Food-Delivery App Foodora Announces Exit From Canada Two Months After Historic Worker Win

Summary

App-based food-delivery giant Foodora is shuttering its Canadian operations, citing the “highly competitive and saturated Canadian environment” in an email sent to couriers Monday.

The rapid exit from the market is expected to be finalized within two weeks. It comes two months after a precedent-setting decision by the province’s labour relations board, which ruled the delivery service’s couriers had the right to unionize.

“Foodora will continue to operate for the next two weeks. The last day of operations will be May 11, 2020. You should expect to receive an official notice of termination letter today,” the email said. “We appreciate this may be difficult news. This is a sad day for all of us.”

While the company’s couriers had not yet joined a union, they were the first app-based workforce in the country to make significant strides toward it. In February, they scored a historic victory when the board made the first decision of its kind on the gig economy, ruling that Foodora couriers had been misclassified as independent contractors, a category of worker that cannot unionize.