Platform work during the COVID-19 pandemic: a case study of Glovo couriers in Poland

The SARS-COV-2 virus has changed all spheres of life as we know it. This article considers the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the gig economy sector, in particular on the work of bicycle couriers in Poland. The main research question is whether in this case the impact is positive (it is a ‘good’ occupation during the pandemic) or negative (gig economy has suffered the consequences of the lockdown just like all other sectors). In order to answer this question, I conducted 20 semi-structured online interviews with Glovo couriers in March and April 2020 and analysed 1300 posts on their internet forum. The analysis of the research material makes it possible to conclude that in the period of the pandemic and the lockdown of the Polish economy, working as a courier was at least a partial ‘remedy’ for the problems on the labour market. The couriers themselves generally did not feel the negative impact of the coronavirus on their occupational situation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has unexpectedly taken hold of the public and private sphere worldwide: over just one month, March 2020, our reality changed beyond recognition. Apart from obvious consequences to human life and health, COVID-19 has also directly hit the economy. The affected countries instantly developed assistance packages for employees and entrepreneurs as hundreds of thousands of self-employed people, workers on junk contracts and small business owners had lost their source of income overnight. In the long run, the crisis will affect all industries and some players will not survive on the market. Of course, the most vulnerable are those working under contracts other than employment contracts in such sectors as the restaurant industry, culture and entertainment, sport and leisure, hotel and tourism. It is estimated that only in Poland up to 780,000 people, 57% of them women, will lose their jobs in these industries (Myck et al. 2020).

One sector particularly hit by the global recession is gig economy, which encompasses several types of economic activities, and generally refers to ‘people using apps [platforms] to sell their labour’ (Taylor et al. 2017: 25; Wood et al. 2019) – platform workers. Gig economy involves both work that is performed via platforms but delivered locally, and thus requires the worker to be physically present (e.g. Uber), and work that is performed and delivered remotely via platforms (e.g. Amazon Mechanical Turk) (Huws et al. 2016).

In February 2020 it was still viewed as the latest trend transforming global economy, one that would soon conquer all labour markets, including Polish. A month later we woke up in a completely new reality. The lack of job stability, which is typical of work within the gig economy sector and has always been its most serious drawback, has become even more acute in the face of the pandemic. Among those particularly affected were people who relied on ‘gigs’ as the main source of income: they lost their livelihood overnight. One of the main types of work within gig economy is platform work. When a large proportion of citizens has to stay at home, working via platforms seems to be a solution to stay afloat. But is it really?

This article aims to provide a preliminary verification of whether platform work could be ‘a remedy’ for labour market problems caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on the dichotomy proposed by Stephany et al. (2020), my research question is as follows: What effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on food couriers’ work can we notice in Poland: (1) the distancing bonus effect or (2) the downscaling loss effect?

The study is based on semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted with Glovo couriers in Poland in March and April 2020 and on the analysis of posts which appeared in closed discussion groups including Glovo couriers in March, April and May 2020. Those months were particularly important due to the growth of COVID-19 cases on the one hand and the economic lockdown in Poland on the other.

This article consists of five parts, the first three of which are respectively focused on platform work, the Glovo company and the methodology of the study. The following section presents the work of Glovo couriers in Poland during the pandemic. These observations are followed by conclusions.

Work that is organised via online platforms involves a wide range of different variables, many of which overlap with other categories of work (Huws et al. 2016). Although in general terms platform work means earning money via online platforms, this system is not uniform and, accordingly, there are several classifications of such work. For example, following Huws et al. (2016), platform work can be defined as both platform-mediated work, performed online (e.g. Amazon Mechanical Turk), and offline work where a platform only serves the purpose of matching clients with service providers (e.g. Uber, TaskRabbit). No matter what classification and definition of platform work we adopt, it is apparent that the number of employees involved in such working patterns is growing.

In the context in focus of this study, platform work is based on so-called ‘gigs’, small tasks or jobs that individuals are contracted to carry out by companies that ‘adopt platforms as their operational model, using internet technology to act as de facto intermediaries of labour supply and demand for the provision of services – such as delivery, cleaning, admin and data processing work’ (Tassinari and Maccarrone 2020: 36).

One group whose work is based on gigs are food delivery couriers. They have recently been widely studied, especially in relation to such issues as platform worker protests (Joyce et al. 2020; Tassinari and Maccarrone 2020; Vandaele 2018), autonomy (Ivanova et al. 2018; Cant 2019; Wood et al. 2019), working conditions (de Groen et al. 2018) or the nature of platform work in general (Drahokoupil and Piasna 2019). Another topic of study is the employment status of food couriers (Martínez 2019). However, there have only been a few studies so far on online workers that include the COVID-19 pandemic variable (Stephany et al. 2020; Raj, Sundararajan and You 2020; Spurk and Straub 2020).

Existing studies conducted in Poland indicate that platform work leads to precarisation (Polkowska 2019). In the current situation, however, it is worth asking whether the COVID-19 factor aggravates the situation or perhaps (at least temporarily) leads to the reduction of precarity.

