41, Uber Eats courier, Sotteville-lès-Rouen, 6 May 2021
On 6 May 2021, at around 8.45pm, on the corner of rue François-Raspail and rue Victor-Hugo in Sotteville-lès-Rouen, near Rouen in Normandy, the life of Emmanuel Adeoye, nicknamed Chahi, came to a brutal end.
At 41, this man from Nigeria, a husband and father, is in the middle of a cold, rainy evening, delivering a meal by bike for Uber Eats. After going through a give-way sign without stopping, at a spot where visibility was limited, he was hit by a Renault Twingo driven by a 21-year-old motorist doing 50 km/h in a 30 km/h zone. Despite the driver swerving to try to avoid him, the collision was unavoidable. Not wearing a helmet, Chahi died at the scene despite the swift arrival of the emergency services. The investigation was handed to the police judicial support unit.
In the endless flow of deliveries that set the rhythm of our cities, Chahi was one of those faces we pass without really seeing. One of the “invisible ones”, as Alexis Vernier, a local councillor in Sotteville-lès-Rouen who was moved by his death, so rightly called them. Without his posts on social media the day after the tragedy, Chahi might have joined the anonymous statistics, the accidents no one talks about, the lives sacrificed on the altar of convenience.
Because Chahi belonged to the growing army of cycle couriers criss-crossing our streets. Three years ago, there were forty of them in the Rouen metropolitan area. Today there are eight hundred, or between 100 and 300 according to some estimates. Eight hundred people who, like him, risk their lives every day to earn a living, at a time when the price of a delivery for couriers has fallen from €5 to €2 or €3.
He left behind a partner, two children and a stepson, in grief and in hardship, as Solenn Leprince, the lawyer for the civil parties, pointed out.
“It’s very hard for the family, who, what’s more, lived only on this income.”
His fellow couriers, in a show of solidarity, set up an online fundraiser to support a family suddenly deprived of its mainstay.
His death sent a real shock wave. On 20 May 2021, elected officials from the Rouen metropolitan area, joined by Green politicians including David Cormand, Yannick Jadot, Eric Piolle and Mounir Satouri, published an opinion piece in the daily “Le Monde”2. The joint text called on delivery platforms to take responsibility for their couriers, demanding in particular “employment contracts” and “the provision of the necessary safety equipment (helmet, lights, mirrors, bell, reflective coat, etc.)”.
In March 2022, at the motorist’s trial, it emerged that over three years, 11 cycle couriers had died on French roads “just to deliver meals to people’s homes faster”. The local officials spoke of a “social phenomenon that risks happening again” and denounced a “system adopted by the platforms [that] ends up endangering the couriers”.
Since the opinion piece, not one of those politicians has put forward a single law to protect couriers.