“Wolt is a company that is practically based on defying the laws of the system in every bad way”
That is how Alan Tribouley, organiser of the Wolt strike, describes the company. The employers are treated similar to freelancers, with none of the benefits that actual employees have, such as pension, paid vacation, or sickness days.
The company takes no responsibility for their employees, who have to pay for misplaced orders or mistakes themselves. At the same time, they don’t have the benefits of official freelancers, such as using the expenses of the job (vehicle, phone, clothes) as a tax discount.
Beyond this lack of rights, the company has been reducing the employees’ salaries by about 55% in the past 5 years.This is done by reducing the minimum prices per order from 45 to 20 kr., by removing bonuses for high demand orders and reducing others, and treating extra orders that can be done on the way as “some bonus money” instead of separate orders.
At the same time the company constantly changes how the algorithm works, and due to the documents that workers sign when entering employment, they have no protection against how the changes affect the job.
The workers’ demands
At first, it was just 5 people that got together to talk about what they could do, then Community House decided to give them the space to get together and help build an organization.At the first meeting they were about 25, and at the first strike they started at 30, and ended at 120 people.At the moment, more than 300 couriers are involved in the movement, and the hope is to take those numbers to the street.The movement is growing quickly due to how widespread the discontent is. As Alan describes, “every time we talk to a new courier, they express how discontent, angry, sad and devastated they feel about the working conditions. A lot of them with no hope of it improving.”
The workers demand an improvement of the working conditions, the raising of the minimum price per order to 35 kr. (for the shortest trip) and transparency in the contract and working conditions.
What happens now?
The Wolt workers will strike every week including on workers’ day, May the 1st, when they plan to show up in massive force. They will continue their strikes and action until Wolt decides to meet their demands.
I will give Alan Tribouley the final words:
“The support from society is fundamental, this is not only a fight of the couriers and Wolt workers, this fight belongs to society itself. We cannot allow such degeneration of workers rights and exploitation. The more they exploit us and make us work for lower and lower wages, the more the wages of the entire society will be brought down, creating a system of ever increasing cost of living and decreasing wages.
Because of that, everybody should support this fight by attending every strike in any way they can, sharing this information, and exposing Wolt both to other people and in the media, until they feel pressured to address the situation.
Let’s make this fight an example for all of the ones to come. These exploiting businessmen can’t keep winning, we have to stop them and take action, showing that the people hold the power.”
A Danish verseion af this article can be found her
