Purchasing food from restaurants and grocery stores and having it delivered to your doorstep is convenient and has become popular in the Nordic countries. Foodora, Wolt and Just Eat are the platform companies dominating the Nordic market. These companies use the digital infrastructure of a platform to coordinate supply and demand (Srnicek, 2017) and usually classify their couriers as independent contractors or use other non-standard forms of employment (Jesnes, 2024). These working arrangements deviate from the standard employment relationship prevalent in the Nordic countries (Rasmussen et al., 2019), raising concerns about the couriers’ working conditions and their health and safety.
In this chapter, we investigate working environment challenges that may arise with digitalized work arrangements like app-based food delivery in the Nordic countries. We are particularly interested in how app-based food delivery companies use algorithmic management techniques to control couriers, and in what ways this affects couriers’ occupational safety and health. We build on three case studies of app-based food delivery companies in Denmark and Norway, Just Eat, Foodora and Wolt, that use different forms of employment. We have conducted interviews with couriers, platform companies and union representatives, as well as desk research and document reviews.
First, we present our theoretical framework, wherein we define how we understand algorithmic management and which dimensions of working environment challenges we focus on in our empirical analysis. Then we present our methods and describe the empirical cases and, finally, share our analysis and conclusion. We argue that app-based food delivery work is insecure, physically demanding and mentally exhausting, but we find differences in how couriers cope with these challenges. Furthermore, working environment challenges seem to be connected to type of employment arrangement, with some business models putting couriers more at risk than others.
