Rider bijeenkomst A*dam 30 november - Radical Riders swingt

Radical Riders meeting
30th of november, 19:30
Eerste Schinkelstraat 16
Amsterdam or Online 

Nederlandse editie verschijnt weldra online

So people. What a time! What an exciting times. We’re growing, fighting, getting recognition, media, even though we’ve not even existed more then 6 months. Awesome work of you all. We are the union, you are the union, and this success is for all of us to revel and take pride in!

When we heard from our German friends that ’the big date’ for their struggle at Gorillas was the 16th of november Michael and I were spooked. We’ve wanted to more concretely and effectively support the important German strike at Gorillas for months. This was our chance. We settled on a demonstration at Gorillas global HQ. But…. we would have only 4 days to prepare. And were we even ready? Could Radical Riders pull this off?

You damn right we could pull it off! And I believe we all had a great time at that HQ. We wrote / are writing a great piece on the action on the website. Check it out!

Demo causes surge: organisers needed
During and after the demonstration we made a big jump in people writing in, wanting to join, wanting to start up a branch or wanting help regarding workconditions or pay, etc. Currently we’re at 30 people. There are now allways a ton of people that need to be reached out to. If only because we want to be a different kind of union then the molochs, we need to connected. Want to get organising? Or need a leg up / some coaching regarding organising? Please step up!

How to organise at work collective autodictacy
Some of us have been trying to actively organise at our warehouses. The experiences have varied. Let’s share our lessons and insights with eachother. At the Gorillas warehouse in oud-west we’ve gotten a ton of people interested and signing up. It very much can be done 🙂

Where to take Radical Riders
The ad-hoc solutions and decisionmaking worked for us for now but we need to step up. The signal chat isn’t fit for real discussions for example. And when you don’t know where you want to be, you probably wont get there; thus, we need a plan and strategy. Also, we’ve had now twice the FNV reach out to us and we need to decide how and if we can work with / within the / a FNV framework. As the question implies, it’s complely open.

Gorillas conflict: no payback! Wage claims for all at Gorillas?
So Gorillas makes a mess of their …. well everything really. As with the salary payments. One of us was overpaid a petty sum. James, who started there in february, quit his job after a conflict and then Gorillas had the guts to demand he pay back this sum, threatening him with confiscating his stuff through a debt collector. Some nerve! For people that pay so little, systematically wipe their ass with our rights and steal massive amounts of salaries, to demand a payback, is shameless. So we and our friend said hell no! Time to fight back. It’s not about the €100. It’s about standing up to their shit.

So what we said: let Gorillas pay up instead of James. Right! So we dove into this specific contract and cao and hell we found so much stuff there that raises a ton of questions. Also we found that, indeed, Gorillas actually still owes him wages. Amongst the many eyebrow-raising things we found that Gorillas in february legally stated they are a supermarket and must use the supermarket-cao. This cao gives workers a ton of more rights like for example bonussen for non-regular working times. It seems they one-sidedly changed all contracts in april and adopted a new cao to go with it, the picnic-cao.

So what to make of this? This we need to discuss together.

Website got a make-over & twitter launched
We did a ton of work on the website. We made it more attractive and well organised, we upgraded to a multilanguage site (NL, EN, PL), we added lot’s of other info and stuff. But there’s a ton of more stuff we need to do. Like translating the latest article. More importantly we’re missing stories. Your story! We’re missing that piece straight up critiqueing Thuisbezorgd / Gorillas that you’ve allways wanted to write. Our website is your website and we’re all publishers.
Also: we got started on twitter!

Now there must be a ton of stuff I’m forgetting right here but this mail has been long enough 😏 See you at the meeting or online!

Radical Riders meeting
30th of november, 19:30
Eerste Schinkelstraat 16
Amsterdam or Online