Today we publish the first part of our interview with Adam, who worked as a delivery driver in Berlin. We will present the second part tomorrow.
You can also find the whole interview in our brochure “This is what exploitation looks like”. You can download it for free here
Tell us a bit about yourself: How long have you worked as a delivery driver for Platforms? How did you get into this job? What did you use to work and what do you use now: Scooter? Bike? Car? In which platforms and cities?
At the beginning of 2017 I moved to Berlin and had to find a source of income quickly. At that time, Germany was experiencing the first boom in food delivery platforms. A friend of mine worked for Deliveroo, which was the main company in the industry and was hiring like crazy. I applied and they hired me on the spot. I planned to work there for a few months, and I stayed for almost three years. Later, I worked on my bike as a food delivery driver for a courier collective and on a cargo bike for another collective, and I also drove a van as a drink delivery driver, but that wasn’t work for the platforms.
How did you work? Did you have a contract, a business or an intermediary?
Business. At the very beginning, Deliveroo employed on employment contracts, but that ended quickly and after a while almost all couriers were forced into self-employment, and new employees no longer had the opportunity to work full-time. Setting up the business took a few weeks and wasn’t particularly complicated, but it involved costs we didn’t know about. In Germany, employees in the logistics industry, such as truck and bus drivers, are covered by additional, compulsory accident insurance. It turned out that bicycle couriers are also included in this group.
Normally, companies pay these contributions for their employees, but we weren’t officially employees, so we had to pay them ourselves. It was €80 per month, but no one at Deliveroo or the offices told us about it, and the Sectoral Insurance Fund starts collecting contributions more than a year after starting the business. In practice, this meant that after more than a year I suddenly got a bill for over €1,000 in arrears. We didn’t earn much and these contributions got me into financial trouble. In theory, we were all supposed to pay for regular health insurance. In a normal job, the contribution is divided half between the company and the employee, but in our self-employment we had to pay the whole thing ourselves. It was from €250 a month upwards, so migrants from EU countries usually tried to find a way, insured themselves cheaply at home, did not pay this contribution and worked on an EHIC. Working on a German business on a Polish, Italian or Finnish EHIC is of course illegal, but health insurance funds cannot control it and you could work like that for years. Pension contributions are not mandatory on a business and no one paid them at all, because they would eat up a third of our salary.
You worked as a delivery driver for quite a long time, so you probably have some comparison: what was the job like when you started? What changed for the better and what for the worse?
Salaries changed for the worse. Deliveroo paid based on the rate and lowered the rates over time. When we started, by not paying all these contributions, you could earn an average of around €10 or sometimes €12 per hour net with tips and live off it quite normally. Then the company started changing the algorithms so that you would pay less and less per ride, and it became increasingly difficult to keep your earnings at a constant level. There was also competition between couriers for the best zones in the city. In some districts, you could earn three times more than in others, but places were limited and it was difficult to get there. In addition, at some point we started getting fewer and fewer rides. I’m not sure what caused this, maybe Deliveroo hired too many couriers, or maybe they increased their prices for customers too much, or maybe they lost to the competition. In any case, it happened more and more often that we sat on benches, waiting for rides and didn’t earn a penny. In winter, you could get really cold from waiting.