More than five months after British Columbia introduced new rules aimed at ensuring fair pay for app-based gig workers, rideshare driver Kuljeet Singh says his earnings have dropped to their lowest point yet.
“It’s getting worse,” said Singh, who has worked as an Uber driver for five years in Vancouver. “I’m making 20 to 30 per cent less than I used to,” he said, noting that his wages have been gradually declining over the past few years.
Singh said he now spends about 13 hours a day active on the app waiting for work but doesn’t get many trips due to the surplus of drivers. After factoring in the expenses of car maintenance and gas, Singh says he is barely able to make minimum wage.
It feels like “doing a slavery job,” Singh said. “The government said they’re making changes, but nothing has changed. We’re fed up now.”
Spurred by a pandemic surge in delivery app usage, the rideshare and food courier workforce has skyrocketed — made up largely of newcomers and precarious workers with few other job options — prompting legislative changes aimed at setting employment standards for gig workers on platforms such as Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and Skip the Dishes.
However, after B.C. became the first province to provide a minimum wage and other protections for gig workers in September, labour experts and advocates are questioning whether other provinces, like Ontario, should follow suit. They argue that the current reforms fall short of ensuring fair wages and real protections for workers.
The rules in B.C. set a minimum wage of $20.88 per hour for “engaged time” — the hours drivers spend actively completing trips or deliveries — but don’t account for the time spent waiting for work, which many drivers say now makes up a large portion of their day.
Ontario’s Digital Platform Workers’ Rights Act, set to take effect in July, promises similar measures, but experts warn that unless all hours worked are covered, gig workers will continue to bear the financial burden while companies avoid paying for much of their labour.
“The minimum wage legislation is a smokescreen. It doesn’t get to the root of the problem, which is the underlying business model,” said labour-relations lawyer Ryan White of Cavalluzzo LLP.
“These reforms don’t address one of the main forms of exploitation in the industry, which is the failure to compensate for all time spent on the app attempting to get work and creating this fiction of engaged time.”
Jim Stanford, economist and director of the think tank Centre for Future Work, echoed this sentiment.
“The core problem is there’s no limit on the labour supply and no requirement that the company pay for the unpaid time,” Stanford said.
“The B.C. rules haven’t solved the core problem, and the Ford (government’s) version of it certainly won’t solve the core problem either.”
The province’s new labour minister, Jennifer Whiteside, and “refine or replace any regulations that are not achieving the intended outcomes.”
Nearly such as Uber, Lyft and DoorDash in 2024, up from 468,000 people in 2023, according to data from Statistics Canada. The number of digital workers increased from 1.7 per cent of the population from the ages of 15 to 69 in 2023, to 2.3 per cent of that age group in 2024.
The data also showed that immigrants who had arrived in the last five years were more than three times more likely to have done paid work through a digital platform compared with people born in Canada.
Stanford said that with so many workers competing for jobs, paying 20 per cent above B.C.’s $17.40 minimum wage for engaged time won’t fix the problem.
“As long as there’s enough desperate people around who are willing to do this work for well below minimum wage, paying a higher hourly rate for the engaged time will be self-defeating,” he said.
“You’ll get even more people online doing nothing, getting paid nothing. It’s an enormous waste.”
However, DoorDash said new regulations have driven up delivery costs across B.C., resulting in fewer orders from consumers and, ultimately, fewer work opportunities for drivers.
“As these regulations are still in their early months, we will continue to closely monitor the impacts,” a DoorDash spokesperson said in an email.
Uber Canada spokesperson Keerthana Rang said the company ensures drivers make minimum wage per engaged hour.
“If drivers earn less than the guaranteed minimum — the combined $20.88 per active hour and $0.45 per active km — Uber will top up their pay,” Rang said in an email.
The president of the B.C. Federation of Labour, Sussanne Skidmore, said the engaged-time pay model leaves drivers “unpaid for a huge amount of their work and may result in workers earning less than the minimum wage.”
Lyft and Skip the Dishes did not respond to requests for comment.
Labour advocates say that the crux of the problem facing workers in the gig economy is their employment status, and Ontario’s legislation does not address this fundamental issue.
They say that app companies for years have gotten around paying drivers minimum wage by misclassifying gig workers as independent contractors — excluding workers from the full set of rights and essential benefits they would otherwise be entitled to as employees.
Ontario’s Ministry of Labour did not respond to inquiries about whether it would consider revising the new legislation.
In most jobs for most employees, there is “downtime in the course of a day that we’re ultimately paid for,” White said.
Stanford views the issue of engaged time as a troubling precedent for employment standards.
“Suppose you only had to pay firefighters when there was an actual job, or an actual fire for them to fight and the rest of the time they just hung around the fire station and getting paid nothing,” he said.
Still, Stanford sees the legislation as a “partial step forward.”
For example, Ontario’s proposed new laws will require transparency around how app companies’ algorithms affect pay structure and performance ratings, and require digital platforms to settle employment disputes in Ontario.
But “the only way to solve this problem,” Stanford said, is for companies to be required to pay for all hours worked or to cap the number of drivers.
In December, pc28city staff recommended capping the number of rideshare licences in a bid to address the ride-hailing industry’s negative impacts on traffic, emissions and public transit. A staff report concluded that drivers’ median income, when accounting for all the time spent on the app, was just $5.97 an hour after costs such as fuel and insurance — a figure Uber disputes.
The city’s executive committee voted to send the proposal back to the drawing board.
Other cities, such as New York, have focused on guaranteed wages for drivers.
By paying drivers a guaranteed wage, Stanford said the hope is that this will dissuade companies from courting a surplus of workers to compete for orders.
“There’s still an employer’s responsibility to manage their workforce, to match expected demand and a certain risk and cost on employers if they don’t do it right,” he said.
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