Delivery Charge

E1: Form a Works Council in these Six Easy Steps

The works council (also known as the Betriebsrat) is a key institution under German labour law and illustrates the aspect of mitbestimmung or co-determination at the level of the workplace. Broadly speaking, workers, through this body directly elected by and composed of those working in the company, have rights to participate in the management of the companies they work for. 
In the Delivery Charge podcast, host Aju John explores how platform delivery workers are organising for fairer conditions of work in India where he is from, and in Germany, where he lives. In 2021, the delivery workers of Gorillas, many of whom were recent migrants to Germany, navigated several intimidating procedures, to campaign for, conduct elections to, and establish a betriebsrat for the company in Berlin. This episode contains the story of the Gorillas Workers Collective.
Gorillas was established in Berlin in May 2020, not long after the city had imposed its pandemic containment measures. The company’s services rapidly spread to several other cities in Europe and attracted large amounts of capital investment. In the process, it became the fastest European company to become a unicorn. The company’s key attraction was its promise to deliver groceries quicker that it would take someone to visit the supermarket for the same purchases. The company’s growth at breakneck speed and its aggressive strategies to acquire customers during the pandemic, may have come at a great cost to its workers. 
Some riders and warehouse workers began their resistance through stoppages at some warehouses in the city during a snowstorm in February, 2021 that was supported by a campaign on social media under the name Gorillas Workers Collective. This perhaps set in motion a cycle of retaliatory firings and wildcat strikes. In April of 2021, the Gorillas Workers Collective began the legal process to establish a betriebsrat for Berlin. By the time the elections were concluded and a betriebsrat established in November, the company had altered it operational structure and there were doubts about whether the betriebsrat could discharge its duties in these changed circumstances. 
Listen to experiences of organising of Ahmad Hadeda, Avik Majumder, Jakob Pomeranzev, and Camilo Alvarez, who were all part of the Gorillas Workers Collective in 2021, and Maria Coelho, who was elected to the Betriebsrat for the Friedenau warehouse in 2022.

Trailer: Delivery Charge

Does the experience of platform delivery workers mobilising to establish works councils at their companies in Germany give us a new way of looking at how unions are working among the platform delivery workers in India? Does the role of strikes and work stoppages by delivery workers in India give us a new way of looking at how delivery workers are organising in Germany?
Apart from featuring interviews with delivery worker activists and trade union activists in India and in Germany, and the stories of their activism during the Covid years of 2020, 2021 and 2022, the Delivery Charge podcast explores themes such as the role of the works council under Germany's labour law, resistance to algorithmic management, the impact of the pandemic on delivery work, and forms of control in location-based platform work. You can listen to Eva Kocher, Uma Rani, Balaji Parthasarathy, Noopur Raval, Sarrah Kassem, Antonio Aloisi, Tatiana Lopez, Oguz Alyanak, Denis Neumann and other scholars of platform work and labour relations in the platform economy.
The Delivery Charge podcast is supported by the M.S. Merian – R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies ‘Metamorphoses of the Political’ (ICAS:MP), which is an Indo-German research collaboration funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). It is hosted by Aju John, a lawyer and organiser and the founder of Nagrik Open Civic Learning. It will be available on all podcast platforms, including Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts. Just search for Delivery Charge on any of these apps and you should find this podcast feed. Subscribe to the feed so that you are notified when the first episode releases.