Courier reports salary delay and poor conditions at Yekaterinburg restaurants

A food delivery courier for famous restaurants in Yekaterinburg has reported a salary delay. According to him, he still hasn«t been paid for work in November. Former courier Alexander Volkhin shared with E1.RU what else he had to face while delivering orders. We publish his story about the underside of working in establishments.

I had a bitter experience working as a courier for a large restaurant chain in Yekaterinburg. I came to Art Rest Band (which includes «Mechtateli» (Dreamers), Bukowski grill, Maccheroni, Custo, and other establishments) for a side job in late October. I worked there until the end of November and still haven«t received part of my salary for the last month of work.

A representative of the restaurants included in Art Rest Band explained to E1.RU that the company has no couriers on staff, and product delivery is handled by several third-party organizations. He couldn«t specify which firm Alexander worked for, as no one entered into an employment contract with him.

If a representative of this organization wants to respond to Alexander«s claims, we are ready to give him a voice.

They assigned me a supervisor. On the first day, we drove around a bit, he briefly explained what and how, and then I started working independently.

The main workplace was the Maccheroni restaurant—there is a loading-unloading area and a courier station. However, orders had to be delivered not only from there but from all other establishments in the chain, except Donna Olivia.

The cars used to deliver orders were, frankly, vintage. I drove such cars back in my youth.

The engine constantly stalled, and gas ran out. The entire fleet consists of five or six cars, but only three or four were operational. For example, the Lada 2109 I started working on soon «died,» and it was never revived.

Once, I was sent to deliver a cake to Verkhnyaya Pyshma (a town near Yekaterinburg), and the car had a malfunction—the windshield washer fluid wasn«t dispensing. I»m driving on the highway and simply can«t see anything.

Since this was a side job for me, I went on shifts about three times a week—but these were full working days that lasted 14–15 hours. Generally, the workday was supposed to end at 11 p.m., but restaurants managed to take their last orders even at the beginning of midnight. By the time you deliver it to some remote district and return home, it turned out that you were working almost two hours overtime.

Before this, I worked with other restaurant chains, but I never encountered a situation where a courier working from morning to evening wasn«t fed. The job advertisement mentioned three meals a day, but in fact, there was no talk of that.

We started working at 11 a.m., and lunch was from four to five p.m. If you were on an order during that time and didn«t show up at the restaurant, that»s it—you«re hungry. The cooks and service staff eat everything, no one leaves anything for the couriers. But a few times, I did see them put out a bucket of cabbage salad and pilaf or some other dish.

I remember that the advertisement clearly stated: «Salary—from 5000 rubles (about $50 at current rates) per day.» But on none of the days I worked did I even come close to such an amount. The maximum was around 4000 rubles (about $40 at current rates). And this despite the fact that we never suffered from a lack of orders.

The first part of the salary for November—4400 rubles (about $44 at current rates)—was given to me only at the beginning of December, although they promised to do it about ten days earlier. The remaining money hasn«t been paid to this day.

The amount there is, of course, laughable to talk about—a little over 20,000 rubles (about $200 at current rates)—but when it came to paying the last part for November, they started telling me that I, it turns out, was supposed to refuel their cars myself. They pulled a figure of seven thousand rubles (about $70 at current rates) out of thin air—with that money, you could refuel a whole KAMAZ truck.

Moreover, they managed to charge me a self-employment tax, although no one officially employed me. And in the job advertisement, it was written that they pay the taxes themselves.

I saw all this mess and decided that I wasn«t going to work there anymore. I filed complaints with the labor inspection and the prosecutor»s office. Only after that did they offer me to contact the firm for «conflict resolution.» They told me: «We have a direct phone number, you could have called, we haven»t gone anywhere.« But why should I run after them to get my honestly earned money?

This is far from the first time Urals residents have complained about salary delays. For example, in December last year, shift workers at an enterprise in Nizhny Tagil found themselves in such a situation. They even recorded a video appeal about it.

Besides salary delays, workers at Sverdlovsk region enterprises had other problems—mass layoffs and a switch to a shortened work week. We told about all this in a special report.

Earlier, the underside of their work was also shared by a postal worker and employees of a low-price store.