February update. Meeting 16-2 | organisation messy | victories | successfull demo | media barrage

Hey Colleagues!

Meeting 16 february 19:30 at Sjerps House
Van Reigersbergenstraat 3-1 Amsterdam
Also at radicalriders.nl/meeting

In this piece: being messy organisingwise; demo went very well; media barrage; ongoing cases & some victories

It’s been too long since our last meeting. We’re going to be honest here. The growth of actions and work for the radical riders, all the while we also working and/or studying, has meant that the past few weeks we’ve gotten been behind on many, many tasks. This also means that those pulling the cart are quite exhausted. We are in great spirits and honoured to work with you all. But the structures we’ve build this far have not kept up. Don’t be too worried, there’s no reason for panic. A great way to contribute to solving this is coming to the meeting and taking up tasks; see also the tasklist. Better still: be spontaneous, inventive, come with your own initiatives.

[supersecret union stuff]

We’re at 110 members currently.

The demo at Thuisbezorgd went insanely well. We sure showed them what we think about firing union members. This is not the place for a long reflection and analysis though. Radical Riders is stronger at Thuisbezorgd now; Thuisbezorgds multi-millionaire owner Jitse Groens reputation has been shredded. Something that went especially well was our mediastrategy. Dealing with this mediabarrage however was also quite, quite a task.

The case with Mustapha we tried to tie into the lifting tide of the Thuisbezorgd action and this case was also in RTL Nieuws, together with our video on dangerous Gorillas bikes. Mustapha still hasn’t gotten his money though and he is suffering. We’ve undertaken new steps that we can’t specify here to speed up the issue. There might be some action.

Delivery companies are in the habit of demanding workers show up for free for work or workrelated things. This bothers us. Recently at Thuisbezorgd and Gorillas safety trainings were organized and the companies either hid how to get paid for this (Thuisbezorgd) or just summoned us as if we are their serfs (Gorillas). After union pressure safety trainings are now paid. This is fucking great. We are looking forward to a more equitable communication from the delivery companies that respect the one thing most mandatory about us showing up: that they pay us for it. Work = work = work.

At Gorillas we, and with us just about everybody at Gorillas, complained and campaigned against the horrible black bikes. As said we were on the national news and we made a well watched youtube video on the matter. Our efforts have paid off. We’re getting new bikes. Victory!

For many years radical worker activists have been told that we were really good for doing fringe things but that we should leave the heavy lifting and concrete stuff to the big old unions. As if we were children and they were the grown ups. Well! Well! Ahum! We’re just as capable of winning small and big concrete stuff as we’ve shown by now and are showing again with these steps. And these ‘big’ unions…. Their losses are mainly big, 100.000 members per year. So we demand our place as equals in the union movement.

Then there are many more things, and cases, which is particular organizer is to exhausted at the moment to enumerate 😉

Hope to see you at the meeting.