18, Uber Eats, Bordeaux, January 2019
There are winter days when the pale light of Bordeaux brushes the honey-coloured stone façades. On Thursday 17 January 2019, shortly after midday, Franck Page gets on his bike, as usual. The 18-year-old, tall and slim with a lively gaze, pedals through the streets of a city he is still getting to know. He had arrived from Marmande, a small town in south-west France, only a few months earlier, to study economics at the university.
Born in Côte d’Ivoire, Franck had settled in France with his family in 2002. His path had taken him from the secondary school in Marmande, where he passed his baccalaureate, the French school-leaving exam, in economics and social sciences, to the lecture halls of the university in Bordeaux. But like so many other students, his grant was not enough. So Franck pedals. He delivers meals for Uber Eats, registered as an auto-entrepreneur, France’s simplified self-employed status: precarious work, but it helps make ends meet.
What the accident reports do not say is that under the cycle courier’s helmet beat the heart of an artist. Among his friends, he was not known as “the delivery guy” but as “the little hip-hop prodigy”. In the crew Animaniax Tribe, his breakdancing moves dazzled. His body could draw shapes in the air that his friends admired. A passion that defined him far more than the food runs he made to get by.
That day, in Pessac, near the Bordeaux ring road, Franck is stopped at a red light on avenue Antoine Becquerel, not far from the slip road onto the A630, at junction 14, Pessac Saige-Ladonne. The urban ballet of vehicles carries on around him. A lorry whose driver has not seen him hits him. The young dancer’s body is dragged several hundred metres along the cold asphalt. He will never dance again.
The lorry driver, a 47-year-old man from the Gironde, noticed nothing. He drives on to the ring road before stopping. When he realises what has just happened, he is in shock. He is taken to the Charles Perrens hospital. For Franck, it is already too late.
“It’s one death too many,” his father Alexandre would later say, with the dignity of parents who have to bury their child. “We want to show Uber that we are here. So far, they haven’t contacted me. So I’m taking the liberty of coming to them. I didn’t expect this silence. I thought they would at least show a little sympathy for our grief. Not even that.”
Uber Eats eventually responded in a statement: “It is with great sadness that we learned of the courier’s death. Our thoughts are with his loved ones and his family.” The platform said it was “in contact with the family in order to assist them in their dealings with AXA, respecting their wishes, and with the authorities in order to assist them in their investigation.” It offered to cover funeral costs up to €1,500 and to pay the family a sum calculated on the young man’s earnings. But for the company, this was a tragic road accident, not a workplace accident.
Franck’s death then raises questions that go beyond a simple accident. “He was right next to a motorway entrance, he should never have been there!” Edouard Bernasse of the Collectif des livreurs autonomes de Paris, a Paris collective of independent couriers, would protest. Uber Eats, the app many couriers call “the worst of them all”, sends its riders far from their usual delivery area, with no regard for the risks involved. “I can’t understand how such a system can exist: making money by making people take all these risks, it’s unacceptable. My son is a victim of Uberisation, one victim too many,” Alexandre Page would add.
Arthur Hay, secretary of the Gironde cycle couriers’ branch of the CGT, one of France’s largest trade unions, makes no secret of his anger: “If you obey the highway code, you can’t make a living.” He points to the lack of road safety training and to pay per delivery, which pushes riders to go ever faster. “When you pay people per job, it creates more pressure, you always have to go faster, so it causes accidents…”
The police issue an appeal for witnesses the day after the tragedy. The investigation is handed to the road accidents and traffic offences unit at Bordeaux’s central police station. Meanwhile, the Paris independent couriers’ collective (Clap) reacts on Twitter: “We regret that, for all the time we have been warning about the dangers of our status and of being paid per delivery, nothing serious has been put in place to guarantee our safety on the road.”
Ten days later, on Sunday 27 January, around a hundred people march through the streets of Bordeaux, at times in pouring rain. The procession sets off from place de la Victoire, along cours Pasteur, across place Gambetta and down rue Sainte-Catherine. At the front, a large banner reads “Tribute to Franck Page, a student who died during a bicycle delivery”, with his smiling face. His father, Alexandre, holds it up at arm’s length, dignified despite the pain. With him march friends, fellow dancers, and couriers from all over France.
Some of the couriers there did not know Franck, but recognise themselves in his situation. “We’ve all crossed paths at some point. It could have been me. I would have liked people to march for me,” says Antoine, 20, who had been an Uber courier for four months and came to the march.
On place de la Bourse, the procession stops in front of a cruel irony: a giant Uber Eats advertisement proclaiming “Get delivered wherever life takes you”.