By Zuha Siddiqui
• Karachi, Pakistan
- When Airlift abruptly shut down in July 2022, hundreds of delivery riders lost their jobs without notice and were locked out of the app. Several said they never received their pending payments and bonuses.
- Nearly all the workers interviewed were the sole breadwinners in their families, and 23 out of the 40 said they now earn less than what they did at Airlift.
The days leading up to a festival were usually a busy time at work for Mohammad Javaid, a Karachi-based delivery rider for Airlift. So in July 2022, when the company gave them a three-day break during Eid-al-Adha, he was rather grateful. But on July 12, when Javaid returned to work, his area manager informed him that Airlift — once touted to become Pakistan’s first unicorn — had shut shop. “There were murmurs afloat for three to four months, but we never thought it would actually close,” the 38-year-old told Rest of World over the phone. “We would deliver easily 15 to 20 orders in a single shift, sometimes even 30. How can a company that’s doing so well close down so abruptly?”
Javaid spent the next few days hunting for another job. His friends from Airlift pointed him towards ride-hailing and delivery startup BykeaiBykeaFounded in 2016, Bykea is a Pakistani ride-hailing service and on-demand delivery company based in Karachi.READ MORE, and he worked with the company for two months. Now, Javaid picks up InDrive commuters on his motorcycle, earning about 25,000 rupees ($87) a month. At Airlift, he had earned more — 30,000 rupees ($104) if he worked from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m., seven days a week.
On July 12, 2022, Pakistan’s most-funded startup Airlift shuttered abruptly. In a statement to Rest of World at the time, the company said the global recession and downturn in capital markets “had a devastating impact on Airlift and rendered its shut-down inevitable.” The company had at least hundreds of delivery riders across multiple cities in Pakistan.
“The shutters [at the warehouse] were down, that’s how we discovered that the company was closed.”
Airlift’s closure rendered these workers jobless overnight. A year on, Rest of World caught up with 40 former Airlift riders who said they still struggle to make enough money to support their families. After the initial challenge of finding alternate jobs, some said they quit gig work altogether, and now work as masons, carpenters, and air-conditioning technicians. Others, who went on to work for other delivery companies like Bykea and Foodpanda, said such work does not pay on par with what they earned at Airlift.
Farman Ali had worked as a delivery rider for Airlift since July 2021. He first learned about the company’s closure when he reported to work at a warehouse in Lahore on July 12, after the Eid-al-Adha holiday. Two days prior, Ali had tried to log into the Airlift app. When it didn’t work properly, he had assumed it was due to a technical glitch. “The shutters [at the warehouse] were down, that’s how we discovered that the company was closed,” Ali told Rest of World. He never heard from the company’s management again.
Several other riders had the same experience. They lost their jobs without notice, and were locked out of the app. They also claimed they never received their pending payments or incentives. Rest of World reached out to former Airlift co-founder and CEO, Usman Gul, for comment, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
Pakistan has at least 1.5 million platform workers, who operate in regulatory ambiguity as the country does not have any clear laws governing gig work. Such workers have few to no safety nets — or even labor unions — if the platform they work for goes under.
For Ali, however, Airlift was “proper” work, he said. He earned up to 60,000 rupees ($210) per month, which allowed him to support his wife and three children. He now works as a mason, fixing and welding doors and windows, earning about 50,000 rupees ($173) a month. “I haven’t worked for any other platform-based company since Airlift shut down because the rest have no thikana [structure],” he said.
In its better days, flush with cash, Airlift wooed gig workers by offering them perks like warehouses with toilets and fans, and space to rest between orders. Most other ride-hailing and food delivery companies in Pakistan do not have such arrangements. “They were even giving us motorbikes,” Aman, a 38-year-old delivery rider, told Rest of World. “They had said riders who would do well would get bikes and the bikes had arrived, with helmets. I wonder what happened to them.” Aman requested to be identified only by his first name as he did not want to jeopardize future employment prospects.