Glovo is a Spanish start-up founded in Barcelona in 2015. It is an on-demand courier service that purchases, picks up and delivers products ordered through its mobile app. From 2019 it operates also in Poland, where it offers its services in thirty cities. Over ten months of the company's presence in the country, the app was downloaded a million times.¹

The Glovo app is available in 550 cities in 22 countries and has about 2.6 million users a month; their orders are delivered by about 50,000 couriers each day. The company employs about 1600 people worldwide, including 124 in the Polish branch. Poland is the third largest market in terms of the number of Glovo staff, after Spain and Argentina (Izakowski 2020).

Although the business model of all such apps (Uber Eats, Glovo, Deliveroo, Foodora) is based on a similar pattern, the work of Glovo couriers has not been extensively analysed so far. One of the few studies on Glovo is an article by Alvarez-Palau et al. (2020), aiming to provide understanding of what types of restaurants have joined the platform, how this has affected their annual turnover, where their physical premises are located, and how the consumer's location affects the service.

In turn, Uber Eats, like the ‘classic’ Uber, has long been a topic of interest to researchers around the world: from Brazil (Monty 2018; De Araujo Leão et al. 2019) and Canada (Schilling et al. 2019) to India (Jacob et al. al. 2019; Raina et al. 2018). Deliveroo and Foodora, which do not operate on the Polish market as yet, have also been thoroughly examined, mainly when it comes to couriers’ protests over the financial policy of these companies (see Tassinari and Maccarone 2020; Cant 2019).

I have adopted the dichotomy proposed by Stephany et al. (2020) concerning the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on freelancers’ work (the distancing bonus effect vs the downscaling loss effect) to study platform workers in Poland. I found this analytical framework suitable in the COVID-19 context. My additional aim was to check whether this dichotomy may be used to analyse another type of online work. It was important to use the existing analytical framework that is focused on the COVID-19 issue.

I have put forward the main research question as follows:

In order to answer this question, I conducted a qualitative study among twenty Glovo couriers in Poland. Due to the pandemic lockdown, all interviews were conducted online. The participants were recruited using purposive snowball sampling (Yin 2013) owing to limited sampling options caused by COVID-19. The study relied on semi-structured interviews and was carried out in March and April 2020; the interviews lasted between 45 and 60 min. The sample included 18 men and 2 women. All of the informants were couriers using their own bikes to deliver food. Half of them had worked for Glovo before March 2020 (for a few months), and the rest joined the company because they had lost their work during the pandemic.

The second source of data were posts which appeared in closed discussion groups including Glovo couriers in March (407 posts analysed), April (546 posts) and May 2020 (352 posts). The number of analysed posts from May 2020 is lower than in March and April owing to the restart of the Polish economy. Although the first stage of the process was launched on 20 April, it did not have a large impact on the number of deliveries made by Glovo couriers.² In the next stages, however, this number began to decrease slowly (stage two, 4 May: reopening of some hotels and other guest accommodation, some cultural institutions and libraries; stage three, 18 May: reopening of food outlets, shops in shopping centres, beauty parlours, hair salons and barbers). Therefore, the last analysed post was dated 17 May. The total number of analysed posts was over 1300. In view of ethical considerations, I made every effort to prevent the identification of the authors of the posts.

It is worth mentioning that restaurants, cafes and pubs were closed between 13 March 2020 (when the lockdown of the economy was announced) and 18 May 2020 (stage three of the reopening of the Polish economy).³ During this period, they only sold takeaway / home delivery meals; grocery shops remained open (in some cases, the opening hours were extended).

The analysis adopted a multi-stage coding procedure (largely based on grounded theory, Glaser and Strauss 2017) which consisted of several rounds: the first round (open coding) was based on the researcher's intuition, the second (focused coding) involved classification of codes into categories that emerged during the analysis, and the third one aimed to identify the core analytical category. In the next stage, categories were classified into topics, which enabled the identification of the type of effect that dominated among Glovo couriers in Poland.

Based on the analysed posts, I distinguished two main analytical categories: the ‘COVID-19’ category and the ‘business-as-usual’ category. There were 392 posts about the COVID-19 crisis (both in relation to work safety and health safety issues) and 908 posts on other issues (most of them concerning business-as-usual issues: problems with the app, problems with the support centre, billing problems, tips for beginners). There were also over a dozen posts unrelated to the COVID-19 category or the business-as-usual category (e.g. jokes, memes). Most of the 392 posts concerning the COVID-19 crisis were published in March 2020 (256 posts).

The few studies on food platforms in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic attempt to answer the question about its impact on platform work. In their article on Uber Eats in the United States during the pandemic, Manav Raj, Arun Sundararajan and Calum You (2020) observe that small restaurants experience significant increases in total activity and the number of orders. They also notice that the growth in the number of providers on a platform induces both market expansion and heightened inter-provider competition. Importantly, digital platforms enabled restaurant survival during the COVID-19 lockdown by providing critical continuity in access to customers. The authors stress the importance of platforms like Uber Eats in the economy of the future.

