E4: Delivery Workers v. The Ghost of Hans Carl Nipperdey

At 11 am on April 25, 2023, Duygu Kaya's appeal against a decision of Berlin’s labour court was to be heard by the Appellate Labour Court for Berlin and Brandenburg. An hour before that, outside the court building, Duygu addressed a group that included some from the media, some representatives of German unions, and several current and former platform delivery workers. Duygu, along with Fernando and Ronnie, had been colleagues at Gorillas when they were fired less than a week after the strikes at the company in Berlin during the first week of October 2021. Their legal challenge had now arrived before an appellate court.

 

Her address made it clear that this was not simply a matter of three workers who felt that they had been fired unjustly. The strikes at Gorillas were termed variously as wild strikes or wildcat strikes because they were conducted outside the framework of organising that is favoured in Germany’s system of industrial relations. Simply put, the strikes at Gorillas in early October of 2021 did not have the blessings of one of Germany’s mainstream unions. By asking why they were fired therefore, this litigation provoked an examination of those limits on the right to strike. Duygu wanted her individual case challenging her termination from Gorillas to have an impact on the freedom of German workers to strike. This litigation also asked us to consider whether those limits were appropriate at a workplace such as Gorillas, which was different from the types of work for which those limits had been developed.

 

In this episode, we peel back the layers of this litigation. The workers in these platform delivery companies are part of the 46% of employees in Germany who are not covered by collective bargaining agreements. We hear from Duygu about her campaign for a strike right that is unconnected with mainstream unions and collective bargaining processes. Diego Danemiller Batres remembers his discussions with some mainstream unions as part of the Gorillas Workers Collective. The constraints within which such workers’ collectives have organised are legal and institutional on the one hand, but also social. We learn more about work processes and labour control in platform work, from the scholarship of Tatiana Lopez and Sarrah Kassem.