E1: Punjab to Potsdamer Platz

By 2023, a large portion of Berlin’s platform delivery workers were, like the protagonists of this episode Shivani, Mohammed, and Abhay, international students from South Asia.

Abhay grew up in Punjab in northern India and in 2019, was managing junior engineers at a prestigious irrigation project. Shivani, also from Punjab, was selling housing loans for a bank and Mohammed was a trained chemical engineer from Karachi in Pakistan. By the spring of 2021, all three of them were delivering food around Berlin for the food delivery platform Wolt. All three of them chose to study at private institutes in the city, partly to improve their chances of being able to live long term in Germany. By 2024, the number of Indian students in Germany had increased several times over several consecutive years to reach 90000. The experiences of young South Asians struggling through low wage jobs in the city to pay rents and fees at private universities is one that implicates the education migration industry, platform labour companies, and the immigration and higher education policies of Germany. 

 

It is now common practice that Berlin’s app-based delivery workers are not paid a guaranteed basic wage. After illegitimate deductions made by subcontractor entities, workers often earn less than the hourly minimum wage. Were they to protest these conditions of work, workers are effectively logged out of the apps without any notice, effectively terminating their employment without any of the due processes required under German law. Between November 2022 and January 2023, Shivani, Mohammed, and Abhay delivered hundreds of orders for Wolt in freezing temperatures but were not paid for it. The company laid the blame at the feet of its subcontractor. This story is about the migrant struggle for survival in Germany but also about their resistance to exploitation. 

 

Thanks to the Wikimedia Foundation for their support for the Delivery Charge podcast, and to some others who support this project financially but would prefer not to be named. 

 

Thanks to music from Desi Free Music and from Kjartan Abel.

 

Thanks to my friends who read out the English summaries of the interviews or parts of the interviews that were recorded in Hindi and Urdu: the ethnographer Jagat Sohail, the musician Shriraj Sagara, and the designer Shilpi Boylla. 

 

This project is published under the Creative Commons license, CC BY-SA 4.0.