VANCOUVER — When Justin Kwok worked as a rider for an ultra-fast delivery company, he felt unsafe, hustling to pack orders for Ninja Delivery and rush them within 10 minutes to customers in downtown Toronto, no matter how foul the weather. So he started organizing his similarly unhappy co-workers at two warehouses into a union.

Their concerns echoed those of others working in an industry with increasingly narrow delivery windows. They earned low wages and not all had signed employment contracts. They received insufficient training. They too frequently hurt themselves en route to customers. In the thick of winter, while riding e-bikes so poorly maintained that their chains would slip off or brakes malfunctioned, Kwok fell three times over less than two weeks, sliding on ice or running into trouble when he rode over streetcar tracks.

Their efforts ended abruptly in early May, when Ninja laid off Kwok and many of his colleagues amid acquisition talks with Toronto-based grocery delivery service Buggy—at a time when major grocers had started partnering with ultra-fast delivery services to stay competitive. Kwok received the minimum severance—a week’s worth of pay—and the union drive came to a halt. But the experience left the organizers with a sour taste, and union officials with a sense of how perilous working in ultra-fast delivery can be.

“It’s inhumane to treat people like this, to almost treat people, human beings, like robots or numbers,” said Kevin Shimmin, national representative with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW Canada), who helped Ninja’s couriers organize. Their jobs, he said, represented “some of the worst possible working conditions out there these days.”

Ultra-fast delivery firms like Ninja are built on the premise that their workers can bring food, household items, drinks and more to customers in a fraction of the time offered by established services. The new players promise times ranging from 10 to 30 minutes, depending on the company. While ultra-fast startups typically subsidize the cost of orders at first to acquire customers, their goal is to have customers pay a premium for the service. Most charge extra for deliveries when orders don’t reach a certain dollar threshold, and the items themselves tend to cost more than they do off the shelf at the supermarket.

They operate out of so-called “dark stores” not open to walk-in customers. Inside, they look different than traditional grocery stores. There are shelves and freezers, but everything is optimized for fulfilling orders as quickly as possible. At Ninja’s stores, that meant narrow aisles, squeezing in as many items as possible and not placing two similar-looking products beside each other to avoid mistakes.

The sector experienced rapid growth and major venture capital investment in recent years. In 2021, ultra-fast firms raised US$7.5 billion in 30 deals compared to just US$1.2 billion over 13 deals the previous year, according to PitchBook. In Canada, a number of startups popped up, including Ninja, while international players eyed expansion into the country. 

The companies maintain that they’re filling a market gap, but workers and labour advocates counter that meeting the apparent demand for speedy deliveries comes at a cost to those fulfilling the orders. In Europe, drivers for German startup Gorillas have protested poor working conditions and workplace violations that include missing or delayed pay, broken equipment, being required to work during hazardous weather conditions and alleged union busting.

Unlike gig-economy platforms such as Uber, these companies tend to use hourly staff rather than on-demand workers, who only start earning when fulfilling an order and are not compensated while waiting. That way, the ultra-fast delivery workers are available to fulfill orders quickly, said Alex Frederick, a senior emerging-tech analyst with PitchBook, who covers foodtech and agtech. 

But those workers face pressure to move quickly to meet the time constraints, which can expose them, in Frederick’s words, to “dangerous conditions.” He said the companies aren’t incentivized to create safer working conditions. Margins on orders are low and raising workplace standards may make it harder to become profitable, maintain the number of orders needed and deliver within their promised time frame, he said.

When Kwok started his minimum-wage job as a Ninja rider in mid-January, he fell off his e-bike in “a pretty bad wipeout” the first weekend. He started tracking colleagues’ accidents—something he said the company didn’t do at the time—logging 13 over about six weeks. They included injuries to an elbow and foot, and a rider getting hit by a car. One of Kwok’s former co-workers, whom The Logic isn’t naming due to the person’s fears around future work prospects, corroborated the incident with the car, as well as a couple of falls of their own, including one where they flipped over the handlebars. (To the best of their knowledge, no one was ever hospitalized, both former staffers said.) 

Kwok and his co-worker believed the frequency of accidents came down to weather, sub-par e-bike maintenance, lack of training and speed required to make deliveries on time. Most of the e-bikes lacked wide enough tires to navigate snow or streetcar tracks, they said, and Ninja required riders to work through snowstorms and extreme cold alerts. The former staffers noticed chronic issues with the e-bikes, including malfunctioning brakes, missing pedals and misaligned wheels. Couriers would start delivering with no training, they said, and some were unaware how to navigate streetcar tracks or use hand signals to indicate directions.

