Every day, gig worker Carvalho bikes around the northwestern Brazilian city of Manaus for five hours, delivering for iFood. But at the end of the week, only a part of his earnings is transferred to his bank account. He loses at least 50 reais ($10) on the “rent” he pays to the real owner of the iFood account that he uses for his work.
Carvalho, who requested to be identified only by his last name for fear of reprisal from Brazil’s leading food delivery platform, told Rest of World he’d prefer to work from his own account and bring home his entire wage. But iFood banned him in early 2023. He said he was blocked from the platform after he failed to return an order that his client did not collect.
Carvalho is among a group of gig workers who rent iFood, Uber, and DiDi accounts from other workers. They use the rented profiles to bypass bans, providing additional income to the workers who own these accounts.
Despite the platforms explicitly banning the practice of sharing or renting accounts, as many as 30% of the approximately 500,000 gig workers in Mexico could be using someone else’s account, Sergio Guerrero, leader of the gig work union Unión Nacional de Trabajadores por Aplicación in Mexico City, told Rest of World.
“Gig workers need to be working more than 12 hours a day, seven days a week across multiple platforms to make a living,” Kruskaya Hidalgo Cordero, who researches gig work platforms at labor rights organization Solidarity Center in Mexico City, told Rest of World. “Renting one of their accounts is a way of bringing in additional money.”
The rise in gig account rentals is a result of profile bans, and dwindling income due to rising fuel costs and an oversupply of workers, according to experts and 10 workers in Mexico and Brazil — the two Latin American countries with the biggest gig work markets.
“There’s no work stability,” said Guerrero. When accounts get blocked with increasing ease, workers “keep getting smaller slices of the pie if they have to pay rent to use the platform,” he said.
In January, LR, a gig worker in Brazil, discovered that the delivery address provided by the customer was incorrect. When he tried to return the order, iFood, which controls 80% of the food delivery sector in the country, blocked his account. “[IFood] listens more to customers than to the workers,” LR, who requested to be identified by his initials for fear of reprisal from iFood, told Rest of World. He’s currently renting an account from a colleague for $20 per week.
In July 2023, Brazilian delivery platform AppJusto changed its policy to ensure workers received a clear description of the terms of service they had violated and whether this would lead to a temporary block or a permanent ban from the platform. Workers are given three days to present a defense. According to Fairwork, a research group focused on platform work, no other platform in Brazil has a similar system in place.
Uber and iFood have implemented ID verification to curb account rentals, and now require a worker’s thumbprint or selfie sent through the registered device. But workers have found a way around this: They now travel to wherever the owner of the account is located to validate the ID, or keep their account open to avoid a login check. Once the ID is validated, workers take new orders under the rented account, for which they pay the owner an hourly, daily, or monthly cut of their earnings.
For those renting out their accounts, the extra profit is marginal but easy money. “Many workers don’t work their full hours on the apps, so renting out their own accounts gives them the chance to receive an income without having to work themselves,” Saúl Gómez Piña, a spokesperson for Ni Un Repartidor Menos, a grassroots delivery workers’ organization in Mexico, told Rest of World.
For DM, a gig worker from the southeastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, this additional wage has become a lifeline as gig work becomes less profitable. “The rates [of gig work] are too low and gas is super expensive, plus [there’s the] added cost of changing tires and oil,” DM told Rest of World.
Renting an account leaves workers more vulnerable, not only to the inherent risks of working without insurance — which only covers account owners — but also to scams.
In a statement to Rest of World, DiDi Food Mexico said it has a “zero tolerance” policy for the practice. It warned that the advertisements hawking accounts for rent — often found on Facebook groups and Marketplace — are often fraudulent. The DiDi-owned ridesharing company 99 told Rest of World it has a specialized team in Brazil to report and take down such posts in partnership with social media platforms.
“Any offer to sell something illicit or irregular should not be taken at face value,” a spokesperson for Uber told Rest of World.
Carvalho was blocked on iFood after he failed to return an order to a supermarket when the customer didn’t show up to collect it. He turned to iFood’s in-app chatbot, but rather than resolve the issue, the app informed him that he had been banned for violating company policies. Carvalho said the platform never specified which policy he violated, but believes it is related to the failed return.
If a worker doesn’t return an undelivered order, they are given a warning and a “strike” before being deactivated, Johnny Borges, social impact director at iFood, told Rest of World. Drivers whose accounts are deactivated have 90 days to appeal the decision and iFood has four to analyze the case and issue a verdict, Borges said. For cases of fraud, deactivation is immediate.
Still, workers say the company doesn’t offer them adequate support.
“They don’t listen to [those of] us who are on the front lines, taking and delivering orders, making it happen,” said Carvalho. “They think, ‘Today we lose 10 workers, tomorrow we get 20 or 30,’ because there are many people wanting to work with iFood.”
Source: restofworld.org
