Many of the city’s newly homeless are
food-delivery workers facing a difficult choice: locked in without income or
locked out with a job
By Karen Hao
Updated
May 10, 2022 10:54 am ET
Many residents of Shanghai have been stuck in their closed residential compounds during the lockdown. ALY SONG/REUTERS
Shanghai’s lockdown has kept tens
of millions of residents trapped indoors for a month and
a half. Thousands of
others in China’s wealthiest city have found themselves in the opposite
predicament: living in the street.
Victims of the same strict
Covid-19 rules that are keeping most residents homebound, many of the newly homeless are migrant
laborers from rural areas and smaller cities who often live hand-to-mouth while
sharing an apartment with other workers.
For many, the companies they work
for have closed down in the lockdown, including boarding up worker dormitories.
Some have chosen to join the tens of thousands who zip around Shanghai on bikes
or scooters for food-delivery platforms like Alibaba
Group Holding Ltd. ’s
Ele.me and Meituan’s namesake service.
But with the income comes the
stigma of a higher Covid risk. While the Shanghai government has granted
special lockdown exemption for food-delivery workers, residential compounds
have their own rules barring them from returning to their apartments for fear
they will bring the virus back with them.
A
delivery worker outside a closed residential area in Shanghai on Monday. Some
delivery workers are barred from living at home because of their work.
Photo: ALY
SONG/REUTERS
Short on money and connections to
find alternate lodging, they have bought simple tents or slept under bridges
with only a bedsheet or blanket for protection.
One rider who asked to be
identified only by his surname, Wang, said he arrived in Shanghai on March 5
after delivering food in another city, with hopes of making more money in the
prosperous financial hub.
On April 1, the residential
compound where he was living locked down and wouldn’t let him leave for more
than three weeks. On April 24, he restarted delivery work, which he described
as his only means of survival. That meant going from being locked in his
compound to being locked out. He began living under bridges.
Other food-delivery workers also
described gathering under any bridges they could find to avoid the wind and
rain. One worker said he shared a bridge with more than 30 people, most of whom
ran deliveries like him.
“How many people can understand
our situation?” Mr. Wang said. “Our suffering is real but difficult to
explain.”
As Shanghai
remains locked down amid China’s biggest Covid-19 outbreak, residents are
taking to social media to vent about a shortage of food or they're bartering
with neighbors. Anxiety and hunger are prompting many to question Beijing’s
pandemic strategy. Photo: Chinatopix Via AP The
Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition
In recent weeks, the local
government says it has stepped up its efforts to support the roughly 20,000
delivery drivers in Shanghai. Officials have coordinated with hotels and other
institutions to create driver service stations to provide mattresses, meals and
a place to charge their devices.
Though six weeks of hard lockdown
has helped bring Shanghai’s daily infection count down—on Tuesday, municipal
health authorities reported a seventh consecutive day of cases below 5,000—authorities in recent days have
tightened restrictions,
signaling that the lockdown could continue for longer.
But heightened awareness of the
plight of homeless workers has generated its own trouble, some say. In the past
two weeks, police officers have begun arriving in the middle of the night to
disperse larger encampments and scatter them across the city.
The Shanghai government didn’t
respond to a request for comment.
The government also instituted a
new requirement for delivery workers to carry a digital pass, which includes
their Covid-testing results and authorizes them to be outside.
With the application for his pass
pending, Mr. Wang once again had to pause deliveries. He hid in a park out of
sight of police, relying on passing vendors or fellow authorized workers to buy
food to eat.
Workers say the food-delivery
platforms, which employ the laborers as contract workers, have struggled to
provide alternative lodging for them, leaving them to navigate a complicated
system for finding limited housing and to foot a bill with strained resources.
Authorities
have ordered nonessential businesses to close and asked people to work at home
in Beijing’s Chaoyang district, in an effort to avoid a Shanghai-size outbreak.
Photo: Andy
Wong/Associated Press
Meituan said in a written reply
to questions that it has been coordinating with hotels since March to provide
temporary shelter for its workers. While they were able to find housing for
roughly 15,000 workers, they are calling for more hotels to join the effort.
Meituan said it has also worked with restaurants to provide free food for its
workers.
Ele.me didn’t respond to a
request for comment.
Workers said it wasn’t enough,
describing the difficulty of finding an available room without knowing the
right people. A driver surnamed Nie said he has stayed off the streets by
relying on his network of friends to tell him which hotels will accept him and
which ones have vacancies.
“I know a lot of people,” he
said. “But others don’t know anyone.”
Another driver surnamed Liang
said Meituan initially put him up in a hotel. But after the government
requisitioned the hotel for official use, he spent nearly a month on the
streets before finding another room through a friend. “I got lucky,” he said.
Others said they worry about
getting locked down in a hotel if a single guest tests positive for Covid,
which would deprive them of their ability to earn an income.
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One driver said he arrived in
late February and began working for a catering business on March 2 only to get
locked down in his residential compound the following morning because a
positive case was found there.
Another came last October to
work in a factory, but the factory closed at the end of
February. He was also confined to his compound before he could find another
opportunity.
Both turned to food-delivery work
as soon as they could exit their apartments and are now roughing it on the
streets, barred from living at home due to the nature of the work.
It isn’t just delivery workers
who have been forced to improvise makeshift accommodations. Many others have
found themselves for days without housing after falling through the cracks of
the Covid rules.
Anna Xu, 42, a Shanghai-based
photographer, was temporarily living in a hotel after returning from
international travel when she caught Covid and was sent to a makeshift quarantine facility. Once she was out, the hotel wouldn’t let
her back in.
A
sweeper near an empty bus stand in the central business district during what is
normally the morning rush hour in Beijing’s Chaoyang district on Tuesday.
Photo: Andy
Wong/Associated Press
She spent two nights outside on a
mattress she scrounged with all of her luggage, scared for her safety and the
safety of her belongings. “There were so many people sleeping under window
awnings and flower boxes,” she said. “The sanitary conditions were disgusting.”
On the third day, she said she
checked into a hospital because she needed treatment for a kidney condition,
which allowed her to sleep on the waiting-room floor. She said she has since
found other accommodation.
Mr. Liang said migrant workers
are more likely to face this situation, including those who live in group
housing and may not be registered individually with neighborhood officials. If
you are sent away to a quarantine facility, he said, “they definitely won’t let
you return.”
But people who have tried to help
the homeless say it has grown increasingly difficult to do so since local media
reports of the issue in mid to late-April spread widely on social media.
Drivers say it has become a sore spot for the government.
On Sunday, Mr. Wang said he
finally received his digital pass more than a week after submitting his
application. He still doesn’t have a place to stay, he said.
—Qianwei
Zhang contributed to this article.
Write to Karen Hao at karen.hao@wsj.com
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