Ninja’s couriers had to move quickly to fulfill its 10-minute delivery promise. Riders were required to use apps that would track how quickly they moved, they said, adding that pressure mounted when the company experimented with scheduling just one or two riders per shift. “As soon as that happened there was no realistic expectation of delivering anything in any sort of reasonable time,” Kwok said. 

Ninja couriers also expressed concerns around compensation. Both riders who spoke to The Logic said they started at minimum wage. Kwok said he never signed a contract or received benefits beyond basic pay.

Fed up, in mid-February, Kwok posted a letter on the company’s Slack channel, which was visible to managers, saying, “I don’t think safety is being taken seriously enough.” He made five requests: Kwok wanted all the e-bikes equipped with tires better suited to streetcar tracks and snow, as well as an e-bike maintenance worker; a workplace injury policy; an anonymous injury reporting system that would track company-wide statistics; and a reduced delivery range during major snowfalls and extreme weather alerts. The post elicited a handful of emoji reactions, including the green checkmark one, sent by one of the company’s founders signifying that the letter had, at least, been seen.

In response to messages from The Logic outlining the workers’ concerns, Ninja provided a statement saying that the company “employed a series of services and processes to ensure safe and streamlined operations.” The statement added that Ninja logged accidents and created an injury report form, but did not specify when it started those processes, or what it did with the reports. Ninja also said it would extend delivery windows, and sometimes reduce the delivery radius, due to weather. The statement added that a third-party company maintained the e-bikes regularly and that staff could use a QR code in stores to dispatch maintenance and other tradespeople. (The Logic also reached out to Ninja’s co-founder and CEO Wesley Yue about the workers’ concerns, but he did not respond to questions. Neither he nor any other Ninja executives stayed on after the Buggy acquisition.)

The employees who spoke to The Logic conceded that Ninja did address some of their concerns, but disputed some of the company’s responses. Ninja did extend the delivery time in bad weather, they acknowledged, but any policy around doing so was “ambiguous and inconsistent.” They recalled only one occasion when the delivery radius was reduced; and said they were not trained to use the QR code. The company did not respond to follow-up questions.

Overall, the former employees said, the efforts felt like too little, too late. Ninja eventually switched to a different e-bike rental company, but by then, winter conditions had passed. 

Meanwhile, Kwok and others started to consider unionizing and reached out to UFCW Canada. They met with the union, started a group chat with co-workers and sent them a link to sign union cards online. The union requires at least 40 per cent of staff to sign cards before submitting an application for an official vote. It’s unclear how many couriers Ninja employed, but as of March 30, it had more than 80 employees across three stores.

Ninja workers were getting close—reaching between 30 and 40 per cent within the first couple weeks, said UFCW’s Shimmin—when the company announced mass layoffs. On May 2, staff at the stores, including Kwok, received an email from Yue saying Ninja was laying them off as it paused store operations pending an acquisition.

Since the purchase, Buggy has rehired some of Ninja’s former couriers, but stresses that it operates under a different model. The company offers ultra-fast delivery, promoting a 15-minute service, but it “doesn’t prioritize 15 minutes over everything else,” wrote CEO Nicole Verkindt in an email. Though unaware of the unionization drive, the company appears to operate in a way that addresses many of the issues Kwok and his colleagues identified. Riders can’t carry more than 25 pounds at a time, for example, and all e-bikes come with winter kits, which include tire studs and specialized handlebars. It pays $16 an hour at first for couriers and a dollar more for pickers, plus tips. All employees sign contracts.

If the ultra-fast model stays the same, though, outside experts wonder how long most such businesses can last. Frederick notes that they’ve benefited from a “blitz-scaling” investment strategy that prioritizes rapid growth to obtain first-mover advantage and maximize market share. Subsidized by venture capital dollars and with high burn rates, he said, they’re poorly positioned for sustainable growth, something investors are more interested in amid changing market conditions: “Suddenly pivoting to focus on profitability is going to make it challenging to either launch operations or to continue to operate.” 

Jim Stanford, director of the independent research institute Centre for Future Work, agrees, and expects to see many shutter due to the changing economic environment. As workers unite to fight for better working conditions in ultra-fast delivery and other sectors, he said, companies that depend on cheap, readily available labour won’t last. 

“If we organize this work to treat the people doing the job like real human beings … it would cost so much to have a little package of groceries delivered right to your door in 10 minutes that nobody would do it,” said Stanford, an economist and former policy director of Unifor, about the treatment of delivery workers. “The fundamental business model of this activity depends on the exploitation of a desperate group of people.”