Stephany et al. (2020), in turn, suggest that among online freelancers in the United States the downscaling loss effect may dominate over the distancing bonus effect during the COVID-19 pandemic. The freelancers reported that there were fewer jobs being posted, and long-standing clients were pausing current projects. Furthermore, there were six times more people bidding for the jobs than even a month earlier. However, none of those studies relies on interviews with workers and on their opinions on work during the pandemic.

Based on the replies from couriers and on the analysis of their posts, it might be noticed that platform workers in Poland experienced distancing bonus effect rather than the downscaling loss effect. All of the informants were satisfied with their job. They noticed a great increase in the number of orders and, as a result, they were satisfied with the pay:

Answering the question whether working as a food courier was a good occupation during the pandemic crisis, they all said ‘Yes, it is’: What could be noticed in the replies as well as in the internet posts was some dissatisfaction on the part of couriers related to the lack of sufficient protective measures (face masks, gloves, etc.): all couriers bought these accessories on their own, and the Glovo company only provided them with advice on how to avoid infection.

The couriers (especially those who started working for Glovo during the pandemic) stressed that it was easy to start this work and noted its relatively high stability and rate of pay. So far, none of them was thinking about changing jobs or even looking for some other employment. They were very happy to work for Glovo, although they had not known the rules of the job before starting it.

The informants often stressed that they had noticed an increase in the number of orders:

As it turns out, then, in spite of restrictions some business sectors expanded their activity under lockdown. In March and April 2020, the Glovo company made its services available in a number of cities where it had not been present before. At the same time, citizens forced to stay at home began to order food through the app on a large scale.

However, based on the analysis of posts from the online discussion group for Glovo couriers, it might be noticed that the rise in the number of orders was related not only to the increase in the number of restaurants that joined the platform but mostly to an agreement between Glovo and the food discount chain called Biedronka. This move turned out to be a great success for the platform: many people who could not or did not want to do shopping themselves made their orders online and had them delivered to their door.

The analysis of posts from the discussion group confirms that the work of food couriers during the pandemic was a profitable activity. At the same time, Uber drivers experienced considerable losses (the number of trips dropped by an average of 80%, and Uber's full-time employees were massively laid off via Zoom).⁵

However, although food delivery services are in high demand and these workers may not fear income or job loss, we still need to remember that instead they have to deal with the fear of getting sick and being unable to continue working because of COVID-19. Glovo couriers are aware of this and treat their job as service: they feel like they are ‘on the front line’, after doctors, nurses and paramedics. One of them said as follows:

Glovo couriers emphasised that the customers were grateful that they continued to work in such a dangerous period and that they took care of those who had to remain at home, which had not been the case before the pandemic. Therefore, they feel double satisfaction with the work they do: on the one hand, they remain on the labour market, while many other professional groups, also within the gig economy sector, have lost their jobs due to COVID-19; on the other hand, they feel for the first time that they do something really important, something that others cannot do. Their fear of getting sick, then, is mixed with the satisfaction of being needed.

The COVID-19 pandemic makes the precarious situation for platform workers more salient within society and in the future provides the opportunity for these workers enhancing their skills and working conditions (Scheiber 2020).

Based on the collected material, it can be concluded that the work of food couriers is actually a ‘good job’ during the COVID-19 pandemic: it enables those who have unexpectedly lost their source of income to stay afloat. It also gives satisfaction to those who started this work before the pandemic, mainly due to an increase in the number of orders and thus an increase in earnings. This means that in the light of the obtained data, in the case of Poland we can talk about the distancing bonus effect rather than the downscaling loss effect. However, considering the limited scale of the study and the specific period in which it was conducted (total lockdown), it would be worth repeating when the economy returns to normal. Preliminary conclusions do not confirm the precarity of the work of bicycle couriers. This issue is worth further research as the studies of platform work conducted so far have identified this category of workers as precarious (Polkowska 2019).

Even if the world of work is different after the COVID-19 pandemic, it might be expected that platform workers in general and food couriers in particular will take another, maybe even more recognised position in the labour market (Spurk and Straub 2020), and that respect for couriers’ work will increase.

How has COVID-19 affected food couriers’ work? Based on the analysed data it might be said that in the short-term perspective it was one way to stay afloat after losing a job in a different sector. On the other hand, many couriers claimed that they were satisfied with this occupation and they treated it like some kind of ‘mission’ during the pandemic, when many people stayed at home. However, in the long-term perspective, when we already know that SARS-COV-2 will stay with us for long, it might be predicted that food couriers’ work will remain unchanged. After an initial increase in the prestige of and respect for their work (people were grateful that someone supplied them with food), everything will probably return to the original state in about six months.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Dominika Polkowska, PhD, sociologist, assistant professor at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University (UMCS) in Lublin, Poland. Deputy Director of the Institute of Sociology UMCS. Her research interests focus on platform work, pracariat and precarity (especially in relation to migrants) and industrial relations.