E10: Friends and Supporters

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.