Where ordinary cargo bikes can still get through, the UM models can fail in the middle of an intersection (Berlin, February 3, 2023)
At the beginning of the year, Velocarrier GmbH and Ecocarrier AG laid off 20 mail carriers. You are one of them. What are the companies?
Velocarrier and Ecocarrier are bike logistics companies that are committed to sustainability and fair working conditions. They emphasize that it is important that drivers are employed and that they are provided with work mobile phones, work clothes and bicycles. They also advertise a higher salary of 13 euros per hour. We supplied customers with organic boxes and Rewe products.
To what extent have the promises to be sustainable and social been kept?
When I started my job a year ago, there were fewer problems. But over time, our working conditions have deteriorated enormously. The bikes have not been serviced. Many stood broken in the yard. We were sometimes instructed to borrow petrol sprinters to transport the goods. Some of the bikes that we still used were so broken that we were exposed to a number of dangerous situations. Once I was in the middle of a big intersection and the bike stopped accelerating. These UM cargo bikes are like small trucks: heavy and bulky. With them, nothing happens when you pedal without electrical support. Suddenly a siren went off and an ambulance came towards me. I couldn’t drive away and I panicked. Luckily there was enough space for the ambulance to drive past me.
Who do you contact in such cases?
At the beginning there was a branch management in Berlin. Later we had to come up with solutions ourselves, which meant a lot of extra work that was not remunerated.
What is the difference between the two companies?
I was signed to Velocarrier a year ago. A few months later we were told by the branch management that Velo- would become an ecocarrier and that we would all get new contracts. We should sign a data protection sheet with our agreement within two days. None of us – including the Berlin management – understood what it was all about. To this day we have different contracts or sometimes no contracts at all, although we all did exactly the same work. And also now with the lawsuits for dismissal, which more than ten of our people with the help of the FAU (Freie Arbeiter*innen-Union, jW) have submitted, they will be processed differently.
How have the dismissals gone so far?
The first person to sue Velocarrier was pleased with the judge’s decision. Numerous court hearings against Ecocarrier were again postponed on the same day, partly on the grounds that the invitation to the court hearing was not correctly delivered to the employer. What puzzles us is that the letter went out two weeks earlier and it was only discovered a day before the court date that it had not been delivered correctly.
Have you ever met the CEO?
On November 30th there was a meeting with Raimund Rassilier and part of the Berlin workforce. We were told that by January all issues would be resolved and businesses would expand. He seemed likeable. The shock was all the greater when shortly before Christmas the big customer Rewe left and then one day before New Year the first layoffs arrived. Two weeks later, the CEO announced the closure of the site in a phone call to a colleague, and more layoffs came in over the next few days.
How were these justified?
Bottlenecks in the order situation. We believe the companies are closing down the site due to absolute mismanagement. This could have been avoided if our demands and proposals had been taken seriously from the start. We put our health at risk and continued to work despite back and knee pain. We feel used. They would rather throw us away than try to solve problems. We are human, we deserve respect.
