Delivery worker union has asked food delivery aggregator Swiggy to take action against a customer who allegedly left a note saying ‘don’t want a Muslim delivery person’ on its order.
“Dear @Swiggy please take a stand against such a bigoted request. We (Delivery workers) are here to deliver food to one and all, be it Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh,” Shaik Salauddin, National General Secretary of Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union said in a twitter post earlier this week.
Responding to the tweet, Member of Parliament, Karti P Chidambaram said, “Platform companies cannot sit back and watch as gig workers face such blatant bigotry in the name of religion. What action will such companies take to safeguard the rights of gig workers?”
Adding to this, Member of Parliament Lok Sabha, Mahua Moitra said, “Sickening to see normalisation of hatred & bigotry - what would earlier be hidden personal prejudices now become proud public proclamations of majoritarianism. @Swiggy please blacklist customer, make name public and also file police complaint. This is blatantly illegal”
Swiggy’s response
In response to Moitra’s tweet, Swiggy’s customer care twitter handle said, “as an equal opportunity platform, there is no place for discrimination in Swiggy’s delivery universe. The assignment of orders is entirely automated and does not take any such requests into consideration. We’ve been attempting to validate the authenticity and recency of the screenshot to get more information since the incident was first reported a few days ago.”
A similar incident has happened on Zomato in 2019, when a customer cancelled his order because the worker delivering his order was a Muslim. Following this incident, Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal had tweeted, “Food doesn’t have a religion. It is a religion. We are proud of the idea of India - and the diversity of our esteemed customers and partners. We aren’t sorry to lose any business that comes in the way of our values. ”