They are cute pink robots who bring you local food. But their drivers may well be a 17-hour flight away

The Canadian brainchild of ex-Uber engineers, Geoffrey is part of a wave of autonomous vehicle innovation that could — quite literally — change the face of the gig economy. For some human delivery couriers, that raises a question now international in scope: what are the implications for workers?

“Automation is like this really heavy, big door that collectively we have a hard time opening and looking past,” said courier and Gig Workers United president Jennifer Scott.

“We don’t talk about the fact that when things are automated, there are still people doing that work.”

Geoffrey has an inbuilt camera and GPS system that can deliver food within a two-kilometre radius. Customers place orders on UberEats, and the remotely operated, millennial-pink device is dispatched for delivery; currently, Geoffrey’s Toronto-based “parent” company Tiny Mile boasts partnerships with about 20 local restaurants. With lower fees than app companies and contactless service, Geoffrey arrived just as COVID-19 made those traits particularly appealing to businesses.

As for workers, piloting robots initially paid $25 an hour to local employees, according to articles last year in NOW magazine and the Star about Tiny Mile.

To Scott, that sounded promising.

“There are lots of gig workers who have education in fields that would relate to this work, as well as all of their delivery experience,” said Scott. “This could be the next step in an industry that famously does not have a ladder of moving up.”

But Tiny Mile is now also recruiting in the Philippines, according to job postings viewed by the Star. Advertising a monthly salary range of $320 to $400 (U.S.), the postings offer the opportunity to work in the “comfort of your home” in four- to eight-hour late-night shifts. Requirements include access to high-speed internet, Xbox or PlayStation controllers, and proficiency in English, according to the ads.

“We succeed if people get their orders on time, affordably,” the posting says.

Responding to questions from the Star, Tiny Mile chief executive officer Ignacio Tartavull said the hiring constitutes a “fraction of the total team,” which he hopes to grow from 15 to 60 employees. He says the ads were placed in “countries that are used by most companies to do customer service.”

“Saying that globalization is ubiquitous feels like an understatement: I called the Toronto Star customer service this morning to get a subscription and the call was answered in India,” he said. (The Star’s circulation issues are in fact handled in Oshawa, but overflow calls are sent to a contracted company in India, according to a company spokesperson.)

Tartavull said Tiny Mile offers a “dream” job: workers “simply get up from bed, use the joystick we bought them and connect to the fast speed internet we paid for, and operate a robot for a few hours which is quite fun.”

But the practice is a growing dimension of precarious work — one that involves “disappeared” labour by racialized workers in developing countries, said Stephanie Santos, an assistant professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver.

“It’s hiding the worker behind this cute robot with heart eyes, behind the discourse of an Xbox and games.”

Along with Texas-based Rice University professor Alden Sajor Marte-Wood, Santos is researching the growth of digital labour in the Philippines, where tech companies are increasingly outsourcing jobs. On top of call centres and content moderation, the team is studying new fields like outsourced Philippines-based health-care personnel hired as virtual medical attendants.

“Their qualifications are far beyond ... what they’re being paid,” said Santos.

The Star found two LinkedIn profiles of Philippines-based workers who identified themselves as “freelance” remote pilots for Tiny Mile. Reviewing one of the profiles, Santos noted that the worker appears to be a computer information systems graduate from a private college.

“What was striking to me were the qualifications of this person,” she said. “It’s in line with the general de-skilling of outsourced jobs that Alden and I (are) seeing in our inquiries.”

While many Filipinos have traditionally turned to overseas work to survive, the country now has an estimated 1.3 million Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry workers — a kind of domestic inversion of the country’s previous employment strategies. While the model is partly about “exploiting cheaper labour markets,” it also allows companies to shed other responsibilities, said Marte-Wood.

In some fields, it can come with steep risks and little recourse for workers.

“Facebook had to pay something like $60 million in terms of restitution for emotional trauma for content moderators based in the U.S.,” said Marte-Wood, of the toll taken by exposure to disturbing posts. “There’s no similar kind of move for a content moderator in the BPO industry in the Philippines whatsoever.”

“It really does show that huge disparity between the types of legal avenues available to workers doing the same exact kind of work in different labouring contexts,” he added.

On average, BPO workers in call-centres make around $7,400 (U.S.) a year, said Santos, roughly on par with the average household income. In the context of constrained opportunity, the jobs might be a step above other fields — or one of the few viable options.

Those doing the work have little protection, said Marte-Wood. BPO workers are not unionized, and a self-organized group of employees have complained of harassment and arbitrary detention by state authorities after launching campaigns around issues like the inability to take regular bathroom breaks.

This Oct. 2020 video shows Geoffrey in action on Toronto’s streets.

In Toronto, restaurants have praised Geoffrey’s convenience and cost-savings, especially as the provincial government lifts a previous pandemic-induced cap on the fees apps can charge restaurants battered by lockdown restrictions.

Customers, too, have delighted in the novelty of remote-controlled delivery. But leveraging global inequality to find low-cost labour is “a strategy as old as capitalism,” said Jim Stanford, an economist and director of the Centre for Future Work.

“Globalization is no longer just affecting jobs in manufacturing. It’s affecting jobs and all kinds of services from food delivery staff to lawyers and geologists and accountants, whose work can also be outsourced to the Philippines.”

Tartavull sees Geoffrey as an answer to what he predicts to be an exodus of couriers from Toronto’s gig economy as pandemic restrictions lift. Tiny Mile, he said, has recently hired a former Uber courier (the company said it would be inappropriate to comment on pay rates) and “working conditions have improved” with the introduction of “great health insurance.”

“This is uncommon for small startups but is important to us because we want to attract and retain the best talent,” he said.

Geoffrey is also a way, said Tartavull, to make food delivery “convenience accessible to everybody and not just to the top wealthiest people in the city, who are the only ones who can currently afford it.”

To Stanford, that raises a deeper issue.

“Is it possible to imagine a system for delivering food to your door at a price point that people will accept, without exploitive labour being built into that equation?”

Imagining that future is central to Gig Workers United’s mission — part of the reason Scott is concerned about what she sees as the gig economy’s “race to the bottom.”

And while icy streets or angry drivers can’t do the same harm to Geoffrey as their human counterparts, Scott says workplace safety is not a problem that can be simply addressed through automation.

“The solutions to what makes work safer are solutions that, socially, are better for everybody in our community,” she said. “Having better road infrastructure, having more accessible parking, having more bike lanes ... would be good for all of us.”

As for outsourcing, solutions are tougher: the practice is neither illegal nor uncommon. Ironically, notes Santos, the model tends to displace low-wage people of colour in companies’ home country.

“Who does the work of delivery in Toronto? Is this mostly a racialized, devalued workforce?”

For Marte-Wood, part of the answer lies in at least “peeling back the layers” on cute newcomers like Geoffrey.

“It’s saying, there’s actually a human being on the other side of the world that’s piloting this food delivery.”

“Advocating for labour wherever you are, especially the value of labour is a way of connecting these struggles,” adds Santos.

“To advocate for labour in the Philippines is to advocate for labour in Toronto.”