I've been carrying shipments through Berlin for over 11 years. Today it's for our cooperative, but between 2015 and 2019 I also delivered food for Deliveroo. I know the different sides of this job, and I know what it feels like when the app sets your pace and your steps get tracked. But I also see that a lot has changed in recent years.
Where back then you'd find people from genuinely everywhere taking a break, today I see a lot of young men from South Asia. They wear the same cube-shaped backpacks we did back then, they have the same job, the same weather, the same red lights. But is it really the same? No, because their situation is fundamentally different from what mine was.
Many of them are enrolled as students, this is now well documented, at sometimes dubious private universities. Institutions that charge around €12,000 a year in fees, and for which students have often already gone into debt back in their home country. Their entry visa, in turn, is tied to that enrollment: lose your place at the university, and you lose your residency status along with it, and everything else too. What's left is the debt, and the collapse of a promised dream.
This is exactly where platform delivery services like Wolt, Uber Eats, and others latch on like leeches, to secure cheap labor, outside of unions and without any lobby of their own. Thousands of South Asian students work for them in Berlin, Hamburg, and other major cities. The platforms themselves rarely employ them directly; that's handled by subcontractors, sometimes two or three layers deep, at times hidden behind shell companies. Wages get withheld, paid in cash, or tied to conditions incompatible with labor rights. Complain, and you're out, and a labor dispute with precarious residency status is not a fight between equals, something everyone involved is obviously well aware of.
The precarity was real when I was still riding for Deliveroo. No fixed salary, no sick pay, constant pressure. But the difference was that I could have quit. And I could also go out on the street, go on strike, even sue successfully, without risking having to leave the country. Most delivery riders working under platforms today don't have that room to maneuver, as a practical matter. Their visa rides the bike with them.
This pattern is now even referred to as “modern-day slavery” in academic research, and that also tells you something: this isn't a niche case. It's a method.
Sources: PAM report on Wolt couriers · RTL Luxembourg on Wolt negotiations · The Left Berlin on Wolt riders · rbb/NDR documentary "Ausgeliefert!" · taz on Indian students · Sozialismus von unten: "Modern Slavery" · Tagesspiegel on visa expulsions