Fast, cheap and now: The hidden safety risks facing Singapore’s platform workers

It was a Sunday evening at the end of a packed, busy weekend and I did what any tired mum of four does when she has no energy left to whip up dinner. I tapped an app and ordered in.

Twenty minutes later, a rider handed over six packets of chicken rice in the rain, wished me a good night, and rushed off to his next job.

I didn’t think twice about him until I came across some numbers that surprised me. In 2025, two platform workers in Singapore were killed and another 74 seriously injured – this means a fatal and major injury rate of 84.6 for every 100,000 platform workers.

Most of those hurt were doing deliveries, and most were on two wheels – motorbikes and power-assisted bicycles – out on our roads.

That rider brought me dinner. It didn’t cost me much. But what did it cost him?

Safety is more than a hard hat

When we hear ‘workplace safety’, most of us might picture a construction site, with hard hats, scaffolding, a sign counting the days since the last accident. Those dangers are real. But the risks that workers face in 2026 are getting harder to see.

They look like a delivery rider rushing one more order to hit an incentive; a bus captain fighting fatigue near the end of a shift; an outdoor worker breathing in haze or feeling the heat; a nurse taking abuse from a patient; an office worker quietly drowning in a workload that never eases off.

You can’t put a plaster on these things. But they hurt people all the same.

Speaking up shouldn’t cost you your job

The foundation of any safe workplace is simple: a worker who spots something dangerous has to feel safe enough to say so. In reality, many stay quiet, worried it will cost them.

NTUC’s “Spot, Stop and Report” campaign, launched in 2023, was meant to change that, making it easier to flag hazards without fear, and positioning unions as an alternative channel when raising it with the boss feels too risky.

The early signs are encouraging. At one transport operator, safety feedback jumped from roughly one report a quarter to three or four a month. That doesn’t mean there was more danger. It’s just more people finally confident enough to speak up.

The platform economy’s hidden danger

Which brings me back to my delivery rider. The old safety rules were never built for platform work.

These workers share our streets. But no supervisor is watching over them – just an app that sets the pace, and money that rewards speed over caution.

NTUC and its platform work associations (PWAs), the National Delivery Champions Association (NDCA), the National Private Hire Vehicles Association (NPHVA), and the National Taxi Association (NTA), have pushed operators to agree on principles that spell out what should be obvious: incentive schemes shouldn’t reward workers for going excessively long stretches without rest.

In early 2026, a Platform Worker Safety Workgroup was formed, bringing together Government agencies, eight platform operators and the unions, with targeted safety measures due by year’s end.

As NTUC Assistant Secretary-General Yeo Wan Ling, who advises all three PWAs, said at the NTUC U Safe Awards and Conference in March 2026, the welfare of workers “cannot be the price of faster deliveries, longer hours, or unsafe conditions.”

There’s law behind this, too. Since the Platform Workers Act took effect in January 2025, around 90,000 platform workers now receive CPF contributions every month, and more than 1,000 work-injury claims have been paid out.

This is, at last, real protection for people the old system treated as nobody’s employee.

And the response is getting specific. This week, Grab Singapore, the Riding Safety Association of Singapore and NDCA launched the Urban Rider Safety Course – a course built for delivery riders in particular.

Participants train with their own delivery bags, practising emergency braking and low-speed control on a loaded bike, and handling the hazards they meet daily: stop-start traffic, tight loading bays, multi-storey car parks.

Grab also nudges tired riders in-app to rest and doesn’t penalise those who take longer on a delivery, because speed and safety don’t mix.

The dangers you can’t see

Some of the newest safety risks are the ones we’ve been slowest to name.

Fatigue is one. NTUC Assistant Secretary-General Melvin Yong has argued that tiredness itself should be treated as a core safety issue for shift and frontline workers, because an exhausted driver or machine operator is a hazard to everyone, including themselves.

Heat and haze are others. In Parliament this August, Mr Yong, who is also a Labour MP, pressed the Government on whether employers in outdoor sectors were ready for a bad haze season – from fit-testing masks and keeping N95s in stock, to scaling back outdoor work when the air turns bad.

Extreme heat and hazardous air, once just background weather, are now workplace risks in their own right.

And then there’s the one we rarely think to put a hard hat on: mental well-being. When Labour MP and NTUC Assistant Secretary-General Patrick Tay recently asked in Parliament whether Singapore should develop formal benchmarks for “psychological safety” at work, the Manpower Ministry pointed to tools that help employers identify workplace stressors.

NTUC president K Thanaletchimi has warned that AI, for all its promise, can increase pace, expectations and pressure on workers – and that it ‘should augment human capability, not erode human well-being.’

Having spent 14 years in the deadline-driven world of broadcast TV myself, let me tell you: burnout is an injury too. We just don’t file a report for it.

Designing work that doesn’t break people

Something more hopeful is starting to happen. The conversation is slowly moving from “report the hazard” to “prevent the hazard” in the first place.

As our workforce ages, NTUC has been urging employers to redesign jobs so that a 55-year-old isn’t lifting the way a 25-year-old does – automating the dangerous tasks and tackling the falls and back injuries that could end careers.

Slips, trips and falls have topped the injury list for a decade. Technology is starting to help too – we now have tools like exoskeletons, fatigue-alert devices, and AI.

Just this week, SMRT rolled out an AI-enabled safety app that lets employees and contractors flag a hazard by speaking into their phone.

None of this replaces the basics. But it shifts the question from “who’s to blame after an accident?” to: “why is the job this way in the first place?”

What we ask of them

My delivery rider is somebody’s father, somebody’s son. So is the bus captain, the cleaner, the nurse, the construction worker.

We ask a great deal of the people who keep this city fed, moving and cared for – and too often we ask it at a speed and a price that quietly put them in harm’s way.

Every delivery rider deserves to return home safely at the end of the day. And ensuring this happens isn’t only the Government’s job, or the employer’s, or the union’s. It’s also ours.

Playing our part doesn’t mean giving up the app. It means not giving a rider a bad rating because the rain slowed him down, not treating ‘20 minutes’ as a promise he owes us, and not looking away when the platform operators who set the pace are asked to make it safer – even if that means dinner will come a little later, or be a little bit more expensive.

‘Fast, cheap and now’ was never really free. Someone has always been paying for it. And the least the rest of us can do is stop pretending otherwise.