Gorillas oud-west branch founded

We’re proud to say that our union is growing up and that we’re branching out. In Amsterdam Oud-west we’ve manage to quite quickly find riders willing and eager to join our union. In Oud-west, Radical Riders has allready been making a difference.

We emphasize to all riders and people in the warehouse the value of working together. We’re far to individualistic… just the way Gorillas likes it. They employ strategies to divide us, to weaken us. Think of the stupid rider-bonus scheme, that fosters competition between riders. Think of the stupid military-style hierarchies that obfuscate the most basic fact: we’re all just low paid workers filling & bringing bags for rich folk. We need cooperation to streamline work, prevent shitmaterial (bikes, helmets) from allways resurfacing, share knowledge. We put forward a mechanism for dealing with charging bikes / removing empties as a team, and this allready works much better then the earlier individualised policy.

Refuse bad bikes: maintenance increased

We organised interventions on the bike front, putting forward the slogan Refuse bad bikes. We remove bad and dangerous bikes, even if that means that the warehouse slows down. Let them feel it, we deserve save bikes. To prevent bad bikes being taken upstairs and getting mistaken (again and again) for working bikes, we started disabling broken bikes by tieing the brakes to the steer with tie-rips. We confronted management with that horrible status of the bikes, and so were part of our warehouse increasing the maintenance to twice a week in Gorillas Oud-west. The tie-rips have since been replaced by a long rope.

Getting those phone repair costs covered at Gorillas

We in Gorillas Oud-west pushed for the long-overdue policy on broken phones repaircosts. Where before some managers were saying it’s all your own risk and cost when you break something, we said hell no. You take our phone during worktime, which is bad enough, and now it’s broken, after you took it, thus you broke it. We stepped up to our warehouse manager and said we wanted to know how Gorillas was going to pay for a broken phone of ours. To his credit, he immediately got it. The warehouse was super happy that broken phones are now covered to €100,-. We’re working on publising a how-to on getting those costs refunded.

And whenever they try to sneak up on our rights, which happens multiple times a week, we stand up.

We’re looking forward to involving more people locally and growing stronger.

Want to join or know more? mail Radical Riders or call Oud-west local representative Sjerp at +31616541143