Foodpanda Bosses Agree Fee Deal With Couriers

Bosses and delivery workers at the food delivery platform Foodpanda say they've agreed a deal on fees after a strike disrupted deliveries in some parts of Hong Kong at the weekend.

Managers and couriers held seven hours of talks on Thursday afternoon, emerging just before 10pm to confirm that they had reached a settlement and to urge customers to stick with the platform.

Representatives of the delivery drivers said the company had given positive responses to their demands, including agreeing new ways of calculating their pay to better reflect the distance travelled.

"We have made an agreement with the management and director," courier representative Waqar Fida said after the talks at the company's Sheung Wan headquarters. "They gave us a very good package and we have done our best to get what we want."

"To the customers: please come back. We have made our very good decision and we are happy for what we got. We are the winners"

He said the company's mistakes were down to "communications barriers" and bosses had agreed to address this as soon as possible.

The company's operations director, Pedro Dias, acknowledged that communication was part of the problem.

"I recognise that several of the issues that were discussed stemmed from an initial miscommunication between us and our fleet, so this is something I will be putting a lot of effort into solving in the near future," he said.

Industrial action at the weekend disrupted deliveries in Tsim Sha Tsui and To Kwa Wan.

Workers said they were unhappy at cuts in delivery fees and the suspension of some couriers as a result of customer complaints.

A first round of talks on Tuesday ended without a deal, but the two sides agreed to continue talking in an attempt to find a solution.

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