“How Berlin’s South Asian delivery workers are navigating a broken system”

Essential to Berlin's food scene, delivery workers from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and beyond, are enduring isolation and exploitation, struggling to build a life within a flawed framework…

…Abdul*, who has travelled far from home to work as a courier at food delivery service Wolt, is among them…

…Abdul and his coworkers are officially not employees of Wolt…

The couriers’ wages are partly performance-based, so there is huge pressure to do well each day…

…In a statement, Wolt told The Berliner that the hourly wage of couriers is “usually above” the statutory minimum wage…

Abdul, Nawaz and several other delivery workers also say that the restaurants often treat them horribly when they come to pick up the food, talking to them as if they were servants and even making them wait, which lowers their performance rates…

“Two prominent companies are Wolt and Uber Eats. Neither of them, to the best of my knowledge, offer contracts to workers at all. The work is mediated in different ways. In some cases, a staffing company mediates the relationship,” says John.

Uber Eats provided a similar statement, saying the company “works exclusively with professional delivery partners who employ their couriers subject to social security contributions…