They travel continents to deliver food - how migrant delivery workers in Budapest become cheap labour

This part is the first of two articles: the first presents the rise of food delivery platforms in Budapest and how the international journey of migrant workers structures their exploitation. The second part describes the types of pressure this new labour management system exerts on workers and how they use collective and individual resources to cope.

“They work like crazy, 7 days a week and 12 hours each day. I’m not good for them, I only work 8 hours a day” – Amir told me while laughing. The Algerian courier was detailing how the fleet company that contracted his labour to the Wolt food delivery platform was looking for new riders from Bangladesh. He was not a typical migrant worker as he had no obligation to send money to family back home, didn’t have much debt and shared a household with his wife in Budapest.

A noticeable change in the Budapest food delivery industry took place by early 2023 and the purpose of this article – that builds on the three months I spent in the winter and spring of 2025 researching the daily life of these workers – is to grasp this transformation through experience of the workers who play a central role in it. Many people picked up the habit of ordering food through delivery platforms during the Covid-19 pandemic and the couriers of Wolt and Foodora – the two competing food delivery platforms in Hungary – with their respective blue and pink uniforms would become an everyday feature of the streets of the city. In the space of a couple months, the courier workforce seemed to have undergone a significant shift as many of the couriers making their way through the streets were increasingly from South-Asia and the Middle-East. The Hungarian press was already filled with articles about a new wave of labour migration involving third-country nationals from the Global South, however, the whole new trend was being primarily framed as the much-needed antidote to the general labour shortage. Food delivery was known before as an easy way to make to make relatively good money, but suddenly the share of locals delivering seemed to significantly drop.

These migrant workers were roaming the streets of Budapest as they made one drop after the other, but they remained socially distant and unknown to the rest of the residents in the city. As I got to know more about their working conditions, it became clear that Wolt platform has come up with a new type of labour management to integrate these workers into their workforce. They outsourced labour management to subcontractors, so-called fleet companies who became responsible for organising the labour process of these workers. I became fascinated and wanted to discover what motivated Wolt to diverge from the existing self-employed courier model that had been effective at minimizing costs – in other words increasing exploitation – for the platform and why they have relied significantly on migrant workers in the process. Afterall, classifying workers as independent contractors and squeezing them in the process seemed to be a successful strategy up until this period.

The rise of platforms where “everyone is their own boss”

Before we get into this new labour regime, it is crucial to see what is new about platforms and the gig economy. Digital platforms remade how work is organised and performed in 2010s. They signalled a new way of organising labour markets already characterised by precarity on a new and larger scale. The rise of platforms has meant the rise of new corporate practices that the following quote from the digital futurist, Tom Goodwin seeks to grasp:

Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.

But in order to understand platforms, we also have to clarify what the gig economy is. The gig economy refers to labour markets where work is mediated by digital platforms and becomes inherently unstable and precarious without the possibility of stable career advancement for workers who tend to be classified as independent contractors. The majority of the costs that come with work are shifted onto the workers themselves. In other words, don’t dream about guaranteed level of income, sick leave, the provision of equipment or paid vacation.

The gig economy also tends to isolate workers from one another: in the case of food delivery workers, they only temporarily share spaces and mainly interact with their screens through which they receive instructions from the algorithm. In this environment, traditional forms of working-class organising is made less effective since the power relations that underpin the labour process are obscured – afterall, “you are your own boss” as the saying goes.

Food delivery platforms started operating as the widespread availability of smartphones started becoming the norm. The network effect – the fact that the more consumers, restaurants and couriers are connected to a platform, the more its value increases making it more likely for further parties to also join it – characteristic of platforms entails that first-mover advantages that arise “from positive feedback loops enable platforms to establish strong presence in markets where they arrive first”. This business model aimed at rapid growth makes food delivery platforms an ideal destination for venture capital that is characterized as „patient capital” since investors tend to tolerate losses in the short and medium run in the hope of obtaining monopoly rents in the future. Platforms tend to offer relatively advantageous rates and prices while they expand to new markets and attempt to raise these as their market presence becomes more stable.

“This used to be a sexy job” – the trajectory of food delivery in Hungary

As elsewhere, the COVID-19 pandemic gave a huge boost to the expansion of food delivery platforms as restaurants could not accommodate clients and a significant part of the workforce was looking for new sources of income amid lockdowns. Both platforms currently active in the country saw the number of restaurants, consumers and couriers on their platforms increase sharply. Foodora’s number of couriers nearly more than doubled in 2020 going from 1800 to 4300 and Wolt recorded an increase of almost 5000 from March of 2020 until May of 2021 going from 1000-1500 to 6000 couriers.

