March 2022, the dual shock. Dealing with massive personnel changes & the credit crunch

Many people were riding last years that otherwise would never have. Often people in the vanguard of our movement. When the Corona-era finally closed just about all of them, logically offcourse, decided to work on their ‘actual’ career. The commitment to solidarity & justice for workers and riders remains, but still many of these people transitioned into a more distant role. There’s also a credit crunch developing. How do we deal with the big changes in the industry right now?

From the start of last year we clearly saw a credit crunch developing. Our companies and their ‘business-models’ are completely dependent on cheaper-then-free credit. A change in this base outlook means companies need to overhaul dramatically. Allready at Gorillas for example work is down dramatically because they no longer have the abundant credit to subsidize orders. You’ll see companies ‘eating’ up each other in an industry consolidation, which will negatively affect our bargaining power. At the same time the other people at the warehouses are also changing jobs at an insane rate. 75% of the workers being day-labour temps is no exception. People that we’ve been building relationships with also move away and/or no longer see riding as a long term thing and thus see our union in a different light.

First of all, no panic, we saw this coming. We we founded 9 months ago we knew march 2022 would be a crunch. That’s why we’ve kept up this insane pace all these months! So we got our institutions, architecture, networks, and experience ready in time, so we would be a bit resilient. That doesn’t mean that we are unaffected. Our organising capacity has been roughly halved. We’ll need to rebuild that. BTW, ever fancied becoming an organiser or activist 😋 Please be welcome to join in. As for the riding personel, we’ll be in a transistory phase. Allready massive amounts of new workers are joining the companies…. And finding their treatment totally shit.

But taking a step backwards and looking at the issues more broadly, we need to rethink what being organized means. What won’t work for the vast majority of young workers like us is the idea of ‘sectoral unions’. Perhaps 70 years ago that made more sense, but we these days are a cleaner one day, then dishwasher, then PHD-candidate, then rider, then mover, etc. We should move to an understanding that all workers rights are our rights, all workers struggles are our struggles. Not because of esoteric Marxist theories, but because as we said you just might be having that job, where people are struggle now, in a month or so. If we stay together in a network, of not just riders, then the solidarity we build right now will carry on to our future workplaces.

We want to keep Radical Riders a riders union, but we’ll be working on embedding our union a bit more conciously in the broader milieu of working-class solidarity networks and organisations. Primarily this concerns Vloerwerk, the organization that spawned us. Vloerwerk is a (pretty bad-ass & successful) general workers solidarity network. It makes sense for people who do transition away from rider-oriented organizing to continue to do sort-of the same thing, under the broader Vloerwerk umbrella. Vloerwerk is, in turn, allways there for Radical Riders, they pledged that.