By Taroa Zuñiga Silva
Servio Hernández is one of the millions of workers around the world, from Chile to South Korea, who hustle to deliver food and other products to people’s homes. If conditions for these delivery workers were terrible before the pandemic, they have only become worse during the ongoing pandemic.
The abrupt pandemic growth of delivery services keeps these workers in legal limbo. Hernández told me that to date, none of these companies has been audited in Chile. He knows this because his organization—Riders Unidos Ya—has two lawsuits in progress against PedidosYa. The complaints have been filed by individuals since legally the workers do not have an employment relationship with the company; they are “self-employed” or freelance workers, which means that they cannot form a union.