Working as a courier seemed like an advantageous option for many as it was possible to gain a relatively high income delivering for a platform. This was also advertised in the press putting emphasis on the much higher than average sums that certain couriers make. The July of 2022 brought a significant change to couriers’ life as the tax category, commonly referred to as KATA was abolished for platform workers as a measure of austerity. This tax category made it possible for couriers to pay a fixed and relatively low sum of tax as entrepreneurs, which contributed to the fact why the food delivery industry could be favourable for so many people before. Protests took place contesting the decision and couriers were central in organising the demonstrations blocking transport infrastructure, but they failed to roll back the legislation. The new tax options available to couriers meant that their tax burden increased significantly. This made the hustle of delivery work less appealing in a period where costs of living started rising sharply due to inflation

The Courier’s League – the trade union for couriers – organised a research project aimed at grasping how the income opportunities of couriers changed between 2021 – as 2022 was the first year of high inflation in the country, in fact the highest in the EU – and 2023 that turned out to confirm what many had already been experiencing in their daily life before. The study concluded that the rising costs in the two-year period meant that couriers saw their real income decrease by a third when working full-time is taken as the basis of the calculation

“This used to be a sexy job. Like cooler than being a plumber or a gardener” – a member of the Courier’s league explained to me while she was referring to both the financial benefits and the prestige this line of work used to offer.

Worsening conditions in the industry coincided with a general labour shortage that made labour migration urgent. The state has been organising the migration of third-country nationals (TCNs) from Asia such as the Philippines or Vietnam to satisfy the labour needs of employers. The number of extra-EU migrant workers in Hungary has surpassed 100,000 making this workforce highly important for the functioning of the economy across different sectors.

The food delivery sector was no exception to this trend. Wolt has increasingly relied on fleet companies since 2022 who employ migrant workers in Budapest and the share of self-employed couriers was decreasing as a result. This involved introducing new workers into the workforce that can be more easily exploited to respond to volatile consumer demand. The composition of the Wolt workforce has been transformed since fleet companies started to work as subcontractors of Wolt acting as intermediaries between the platform and the workers in contract with the fleet companies. Fleet companies are the main legal channel for extra-EU workers to deliver food. These subcontractors free couriers from having to file their own tax reports and to work with accountants and take a certain percentage of the couriers’ income – typically between 20-33 percent - or a fixed amount each month. Workers can lease bikes from the company or use their own and some fleet companies also provide housing to migrant workers. Though, company housing tends to cost more than available rent in Budapest.

Sellers and buyers of dreams

“I expected to earn around 2000 euros, but can barely make 1000 a month” – the translation appeared on the phone screen of a Vietnamese rider as we were having our conversation. They explained to me how they hoped to help their families back home, but one of the couriers expressed doubts about the prospects. Although illegal according to Hungarian legislation, these riders had to pay between ten to fourteen thousand euros to get to the country. Many were quite unsatisfied since they ended up making just enough money to repay the debts they acquired to finance their trip.

These couriers I met during my fieldwork were men, relatively young and pirmarily from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India. The other main group of couriers in terms of nationality was Vietnamese riders who rivalled Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Indians in number during the start of my research, but my contact with them was much more limited.

Amir – who appears at the start of the article joking about his “imperfect” work ethic - once told me that each time he mentioned that he only had had to pay 600 euros to start working in Hungary, the other riders thought he was playing a joke on them. It was the standard for the rest of the couriers to pay between ten and fourteen thousand euros. As one Bangladeshi courier explained to me, the amount one has to pay depends on the number of parties through which his application goes: he was quite lucky as he “only had to pay 8000 euros” since only one party was involved in his case. Amir detailed to me that often, one of the first people who come from a certain location to work for a fleet company end up becoming labour agents themselves and pocketing some of the money that the new arrivals pay for their journey.

The labour brokers who are important actors in this labour regime are sometimes referred to as “sellers of dreams” who convince people that the money invested into migrating for work is a worthy one. I managed to get the contact of a Pakistani man who was allegedly helping people come to work as couriers in Hungary. He has a Youtube channel dedicated to assisting people with administrative process of moving to European countries such as Hungary. However, our conversation over the phone was cut short when I asked whether he provides help for people and he started shouting on the other end of the line and then hung up.

Many of the riders learn about the job opportunity through friends or social media ads and applied through agencies in their country of origin. While couriers cover almost all the expenses that their working life entails, the promise of low costs and provisions are used by labour brokers to make the idea of working in Hungary seductive. Bashir, a middle-aged Bangladeshi rider worked in Dubai before coming to Hungary where he essentially made the same monthly income nearing 1000 euros. In Dubai, he got housing and food during working hours for free and was promised to get housing, internet, phone and a bike for free at the fleet company. However, these all turned out to be his own expenses and therefore he has to spend half of his income on these items.

The reasons why people “buy” these dreams is more complex than just the hope of financial gain. Bashir decided to move since he was also doing delivery work in Dubai, but the heat was unbearable for him while others found the managerial pressures in the service sector there too tyrannical and wanted a job with less human supervision. This desire for flexibility was a recurring theme and the adventure of working so far away from home also was a major motivating factor for many workers. One Indian courier explained to me that he had left his masters degree in India since “studying was also for getting work later”, but he wanted to start right away: “I wanted to shake myself, see the world” – he said with a big smile while also adding that he feels satisfied with the adventure and will return to Hyderabad in Southern India once he is done here.