Delivery riders targeted by racist calls: platforms 'shocked', but how far do they bear responsibility?

According to franceinfo, the Paris prosecutor's office has opened an investigation after calls for racist violence against delivery riders, posted on social media. Approached by the broadcaster, the platforms Uber and Deliveroo say they are "deeply shocked" and insist they have sent a prevention message to their riders. The dispatch tells us no more than that: at this stage we don't know who is behind these calls, how many people were targeted, or whether any violence actually took place. We will therefore stick to what is established, and what follows is our reading.

First, a point that should not need making: racism belongs to those who preach and commit it, not to the platforms. The judicial inquiry is the first response, and it is for that inquiry to establish individual responsibility. The riders, for their part, asked for nothing except to be allowed to work.

But the question of their exposure does fall within the organisation of work. A "prevention message" sent through an app is the gesture of an employer that isn't one. The rider is presented as self-employed: he rides alone, often at night, without a collective, without a base, without a delegate, without occupational health care. When the company is "shocked", it is shocked from a distance, the way one reacts to a news item. Yet in an ordinary employment relationship, a threat aimed at workers would trigger precise safety obligations on the employer. Here, the status is precisely what keeps them at arm's length.

One can see in this, in Marxist terms, a very concrete illustration of a mechanism described as structural: the platform captures the value of these couriers' labour, piece-rate pay and permanent availability, yet leaves the risk with the person pedalling. The profit is made on the journey, the danger stays on the pavement. This is not a matter of one boss's malice: it is the relationship itself that makes protection optional.

There is also a question of collective strength. Trade unions, we are reminded, exist to negotiate working conditions, of which safety is part. Isolated riders, atomised by an algorithm, have little means of pressing the company on what it owes them when the danger comes not from the road but from hatred. Solidarity has to be organised; the app, for its part, offers only ratings.

The Republic likes to remind us that everyone is equal in law and in dignity. It would do well to check whether that equality survives a contract for services. While we wait for the results of the investigation, one simple question arises for the platforms: beyond the press release and the prevention message, what are you concretely changing for those from whom you draw your revenue?