Shanghai Delivery Rider Exposes Pledge: 963 Orders Nets 4,735 Yuan

On May 25, a Shanghai food delivery rider posted an "Employment Commitment Letter," exposing various deduction and fine rules faced after starting the job.

The commitment letter shows that after the rider is hired, the company distributes helmets, work uniforms, and other equipment totaling 1,000 yuan, which is deducted from the salary. For delayed orders, 2 yuan is deducted from the delivery fee per order; customer complaints, wrong deliveries, and damages result in a fine of 50 yuan per order; poor service attitude incurs a fine of 50 to 200 yuan per order; if an order is canceled due to personal reasons causing delivery delays, the fine is 500 yuan per order.

The materials also show that the rider's working hours include 7:00 AM to 8:30 PM, and 10:30 PM to 12:00 PM the next day. Failing to attend work on rainy or bad weather days will be treated as absenteeism, with an absenteeism fine of 300 yuan per day.

Resignation rules are equally harsh. Riders can only resign after completing two months of employment. Those who resign before two months will have their pay uniformly settled at half price, meaning 2.9 yuan per order. If the resignation procedures are not handled normally, the accommodation fee will not enjoy the company subsidy and will be deducted at the original price of 1,000 yuan/month, with anything less than a month calculated as a full month.

The rider stated that they delivered food for a month, completing a total of 963 orders, working about 10 hours a day. After deducting equipment fees and timeout fines, the final take-home pay was 4,735.3 yuan.

What this commitment letter presents is not just a rider's pay stub, but a typical platform-outsourced exploitation structure: risks are borne by the worker, costs are borne by the worker, fines are borne by the worker, and the enterprise is only responsible for making rules, shifting responsibilities, and reaping management profits.

Under this logic, riders appear to "take orders freely," but are actually bound layer by layer by equipment fees, timeout fines, complaint fines, absenteeism fines, resignation deductions, and accommodation deductions. The so-called flexible employment means flexibility for the company's responsibilities and inflexibility for the worker's body; the so-called commitment letter promises not guarantees, but signing and acknowledging fines in advance.

The Chinese Communist Party has long promoted "new forms of employment" and "platform economies absorbing employment," but many grassroots workers in reality have not gained more stable guarantees. Instead, they have been pushed from traditional employment relationships into more fragmented labor traps where rights are harder to defend. Running through the streets of the city, behind the rider is not so-called common prosperity, but a deduction machine that precisely calculates every single order.