Swiggy delivery workers call off strike after firm seeks a week to respond

Delivery partners of online food ordering platform Swiggy went on strike on July 21 across Bengaluru to protest poor pay, reduced incentives, and safety concerns, the Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT) said.

IFAT is a trade union federation of ride-sharing and other gig transport workers.

The strike, in which about 3,000 workers participated, was called off on Sunday afternoon.


ET could not independently verify the number of people who had taken part in the strike.

Swiggy's management has sought one week’s time to address the delivery partners' grievances, an IFAT spokesperson said.

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“We are prepared to go back on strike again with an action plan in place if they don’t respond with a solution in the next one week,” Shaik Salauddin, national general secretary, IFAT told ET.

“We have been in direct contact with a handful of striking delivery executives in a few pockets of Bangalore to assuage their concerns. These zones remained fully operational during this period,” a spokesperson for Swiggy said in response to ET’s queries. “We continually evaluate our payout and incentive structure for delivery executives in order to ensure their earnings are at par with industry standards.”

The company faced disruption in food delivery services in parts of the city over the weekend due to the strike.

“Swiggy has started extending our delivery zone and reduced payout for long distance delivery,” a delivery partner from the city who is part of IFAT said. “When we go out of our zones, there’s an added threat of snatching, robberies, and accidents,” the partner said.

The company has also slashed incentives and delivery partners must put in more hours to earn daily bonuses, the person said.

“It takes us 14 hours to reach our daily target now, we want to put in 8-9 hours of work to complete our daily target,” the person added.

Salauddin said that Swiggy was directing more orders to third-party logistics providers and this was affecting delivery partners’ daily earnings.

Following the Covid-19 pandemic, the payouts of gig workers at food delivery companies were slashed by as much as 60%, ET reported last year.

Delivery partners had previously taken to microblogging platform Twitter to bring attention to issues including lack of compensation for skyrocketing petrol prices, absence of first-mile pay, lack of long-distance return bonus, and daily earning caps.