Today we are striking for our demands that you can see behind me.
Last week and in the last two months, actually,
but especially in the last weeks,
there has been lots of tension being build up on our backs,
on our psychologies, in the relationships, in the warehouses.
Because they're trying to implement a project that is called Ace,
and it is based on optimization.
And that means we end up with scattered schedules.
But the most important thing is that most of us are not being paid properly.
There are many riders who haven't been paid at all.
They received zero salaries and like it's not enough
they fired people in very shady ways
by calling them on their last day of probation.
And that is what happened in Bergmannkiez warehouse.
They fired one of our riders, one of our friends,
and they did it over the phone.
They tried to take him out of the WhatsApp group so he wouldn't get help.
And this affected every other rider who was not
in any political engagement before, because it's not about politics.
It's about our lives. They are not getting paid.
We are not getting any respect
regarding our social lives, private lives and our lives in general.
And on top of everything, we are suffering from really bad quality
working equipment and most importantly, we need better quality bikes.
They keep breaking while we are in the middle of the traffic,
for example the saddles.
It was one of the biggest problems about these bikes.
They keep breaking and we can just sit on this broken metal and hurt us.
But maybe even deadly, if not that, it's going to definitely leave
some permanent damage to many people.
And this was raised thousands of times and there was no solution for it.
And we don't want bags on our backs
because we are forced to do double, triple, quadruple orders sometimes.
And there are lots of people who are just getting signals for chronic back pain.
And these things
and most of the work accidents are not also reported as work accidents.
So we cannot get anyone down here to inspect what's really happening.
But chronical back pain is a work accident, and it should be reported as one.
But let alone that even the accidents like actual accidents are not reported.
We have one rider, for example, who is now in the...
He's out of coma.
His body is responding, but that's all.
He cannot wake up.
He cannot get out of the bed.
He cannot come back to his life because he had a work accident.
And after that, these bikes, everything should have been immediately improved.
But that didn't happen.
At Schöneberg right now, there's a strike.
And we are hoping all our warehouses, - not our warehouses,
but our fellow workers in those warehouses - will join this fight.
That's a beautiful moment.
This fucking warehouse
This fucking warehouse!!
Most of us are actually not aware of our rights.
So we are learning about our rights through such actions as well.
So that's one of the outcomes of striking.
I've learned so much
about what workers rights mean in Germany, and I'm trying to spread the word.
All of the people who are striking today, they are trying to spread the word,
because what we realize: People actually don't know about their rights.
And when you just keep on not knowing about them,
of course, you cannot also fight for them because you don't know that they exist.
So such struggles are also important for spreading such words. Out there.