Thuisbezorgd fucking with our brains

There are two notable situations for me (ok, there is a fuckton of those but this story is already long and you get the gist of it if you work for this company). I don’t know if I can use our manager’s names so we’ll stick with letters.

I asked some questions on discord when the winter hit, such as whether we’ll have to work, and if yes will we be provided with any safety gear (there wasn’t a single bike helmet in the hub at that time). My messages were deleted with no comment. When I came to work, the hub coordinators waited till everybody else was out and K started very aggressively giving me shit about those messages. Apparently I interrupted his breakfast with family (cry me a river you piece of shit), he HAD to moderate the channel before he started his shift and all of this was somehow my fault. It wasn’t a problem for him to call me on my days off so apparently this is a completely different situation. Additionally he asked me with outright hostility if I was a union spokesman and if not why am I saying ‘we’. Cunt.

‘If you don’t feel like you can work in those conditions you don’t have to!

It’s your choice. But if you don’t come the company will consider you less reliable.’ – E

Your contract is a phase A contract. That means you have a 10 day notice. Go figure.

The best way to explain what talking to E was like is ‘secondhand cognitive dissonance’. It doesn’t harm your lungs, but fucks with your brains. I’ve heard that the company cares for its riders only to hear that it lets go of them easily later. I was called picky for refusing to use 3 bikes that didn’t have working brakes. I’ve heard a lot about communication problems, ‘communicating about issues’ and other BS but was never given any specifics of what my communication problems were. The best part: I’ve even heard that E ‘always tries to do good’ on the day I got a call from the agency that they’re firing me. That’s right, the fucking hub coordinators didn’t even have the balls to tell me that in person. I’ve heard a lot about what they can’t do over the couple of months I was working there and how they have no control over the orders they get from the top. I guess I can’t blame them if they were only following orders though, can I?

This is maybe a bit of a conspiracy theory as I don’t have a good statistic sample, but our first and second management were VERY similar personality and demographics wise. There was one emotionally supportive woman, one neutral guy and one aggressive guy. Is this the case with other hubs? I don’t know, but if you had the same feeling – maybe this does say something about the company hiring policy and how much of a psyop your day to day conversations with the management are. Their role is to force you to do things you don’t want to do after all. By choosing hub coo-s like that they give themselves 3 ways to achieve that: asking nicely, reasoning with you and bullying you. But again, that’s just my theory and I might be wrong.

Epilogue: phone holders, masks and communication problems

Our phone holders were changed multiple times over the course of a couple of weeks. Never was this discussed with any driver to my knowledge, and one of the types along the way was to small to fit a lot of phones. The last ones they made us use were so shitty that during a 3 day period my phone fell out of them at least 2 times. This has never happened before to me, meaning that they settled on the worst possible type. All other phone holders were supposedly sent to HQ and we were all forced to switch. As mentioned in ‘Thuisbezorgds Dante: I refuse to be cynical about it’ we were lied to about insurance so the costs of fixing your phone weren’t covered by the company. Go ahead and pay what you earn in a day of your work to fix your screen. Every couple of weeks. Or just use the only phone you have with a broken screen and let some water get inside when it’s raining. You can always get a new one, it’s not like you have rent to pay. You’re not working 16-20 hours a week after filing in for 40-50 either, right?

Roughly at the same time we got info that the company will no longer be providing disposable face masks and that we are either required to buy them ourselves or use reusable cotton masks given by Thuisbezorgd, despite their effectiveness being way worse at preventing covid and the fact that we only got 3 (three!) of those. Should I start turning my washing machine on daily just for that mask? How am I supposed to follow proper disinfection procedures with it? Why are we being given less effective personal protection equipment in the middle of covid? None of those questions will be answered unfortunately because after asking too many of them on the company discord (after firstly getting my PM’s ignored by a hub coordinator) I got fired citing ‘communication problems’. The lady from the agency thanked me for my cooperation with thuisbezorgd in the previous months. Fuck you.

Almost 6 months have passed since those events and I still avoid the hub when I go to the city centre. I was mostly working in horeca during this time, but even that wasn’t as bad in my individual experience. Your mileage may vary.

So what now?

Almost 6 months have passed since those events and we still wrote what you’re reading right now. Maybe this story made you angry or sad. Maybe you can relate to it. None of us can change our past experiences, but we can still improve future working conditions – if we organise. You have something extremely important we didn’t have before – this platform and group. Send us a mail, even just to say we’re full of shit and you love working at thuisbezorgd. Come to our meeting and let’s discuss what we can do together. The company doesn’t give a shit about you, but you can. Organise and win!