My wife and I do it probably once every two weeks; perhaps a bit more frequently when we’re busy. It’s a treat at the end of a hard day – when neither of us has managed to get to the shops and we both refuse to accept it’s our turn to get off the sofa and cook.
A phone comes out. One of us opens an app and places an order for hot food from almost any restaurant in the area. A gift from the digital gods. So easy, in fact, it can be done without any thought at all – which, on closer inspection, might not be quite the miracle it sounds.
The pattern is familiar by now. A start-up launches a great new digital product. Copycats flood the market and for a year or two it feels like there are a thousand firms all offering the same service. Then everyone starts merging, buying each other out, going bankrupt, until two or three emerge triumphant.
In Germany, when it comes to food delivery (excluding groceries and specialised services like Hello Fresh), that means Lieferando, Uber Eats, and Wolt.
The boom began during COVID and the benefits for consumers are undeniable, in convenience and the sheer variety of food now on offer. The market is projected to keep growing, with the big three ideally positioned to profit from this growth. Each one offers a slightly different rewards system, but from a consumer point of view, they seem largely interchangeable.
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'Nobody prepares you'
A recent exhibition in Berlin called Cycles of Decolonisation made it very clear that the people who work for these companies don’t think they’re interchangeable. Based on anonymised interviews with riders from all three organisations, it also lays out the many challenges they face in common:
One testimony read: "It was snowing. I was delivering an order and my tire skidded in one of the corners. I hit my head and fell unconscious on the road. I was lying there for five minutes. It was a Sunday. I wasn’t conscious and there was nobody there."
Another read: "It was summertime. People were sitting outside. Inside, it was totally empty, so I went and sat in a corner. One of the guys from the restaurant told me I wasn’t allowed to sit inside. I was feeling bad. I said I wouldn’t go outside. I told him to give me the order and I’d go. I wasn’t taking anybody's seat. They hit me and snatched my bag. There were three or four people. They took my bag and hit me so my head started bleeding."
Another rider said: "The customers are shown our names on the app. Sometimes, if they see it’s a woman delivering, there have been episodes where customers open the door naked. Not in my case, but a colleague was in this situation – and nobody prepares you for how to deal with it."
Precarious work
According to a study by Germany’s Institute of Employment Research, gig-workers in the delivery-services sector are predominantly male, comparatively young and often foreign, with a large proportion coming from South Asia. 61 percent of delivery riders are marginally employed or hired under working student contracts.
READ ALSO: How much money do international students need to study in Germany?
Reading the exhibition interviews, a picture forms of how the companies operate, which flatly contradicts the image of smiling students pedalling in sunshine, choosing when and where to earn a little extra money.
In practice, many riders apparently delete the app from their phones between shifts, to escape from the eyes of their employers for a few hours.
The platforms know where they are, routinely contacting them during periods of high demand. Instead of offering rewards for working overtime, they threaten to block the riders’ ID numbers on the app - making it impossible for them to work - unless they start accepting orders immediately.
Two of the three companies operate a ‘delivery per hour’ system, whereby riders are penalised if their delivery rate falls beneath a certain threshold (typically 3 deliveries every hour), regardless of fault or mitigating circumstances.
READ ALSO: Jobs in Germany - Should foreign workers join a union?
Perhaps the least attractive aspect of the platform economy is the reluctance on the part of people making huge sums of money to take any measure of responsibility for the people whose labour makes these profits possible. All the riders interviewed are self-employed or sub-contractors.
They use their own phones, their own clothing, and often their own bikes, without any clear route to making claims for repairs, maintenance, or other costs. When online tipping was introduced, the platforms moved to what they describe as a ‘mixed wage’, meaning that tips are mixed in with wages for an overall loss of earnings (probably; the riders can’t be certain as they’re not allowed to see how much they’re being tipped).
Ignoring German labour laws
All three platforms make creative use of part-time contracts and Germany’s system of ‘mini-jobs’, hiring people on 12- or 16-hour contracts, then allowing (or obliging) them to work much longer during busy periods, before cutting the hours again as soon as they can. And Wolt and Uber Eats regularly work through sub-contractors.
One of the riders interviewed sets himself a target of 500 deliveries each month. The sub-contractor he works for pays €600 or €700 into his account, according to the terms of his part-time contract. He has to collect the rest of his earnings in cash. Often, the riders have to wait months for their money. Occasionally, the sub-contractors simply disappear.
The platforms plead ignorance. Wolt and Uber Eats pay per delivery (or per ‘delivery per hour’), happy to ignore the time their riders spend battling traffic on busy city streets – acting as pedalling billboards and generating vast quantities of hugely valuable data.
There are good labour laws in Germany, which is probably one reason the platforms increasingly rely on riders whose status in the county is precarious or temporary. Many of the riders have theories about why the authorities appear so willing to turn a blind eye to irregularities and abuses in the industry. And many have paid a substantial sum of money to come and study in Germany.
The terms of their visas – as well as their academic commitments and imperfect command of German – make them dependent on casual, flexible work.
How to support delivery drivers
Individually, there’s not much that we can do to persuade the German government to improve the country’s labour laws or enforce the ones which already exist. Happily, however, there are several small steps we can take to show a degree of solidarity with our fellow internationals. For a start, we can take note of the fact that riders have a clear favourite among the platforms.
Lieferando is the only one which pays them per hour (rather than ‘delivery per hour’) at the legal minimum wage, doesn’t work through sub-contractors, and has allowed its riders to form a workers’ council. Uber Eats has the worst reputation.
Several of the riders interviewed for the exhibition would like us to tip in cash whenever possible, rather than via the app. And all of them wished that more people would smile and say thank you when they make their deliveries.
The riders are alone for long stretches of time, navigating traffic or waiting hidden out of sight while orders are prepared. They are providing a service which makes our lives easier. Many are studying. Others are qualified engineers, doctors, and teachers. All of them are people.
Quotes have been abridged for clarity. The Cycles of Decolonisation (https://cppdnetwork.com/en/veranstaltung/5413/) exhibition runs until 6pm on Sunday, March 23rd, at Villa Elisabeth Park (Invalidenstraße 3, 10115 Berlin).
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