Berlin – The exchange of blows between the management of the Gorillas delivery service and the employees who organize themselves as the Gorillas Workers Collective (GWC) continues. The company’s recent advances seem like a two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, the company announced the first implementation of an “action plan” for the bicycle couriers on Wednesday – and thus appears to be responding publicly to the calls for better working conditions made by the employees after the wildcat strikes in Berlin. On the other hand, the employees, according to their own information, received an email on the same evening that organizational changes were pending: The company will in future consist of two separate companies.
It is not surprising that both announcements come at this point in time. Because the pressure on the company is high from many sides, investors and the public have been watching the so-called Unicorn delivery service closely for several weeks. Gorillas has been in discussion for months because employees criticize the working conditions at the start-up, which they bundled in a comprehensive catalog of demands almost two weeks ago. The deadline set by the strikers for management will expire next Wednesday.
The company management now stated that they have taken the first steps to “improve work processes”. Gorillas founder Kagan Sümer said without reference to the deadline: “Our company recently turned a year old and of course our rapid growth has meant that we had to adapt systems and structures.”
The Quinyx app should enable “individual and intuitive shift planning” for time recording and payroll accounting. According to the company’s blog, employees can use them to check in and out, create leave requests and swap shifts with one another.
Gorillas Workers Collective: Measures are an “insult”
The GWC, which communicates with the public via Twitter and the Telegram chat program, had complained that salaries had not been paid in full in the past. According to the company, the “problems with the payroll” are now “completely balanced”, it said in the company’s statement. In addition, the staff of the “Rider Support” team, which is the contact for the couriers, has been doubled.
The GWC understands the company’s statement as “another insult not only to the public, but also to workers”. “Now that we are putting public pressure on, they feel responsible for their image in front of the press and show themselves as if they want to change something,” says Yasha from the GWC.
Not all of the missing salaries have been paid, says Yasha. He has collected salary slips from some of those affected, which are available to the Berliner Zeitung. The increase in the support team has also had no effect so far, the team can still only be reached by email, not by phone. The provision of work equipment also remains a contentious issue. While the company management declares that it provides bicycles, helmets and rain protection, the GWC describes the work equipment as unhygienic and technically not up to date. Worse still: There were three work accidents in the past week that the GWC pointed to inadequate Equipment.
Reducing the load that the couriers carry on their backs is one of the core concerns of the GWC. Gorillas has now stated that they want to relieve the couriers with “weight display boards” in the camps. According to Yasha, there are no scales in the warehouses, only devices that classify an order as “light” or “heavy”. “Nobody knows how that is calculated,” says Yasha. He therefore does not feel that the “scoreboards” communicated by the company as a success are sufficient. In response to the request for luggage racks, the company told the Berliner Zeitung that it was testing “various other solutions such as cargo bikes or devices that hold the backpacks during the journey”.
The conflict between gorillas and GWC is now turning on another, new axis. The mail that the employees received on Wednesday evening declared two “separate and completely independent companies” for gorillas in Germany with immediate effect. On Twitter – presumably sympathizing with the GWC – accounts reacted with the catchphrase “Union Busting”: According to the definition of the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB), the term refers to “the systematic and professionally planned action against trade union interest groups. In Germany it is mostly about obstructing or preventing works council work ”.
According to Gorillas, the division of the companies has no effect on the employees. “The establishment of a works council by our riders is neither prevented nor delayed by this measure,” said a spokesman on request. The negotiations between Gorillas and GWC had come to a head in public, among other things on the issue of employee representation. At the beginning of June, the employees elected an electoral board as a first step towards the works council.
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