Australia sets a pay floor for the international students behind its delivery apps

Bijoy Paul had come to Sydney from Bangladesh in 2016 to study for a master’s degree. On a night in late November 2020, the 27-year-old was delivering food for Uber Eats in the suburb of Rockdale when he was struck by a car and killed. He was the fourth food delivery rider to die on Australian roads in two months, and a fifth would follow within days. Almost six years later, the riders who have taken his place are about to receive protections that Paul never had: a legally enforceable minimum rate of pay for the hours they spend delivering, and accident insurance paid for by the platforms they work through. The change is the clearest sign yet that Australia has decided its food delivery workforce, young, migrant and heavily drawn from the international student population, can no longer be left entirely to the market.

The law that gave a tribunal new power

The shift traces back to the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No. 2) Act 2024, whose provisions for “employee-like” workers commenced on 26 August 2024. Before that date, Australian law recognised two kinds of worker: employees, who are entitled to the minimum wage, leave and superannuation, and independent contractors, who are not. Riders and drivers who log in to apps such as Uber Eats, DoorDash, DiDi and Uber sat in the second group, treated as small businesses running their own affairs. The reform created a third category and gave the Fair Work Commission, the national workplace tribunal, power to set enforceable minimum standards for people in it. Those standards can cover pay, insurance, record-keeping, cost recovery and representation, though the Commission cannot set overtime rates or rosters. Workers gained the right to challenge “unfair deactivation” as well, the term for being cut off from an app without warning or a fair hearing.

What the draft standards promise

On 8 July 2026, the Commission published a decision and a draft minimum standards order for on-demand delivery, the first of its kind in the country. The draft sets an income floor tied to “engaged” time, the hours a worker spends actively collecting and completing deliveries. From August 2026 the proposed rate is $31.30 an hour for a rider on a pedal or electric bike, $31.50 for a motorcycle or scooter and $32.00 for a car, with small increases scheduled for 2027. The figures represent about a 25 per cent rise on the roughly $24 an hour that industry surveys suggested many riders were earning. Platforms would also have to fund personal accident insurance at a “reasonable minimum level”, give riders clearer information about a job before they accept it, and recognise a right to union representation. Submissions on the draft closed on 29 July 2026, with the order due to take effect on 10 August 2026 if it is confirmed.

The floor comes with limits that keep riders outside standard employment. It works as a top-up rather than a guaranteed wage for every hour online; a worker who already clears the floor through delivery fees across a pay period receives nothing extra, and waiting time between jobs does not count towards the calculation. Riders still cover their own fuel, registration, repairs and any fines, and the order does not include superannuation. The Commission’s own expert panel noted that the proposed rates sat below the casual hourly rate in the relevant award once costs were taken into account, describing the margin left for a car driver to recover expenses as less than a dollar an hour.

The deaths that forced the question

The push for these standards grew out of a run of deaths that authorities could not ignore. Between 27 September and 26 November 2020, five food delivery riders were killed on the roads: Dede Fredy, an Indonesian rider working for Uber Eats; Xiaojun Chen, who delivered for Hungry Panda; Chow Khai Shien, a DoorDash rider in Melbourne; Bijoy Paul; and a fifth Uber Eats rider whose death came two days after Paul’s. All were migrants, several were riding bicycles or scooters in heavy traffic, and none were covered by workers’ compensation. The New South Wales Coroner examined the cluster, and the Transport Workers’ Union called for a federal regulator for the sector. The toll did not stop there. By August 2024 the union counted 18 food delivery riders killed on Australian roads since 2017, with further deaths recorded after that count was made.

Michael Kaine, national secretary of the Transport Workers’ Union, has led the campaign for these standards for most of a decade. The union surveyed riders, publicised each death, and pressed both state coroners and the federal government for action. Kaine has described food delivery riders as among the most vulnerable workers in the country, pointing to people sent onto busy roads with no training, no protective equipment and no right to insurance. His argument stayed consistent throughout: workers carrying real physical risk on behalf of large companies should not be denied the basic protections that other Australian workers take for granted. That case gained weight each time another rider failed to come home.

Who is actually on the bikes

The workforce these rules are meant to protect is young, migrant and heavily made up of international students. A Transport Workers’ Union survey of 240 riders, published in early 2020, found that three in four were temporary visa holders, including international students and people on working holiday and bridging visas. Their average age was 26, two-thirds were under 30, and one in four had been in an accident while working. The same survey and later reporting put average earnings, after the cost of fuel and vehicle wear, at little more than $10 an hour. Official data is thinner. The Australian Bureau of Statistics found that in 2022-23 just under 1 per cent of employed people had done digital platform work in the previous month, with food delivery the most common task at 35 per cent and personal transport, meaning rideshare, next at 27 per cent.

How many riders come from India or the wider South Asian region is harder to state with precision, because neither the platforms nor the government publish a country-by-country breakdown of who delivers. What is documented is the size of the student communities from which the trade draws. India is the second-largest source of international students in Australia after China, with about 118,900 enrolments in 2023, and Nepal ranks among the top five. Students from Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh add to that pool. Riders, community advocates and the deaths themselves, several of them South Asian, point to a workforce in which students from the subcontinent are strongly represented, even where the exact share is not officially counted.

For student riders the stakes carry an extra edge. A student visa holder may work only 48 hours a fortnight during study periods, and every hour logged on to an app counts towards that limit. A rider chasing enough deliveries to cover rent can drift past the cap and breach the visa; one who reports underpayment or an unsafe practice risks drawing attention to hours already worked. That bind has long left many riders reluctant to complain, a vulnerability that safety and underpayment campaigners say the platforms had little reason to address while the law treated riders as contractors.

Flexibility, cost and the price of a floor

The platforms did not simply resist. In November 2025 the Transport Workers’ Union lodged its application for the delivery standards jointly with Uber Eats and DoorDash, a step the union called the first of its kind in the world. Simon Rossi, DoorDash’s vice-president for the Asia-Pacific, framed the deal as the first time drivers would gain minimum standards under the government’s new laws while keeping the freedom to choose their own hours. That flexibility is the feature the companies most want to protect, and one many riders value, since it lets students fit shifts around classes and exams. The market was already moving under them; Menulog, once a major platform, closed its Australian operation in late 2025. Uber has estimated that the changes could push the cost of rideshare and delivery up by between 10 and 15 per cent, a figure that captures the tension at the centre of the reform, stronger protection for riders set against higher prices for customers and questions about how many shifts the platforms will offer once each delivery costs more.

The federal government has presented the standards as a measured correction rather than an overhaul. Amanda Rishworth, the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, called the Commission’s decision a landmark ruling, and the government has stressed that the framework preserves the independent-contractor model while placing a floor beneath it. Ministers have also pointed out that eligible gig workers now have access, for the first time, to a low-cost process to challenge unfair deactivation, with the Commission able to order that a worker be switched back on. The design reflects a deliberate choice to regulate the platforms without turning every rider into an employee, an approach that leaves both companies and unions able to claim a measure of the outcome.

What it means for the riders

For the students who deliver Australia’s dinners, the change is real but bounded. A rider on a bike will have a stated rate for the hours spent delivering, insurance if the worst happens, and a route to contest a sudden loss of access to work. Those are protections Bijoy Paul and the riders who died alongside him never had. Whether the floor holds its value, whether waiting time and running costs erode it in practice, and whether the platforms keep offering enough shifts as prices rise, will decide how much the reform is worth to the people on the bikes. For a workforce drawn so heavily from India, Nepal and their neighbours, the answer will be measured less in the wording of the order than in whether the next rider gets home safely at the end of a shift.