“Airlift was doing well because it was the new company on the block and wanted to scoop up as many riders as possible.”
These perks ensured that riders continued to work for Airlift even when they noticed the company was rapidly expanding. Aman, who joined Airlift in 2021, said the company set up warehouses in eight neighborhoods across the city in the span of one year. “The pace was crazy,” he said. The Karachi headquarters, located inside a towering glass building, “even had a gaming setup inside.” After losing his job, Aman tried working as a Foodpanda delivery rider to support his family of nine, but couldn’t keep up the gig. “Their bonuses were very less,” he said, adding that the platform’s “on demand” orders sometimes required riders to travel unreasonably long distances, with no compensation for gas. “And if you ‘leave’ an order, it affects your ratings,” he said.
“Riders are compensated for on-demand orders that cover longer distances,” Tooba Iqbal, a spokesperson for Foodpanda, told Rest of World. “Given [that] riders operate as freelancers, it’s their discretion to accept any order but once the rider accepts an order, [they’re] required to deliver it. Rider ratings are determined by a range of factors but not accepting an order does not impact rider ratings.”
Saad, another former Airlift rider, now works at Bykea. But he said he struggles to make ends meet as the company no longer offers incentives for completing a certain number of deliveries a day. “Bykea has canceled our bonuses. We could get about 2,500 rupees ($8) per week as a bonus for picking up a certain number of rides, but don’t anymore,” Saad told Rest of World, requesting to use only his first name. “They also don’t pay us a flat rate for picking up shifts. Now we just get paid 20 rupees (7 cents) per kilometer, that’s it. We have to manage our fuel expenses from that.” He alleged he is still waiting on a weekly bonus of 2,800 rupees ($10) that Airlift owed him when it shut down.
Bykea used to offer a weekly bonus to drivers, but “only 10% of driver-partners qualified,” company spokesperson Saba Mushtaq told Rest of World. Instead of expanding upon what happened to these bonuses, Mushtaq chose to talk about how Bykea had reduced the commission it charged its drivers from 20% to under 13%.
“All these companies are terrible,” Umar Rehmat, who worked for Airlift in Lahore for five months, told Rest of World. “Airlift was doing well because it was the new company on the block and wanted to scoop up as many riders as possible.” In the months following the shutdown, the 30-year-old worked as a Foodpanda rider. He claimed the company had not provided riders with adequate insurance compensation.
“All the blame goes to the riders, for anything that goes wrong,” said Shehriyar, 22, who worked at Foodpanda for two months after Airlift’s closure. “If the customer is unsatisfied with a product or food item being delivered, [they] deduct the money from the rider's wallet.”
Foodpanda spokesperson Iqbal denied this allegation, and said the company’s riders don’t face any deductions from their wallets if a customer is unhappy or unsatisfied with a delivery. Riders are insured while working on the platform and are eligible for compensation as per the terms of Foodpanda’s insurance policy, she said. “Foodpanda works closely with the insurance company to ensure any disbursem*nts are paid out in a timely and effective manner, as per policy, and that the riders are adequately supported.”
As many Pakistani companies cut staff to save costs during the pandemic, working as a delivery rider for Airlift emerged as an appealing option for many. It came as a boon for 22-year-old Mughees Mehar when the Pizza Hut where he worked closed down. Similarly, after 27-year-old Nabeel Cheema lost his job as a supermarket cashier, he became a delivery rider for Airlift.
Cheema told Rest of World that after Airlift went under, he spent three months trying to find a desk job as he wanted to pull himself out of the gig economy. He sent his CV “everywhere.”
“I wanted to work as a receptionist or a clerk somewhere, but there are no jobs,” he said. “It's been really difficult. I have [finished high school] and done a computer literacy course, but there's nothing available.” Cheema is now back on the road, working for Bykea, earning nearly half of what he made at Airlift. But he is grateful. “At least I can bring some money home each day.”
