risks involved. No insurance, not even bike ma

> Why is their business model "poor"? Because it relies on exploitation. It offers pennies for work that ha real risks involved. No insurance, not even bike maintenance is offered. You're on your own and if you happen to be the unemployed, unprivileged youngster from the outskirts of Stockholm (quite common) and anything happens while you're riding for one of these companies (car hits you, pedestrian walks out in front of you, etc.), at best your bike is busted and you can't even pay back the money you borrowed to buy it just to get the job. At worst you'll have serious injuries and you'll need treatment that you'll get for relatively little cost only because this is Sweden not one of those fucked up countries where health care is terrible and you'd go bankrupt if such a thing happened to you. That's why the mode is poor. It makes me sad that all these delivery companies build thir business on exploitation.

Fnoord 9y ago
Well said, and on top of that the pressure to deliver in a short amount of time is high. Which leads to taking risks in traffic. Sure, that might go well usually [deliberately not gonna make examples where it can go well], but there's still a higher risk than abiding the traffic law. You can actually read in the article that the reporter broke the law, on multiple occasions. One thing it has going for it is that as with a lot of jobs you get better with practice. You learn to take your breaks, you get better muscles (as with any physical labour job), etc. However, what happens if you retract a muscle one day? In a normal job you'd call sick, and in EU if you're on contract that means benefits. What we need is two things: one we need laws structured to make this type of self-employment illegal (since the relationship between contractor and contractee is clearly top-down, and requires near to no expertise), and two we need active enforcement of this law.

Fnoord 9y ago

Well said, and on top of that the pressure to deliver in a short amount of time is high. Which leads to taking risks in traffic. Sure, that might go well usually [deliberately not gonna make examples where it can go well], but there's still a higher risk than abiding the traffic law. You can actually read in the article that the reporter broke the law, on multiple occasions. One thing it has going for it is that as with a lot of jobs you get better with practice. You learn to take your breaks, you get better muscles (as with any physical labour job), etc. However, what happens if you retract a muscle one day? In a normal job you'd call sick, and in EU if you're on contract that means benefits. What we need is two things: one we need laws structured to make this type of self-employment illegal (since the relationship between contractor and contractee is clearly top-down, and requires near to no expertise), and two we need active enforcement of this law.