Marwân-al-Qays Bousmah

INED researcher Marwân-al-Qays Bousmah is investigating the health of food delivery couriers in France working off of digital platforms. He answered our questions. 

(Interview conducted in March 2025)

Delivery couriers working by way of third-party companies via those companies’ online digital platforms are heavily exposed to socio-organizational risks. This is the case in France and everywhere that what are called platformized jobs and work develop. The phenomenon is particularly alarming in that these platforms use an increasingly unstable, precarious work force—notably immigrants without residence permits—who are either self-employed or “renting” the account of a third person and who have very little in the way of effective social protection. 

So it’s really important to study the social determinants of delivery workers’ health, particularly the impacts of their working conditions. Likewise, there is a strong need to improve our understanding of this emerging social and labor group of “Uberized” workers as platform-based comes to prevail in an increasing number of activity sectors.

This is precisely the aim of the SANTÉ-COURSE project (Health-delivery running), a participatory research project run jointly at all stages by an interdisciplinary team of social science and health science researchers from INED and IRD, advocacy group coordinators who provide platform-based delivery couriers with assistance in medical-social, administrative, and legal matters (these groups include Maison des Coursiers de Paris, Maison des Livreurs de Bordeaux, and Médecins du Monde), and a peer group made up of current and former delivery couriers. I coordinate this project with Annabel Desgrées du Loû and Flore Gubert from IRD (Institut de Recherche pour le Développement) and Circé Lienart from the Maison des Coursiers. The project is jointly funded by the Institut Convergences Migrations, France’s Agence Nationale de Recherche (ANR), INSERM, and the Paris Public Health Institute. 

Our project is composed of three complementary research operations: a qualitative study based on semi-directive interviews with delivery couriers together with non-participant observation; a quantitative survey targeting a sample of between 1000 and 1500 delivery persons; and a third component that has yet to be funded and will measure delivery couriers’ exposure to air pollution by means of on-board microsensors, enabling us to study exposure disparities by working conditions. 

There are a lot of challenges when it comes to recruiting participants for the study. There is no sampling frame, and delivery people are a heterogeneous group, geographically split and always on the move. A considerable proportion of them are working through a third person’s account. 

The usefulness of the participatory approach goes far beyond recruiting problems. It enables us to formulate more relevant research questions and develop a more effective questionnaire, to hone our survey methodology and fieldwork—all while developing a relationship of trust with the people directly concerned by our study. This collective approach in turn led us to adopt the method of location-and-time sampling: participants are recruited on site in public spaces in Paris and Bordeaux Métropole as they wait for delivery orders. To manage this, we mapped out delivery worker waiting spots in the two urban areas while using social geography studies to get a better idea of the types of logic driving the place-based self-positioning specific to platform-run delivery work. 

The medical-social consultations run by our partner Médecins du Monde in Bordeaux as part of the “Precarious workers” research program suggest a strong prevalence of musculoskeletal, psychological, respiratory, and urogenital disorders. We also encounter the familiar key issue of access to rights and medical care: lack of prevention, an alarming rate of healthcare non-use, and no access to occupational medicine. 

While there have been some recent qualitative studies on the effects of platform work on health—in sociology of health and the psychodynamics of work, for example— to my knowledge no quantitative studies on the question have yet been done in France, and very few at an international level.