Growing the Rider movement! Meeting friday 10/9 ams 14:00

Hey all!

Amsterdam was flooded with stickers pasted by our Riders and their colleagues. It’s a pretty sweet start for a newborn workersgroup, complementing the nightly solidarity actions. Riders are finding us in increasing numbers, and more issues are coming in. Also in this mail: a cheatcode for ‘free money’.

Be welcome in our meeting in Amsterdam.
let’s talk of our worries and struggles,
let’s educate ourselves in our workersrights and contracts,
let’s share the swelling stories of rider resistance.
Finally…let’s have a good time!
10/9, 14:00 at Café De Oude Schaeper in Amsterdam West.
Near Hugo de Grootplein

Let’s recap what’s been going on the past 2 weeks. An English worker method is called ‘Radical Honesty’. To our fellow workers we strive for honesty and openness. Lies are reserved for the bosses and the like. Let’s see.

Hat-tip to the good workers at Zapp, Flink, Getir, and all at the other companies. We’re mainly Thuisbezorgd and Gorilla’s, by sheer accident. You’re part of it though, come join us. We’ll organise just about anything, we like to go around 😉

Our prime focus these two weeks was on finding a labourconflict, fighting it like and with the group Vloerwerk, and we had two riders for this. We studied and studied, learned a ton. Also got a legaldude, great guy, to study the matter. A ton of information on Gorilla’s is now available at Radical Riders. We’ve got no publication yet so you’ll have to write us or drop by 🙂

I’ll get to the cheatcode in a second. One Riders, turns out, wasn’t underpayed, but the opposite. He got too much. This happens quite often at the damn messy Gorilla’s. We decided not to press the issue at Gorilla’s 😉 The rider we we’re working with decided to try his luck with a lawyer, which he was looking into anyway. Well, power to you brother, see you on the road.

Gorilla’s contracts talk about making an ‘effort’ to pay back. That’s vague for a reason… the law says, basically, keep the money! By Dutch law when they overpay, paying back is not required. Bosses like to play with the monthly salaries around, calling it ‘substracting wages’. The law is pretty clear on that point: it’s theft, it’s criminal. Wages are yours and yours only and when they screw up it’s their problem. See, sometimes it’s good to know about your rights!

While on the outlook for a next case to take on we realised that in the immediate term we riders want more then ‘just’ a branded solidaritynetwork. Meaning just gearing up for mainly straightforward economic fights wasn’t a complete plan. So we’re switching tack a bit.

We want to connect with our colleagues, as writting in the introduction. Build a community. Grow roots. Even regarding relatively simple mutual aid work like educating eachother in making sense of those payslips is elemental in decerning if the boss is cheating again or not. They’re designed to be hard to understand for workers, same with the contracts. They can’t fool us all though.

Then, as I’m writing this very mail, a Rider mails us he still is waiting for June’s pay. Wrote after seeing the sticker. Imagine us showing up 6 weeks late on the job. Yeah Gorilla’s is fast allright…just not with paying their workers. Or fixing broken bikes for that matter! We shouldn’t be putting up with this shit, they only care for growth, everything is a mess right. And this is why we need to organize.riders rise up sticker

The stickering campaign is a ton of fun. Just about all stickers have been spread. So we need a new batch. These are our own stickers and of the many participating, so we also decide the message!