The legislature this month passed the initial review of a food delivery platform labor protection bill to safeguard the interests of delivery workers and address ambiguity over pay calculations and protections against labor exploitation.
However, proposed minimum pay rules have triggered concern over the likelihood that delivery fees would surge and orders would drop.
The bill says that the minimum pay for app-based food delivery drivers must be equivalent to 1.25 times the minimum wage and no less than NT$45 per delivery. With the minimum hourly wage to be NT$196 next year, that would mean hourly pay no lower than NT$245 for delivery workers.
Additionally, delivery workers would be paid per trip, rather than per order, meaning that batched deliveries would likely be scrapped once the new rules are implemented. Batched deliveries are common practice, as delivery platform operators assign multiple orders to one driver to increase efficiency. However, delivery workers would miss out on payments if they were to deliver multiple orders on a single trip under the new rules.
The proposed wage calculation mechanism created by the Ministry of Labor received positive feedback from some gig workers, as it would mean double protection for their income. It is a response to long-standing complaints about unsustainable wages. A national delivery workers’ union has sought “reasonable” pay, calling the pay calculation mechanisms of employers opaque and not fully reflective of the work done, as well as costs such as gasoline, and vehicle depreciation and maintenance.
However, Uber Technologies Inc warned that the proposed minimum wage rules and restrictions on batched orders could prompt a NT$20 increase in delivery fees in Taiwan, as poorer efficiency drives up costs.
Batching is essential to growth in the delivery industry and it allows Uber to make deliveries more affordable, Uber chief executive officer Dara Khosrowshahi told reporters on Monday last week during his first trip to Taipei.
The delivery sector is a highly price-sensitive market, with a 5 percent price hike likely to result in a loss of 34 percent of overall delivery service users, a Fair Trade Commission survey released last year showed. The competition watchdog last year denied Uber Eats’ proposed merger with Foodpanda.
The food delivery bill is expected to take effect as early as next year as opposition parties threw their full support behind it and plan to push it through the legislature by the end of this year.
However, the government should not rush to implement the rules and should consider a demonstration period within which inappropriate rules could be adjusted.
Some cities in the US have introduced minimum-wage laws to protect delivery worker’s rights. The government should study those cases to avoid adverse effects.
New York City in 2021 enacted a minimum hourly wage of US$7.09 for the industry and increased it to US$17.96 per hour in 2023 after the city government implemented a delivery workers’ pay protection law following separate legislation that said gig workers should not be considered contract workers. However, the changes led to a significant decrease in delivery workers’ pay, reports said.
Seattle last year enacted minimum-wage rules, but in the first few weeks, DoorDash orders declined by 30,000 in the city, while Uber Eats reported a 30 percent drop in orders, media reported.
To prevent a surge in delivery fees from reducing order volumes, the government should thoroughly analyze the cost structures in the food delivery supply chain, including platform operators, restaurants and delivery drivers.
It should carefully consider the proposed minimum-wage rules to avoid a wide-ranging controversy.
Most importantly, the proposed changes do not require app operators to improve the transparency of their pay calculations and would not cap the fees delivery apps charge restaurants, which are high and drive up delivery fees.
The government needs to consider all of these things before enacting the bill.
The image was oddly quiet. No speeches, no flags, no dramatic announcements — just a Chinese cargo ship cutting through arctic ice and arriving in Britain in October. The Istanbul Bridge completed a journey that once existed only in theory, shaving weeks off traditional shipping routes. On paper, it was a story about efficiency. In strategic terms, it was about timing. Much like politics, arriving early matters. Especially when the route, the rules and the traffic are still undefined. For years, global politics has trained us to watch the loud moments: warships in the Taiwan Strait, sanctions announced at news conferences, leaders trading
The saga of Sarah Dzafce, the disgraced former Miss Finland, is far more significant than a mere beauty pageant controversy. It serves as a potent and painful contemporary lesson in global cultural ethics and the absolute necessity of racial respect. Her public career was instantly pulverized not by a lapse in judgement, but by a deliberate act of racial hostility, the flames of which swiftly encircled the globe. The offensive action was simple, yet profoundly provocative: a 15-second video in which Dzafce performed the infamous “slanted eyes” gesture — a crude, historically loaded caricature of East Asian features used in Western
Is a new foreign partner for Taiwan emerging in the Middle East? Last week, Taiwanese media reported that Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois Wu (吳志中) secretly visited Israel, a country with whom Taiwan has long shared unofficial relations but which has approached those relations cautiously. In the wake of China’s implicit but clear support for Hamas and Iran in the wake of the October 2023 assault on Israel, Jerusalem’s calculus may be changing. Both small countries facing literal existential threats, Israel and Taiwan have much to gain from closer ties. In his recent op-ed for the Washington Post, President William
A stabbing attack inside and near two busy Taipei MRT stations on Friday evening shocked the nation and made headlines in many foreign and local news media, as such indiscriminate attacks are rare in Taiwan. Four people died, including the 27-year-old suspect, and 11 people sustained injuries. At Taipei Main Station, the suspect threw smoke grenades near two exits and fatally stabbed one person who tried to stop him. He later made his way to Eslite Spectrum Nanxi department store near Zhongshan MRT Station, where he threw more smoke grenades and fatally stabbed a person on a scooter by the roadside.
RSS