Cairo – In a significant legislative step towards regulating the work of delivery workers in Egypt, the Parliamentary Committee on Communications and Information Technology has unveiled a new draft law aimed at safeguarding the rights and safety of workers in this rapidly growing sector—particularly young people who rely on delivery apps to earn a living, often under precarious and unregulated conditions.
The draft law seeks to formalize the status of platform-based delivery workers, ensuring they receive social and health insurance, while obligating companies operating digital platforms to establish clear standards for occupational safety and secure the vehicles used by workers.
According to local media reports, the forthcoming legislation will also introduce oversight mechanisms for digital delivery platforms and define the legal relationship between the worker and the platform, thereby protecting workers’ rights and limiting exploitation.
This legislative initiative comes in response to repeated demands from trade unions and civil society organizations, amid a sharp rise in the number of unregulated delivery workers in the Egyptian labor market and the lack of any legal protections—despite the daily risks these workers face.
In this context, the Arab Trade Union Confederation (ATUC) welcomes this step as a positive move toward recognizing digital labor as an integral part of the labor market. ATUC further calls for expanding the scope of such legislation to include all categories of workers—on and off platforms—in line with Egypt’s commitments under international conventions, particularly ILO Convention No. 87. ATUC also emphasizes the importance of guaranteeing full trade union representation for these workers to uphold the principles of decent work and social justice.
