eFood delivery workers went on strike today for the fourth time in as many months.

Today’s strike was called by the the Efood Employees Union of Attica as the Labor Inspectorate held a meeting with eFood regarding shift scheduling for salaried employees at the company. 

The popular food delivery app continued to operate on Friday through the declared strike. 

eFood has altered the method of scheduling shifts for salaried workers, such that they can express a preference for time off, but are assigned which shifts they will work by the company. The union stated this method deprived workers of the ability to choose their own working hours. 

“It changes your life, it changes your whole schedule. You’ve created a stable schedule, it changes that,” said one eFood delivery worker who gave his name as Christos at the strike gathering outside the Professional Policy System for Employees and Professional Workers (SEPE) building. “You cannot fully choose your own shifts.” 

Previously salaried eFood workers simply declared their own shifts on a fortnightly basis. 

However the union and workers had many more demands that they have been organizing around for the past few months, and some for years. 

The union calls for a collective labor agreement with significant wage increases for all workers, a guarantee that freelancers will have a minimum hourly rate and coverage for workplace accidents, or better yet an end to the freelancer model entirely, an end to the use of contracted middle managers, and better health and safety protections for delivery drivers including the provision of personal protective equipment as legally required.

Since 2021, eFood has tried to push workers to work freelance, and no longer offers salaried delivery driver positions. Workers who are salaried have held onto their contracts since then. 

“There are 600 of us salaried workers in Greece out of the 7,000 distributors,” said Giorgos, a delivery driver and union member. “In Athens we are around 300”

Freelance workers for eFood do not have the ability to state their own rates, rather they are determined by an algorithm. 

“The official announcement of the company is that the price of the order is obviously determined by the distance,” said Giorgos. “but from there it is determined by how many distributors are at work, and time and how many are the total volume of orders. You see it is a stock exchange, you do not know in advance the rates. If you declare a shift you don’t know even approximately what you will make.” 

“They are in a constant hunt, they are living precariously, unsure if they will manage to turn out a sufficient daily wage to live.”

Furthermore freelance workers do not have health insurance provided by the company. If they are injured on the job they do not receive worker’s compensation or paid time off. In a field of work with so many accidents, this is a massive issue. 

“Every year Greece has close to 70 accidents” said Giorgos. However he noted that because freelance delivery drivers don’t usually declare such accidents as workplace accidents, the number is likely much higher.  

Workers have long argued that all delivery drivers for the app should be working with contracts.

The union began efforts to establish a Corporate Collective Labor Agreement in 2023, but have stated that eFood failed to respond to their demands. The union organized multiple strikes, including a 24-hour strike in October and a 48-hour strike in November, protesting the company’s shift toward a freelance-based model, and the refusal to form a collective agreement.

“A collective labor agreement is vitally important,” said another delivery worker also named Giorgos. “It will guarantee us rights as is required by European labor laws.”

On Friday representatives from eFood told workers that they did not intend to change the scheduling of their shifts, and proposed a meeting for the ​​17th of the month to negotiate scheduling terms.