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 support from Wikimedia Deutschland as a part of re.shape - a project to support knowledge equity 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.

For the last episode of this season of the Delivery Charge podcast, host and producer Aju John is interviewed by some of its friends and supporters: the cultural anthropologist Jagat Sohail, and the doctoral researchers Joanna Bronowicka, Marini Thorne, Nicolas Palacios, and Sneha P. These interviews cover many of the themes that emerged in the previous nine episodes. Those episodes featured my interviews with platform worker activists in Berlin and India between August 2021 and November 2023. In Berlin, delivery worker activists led efforts to establish works councils at the delivery companies Gorillas, Lieferando, and Flink, and resisted the company managements’ efforts to install a friendly works council at Getir. In India, activists of the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union and the Rajasthan App-based Transport Workers Union, organised to seek legal reform by influencing key elections and the worker activists affiliated with the All India Gig Workers Union sought the activation of the existing labour bureaucracy to benefit platform workers. These interviews gave us a perspective on their organised pursuit of power in platform work.

With the emergence of platforms, there is even more standardisation, granular control and planning in logistical operations. App-based delivery workers have even less discretion on how to complete their tasks. At the same time, platforms and platform work are also being determined by the particular geographies of the places they serve, including as we have explored in this podcast: demographic compositions, labour market segregations, and labour regulations.

In making this podcast, we learnt how Berlin’s delivery worker collectives used Germany’s works councils law to seek tangible material outcomes such as termination protection and the ability to organise co-workers during paid working hours. In India, platform workers unions and unofficial associations leveraged competitive democratic politics to aspire towards the legal regulation of platforms and social protection for platform workers. In both contexts, we saw that as workers movements embraced the law, the law embraced them back and left its deep imprint.

Generally speaking, in industrial or workplace disputes, the strike is a weapon of last resort and is used by workers to persuade the employer to accept their demands. On July 21, 2022, when a group of delivery workers stopped work in Bangalore, like some other gig work protests and strikes that we have observed in previous episodes of this podcast, the strike was not the weapon of last resort but simply a signal to commence negotiations. These workers delivering through Swiggy’s Instamart app wanted to be able to finish their work within the agreed upon shift timings but found themselves having to work up to fourteen hours every day. They had opinions on the conditions of their work, and felt that if they wanted to be heard, they had to go on strike. So far, in their struggle against their arbitrary suspensions from these apps, and for fair pay, reasonable working hours, holidays, and social security, India’s platform workers have not been able to use India’s mid-twentieth-century labour laws. For the All India Gig Workers Union, the CITU-affiliated federation that supported the July 2022 strikes, the strategy now is to have full-time workers recognised as employees of a platform. These strikes took place during the same month that The Guardian began publishing a series of reports into the files leaked from Uber by a whistleblower documenting the company’s unethical practices, including as they lobbied for favourable labour regulations. Bit by bit, sector by sector and state by state, AIGWU’s activists are helping platform workers pry open the gates to this legal infrastructure. It is precisely what platforms have been resisting around the world.