Delivery partners with Dunzo protest over severely slashed pay structure

Delivery partners working with Dunzo on Tuesday staged a protest over the company’s recent payment and incentive structure.

Protestors vowed to continue their strike if the company refuses to revert to its previous payment structure that drastically differed from the newly introduced system.

Bharath H K, a delivery partner, said the company had reduced its minimum guaranteed payments recently. “This used to be Rs 2,000 for 27 deliveries earlier. Now it is Rs 1,900 for 31 deliveries,” he said.

Recently, the company began paying petrol charges for one-way travel, but reduced the per-kilometre payments, say delivery partners. “Our earnings earlier were Rs 7 per km, which has been reduced to Rs 6 per km. Base pay for the first 2 km was Rs 15 per km, but now it is Rs 10
per km,” says Bharath.

Besides, incentives are calculated by excluding the petrol payment, says another delivery partner Girish K R.

“The pay for 5.1 km earlier would be Rs 51. Now it is 61 with the petrol charge of Rs 25. But the incentive will be computed excluding Rs 25 from earnings (only Rs 36 considered). So, it has become difficult to earn enough per day to have an adequate incentive,” he says.

Bharath says incentive amounts have also been slashed. “Earlier, for making deliveries worth Rs 650, we used to get an incentive of Rs 900 per day. This would give total daily earnings of around Rs 1,550. But now it is almost reversed. I need to earn around Rs 900 so that I can get incentive of around Rs 650, which is hard to manage,” he said.

Girish says the number of work hours has been restricted to 10 now, limiting the amount of work partners can do. Besides, they spend around Rs 4,000 a month servicing the vehicle as it runs over 200 km per day.

Delivery partners said the payment structure had been altered gradually in the last few months.

While protesters said hardly any deliveries happened in Bengaluru on Tuesday, a Dunzo spokesperson said they were serving 90% of their customers.

“We understand that some partners have raised a few concerns. We are working with them to resolve it in a quick and mutually beneficial way to maintain everyday operational efficiencies,” one of them said.