If you order butter chicken or burgers on a Sunday night with any regularity, you may have noticed the growing number of South Asian workers bringing dinner to your doorstep. In the two years since the Labour Immigration Act was reformed to fill an estimated 400,000-person gap in Germany’s workforce by encouraging skilled labour migration, there has been a huge influx of immigrants from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Abdul*, who has travelled far from home to work as a courier at food delivery service Wolt, is among them.
“In my home country, Bangladesh, things are not very good now, there is an economic crisis and a lot of protests going on and it’s difficult to find jobs. So I came here to be able to support my family back home,” he says. “My mother is alone and I have a disabled brother living with her. They need all the help they can get.”
I work six days a week for 10-12 hours, and on my days off I often end up only sleeping and talking to my family, that’s all.
While we chat, Abdul waits for a new order to come in. It’s mid-afternoon, around 3:30 pm. “This is a quieter time of the day, lunch rush is over and the dinner orders have not yet started to come in,” he explains. He and six other couriers are hanging out outside a Risa Chicken on Sonnenallee, all of them waiting for their phones to ping. “Sometimes we have so much work that we barely have time to eat or drink anything, and then there are hours when we just wait around. It’s hard to predict when to take a break because you wouldn’t want to miss out on a call.”
One of his colleagues is also from Bangladesh, and there are two Pakistani men and one Indian man standing around with them. They all came to Germany through a staffing agency that sent them invitations to work. They had to present those invitations at the embassy in order to get their Chancenkarte visas – also known as the ‘opportunity card’, it allows foreign nationals to explore job opportunities in Germany for up to a year. Abdul arrived in June – around the same time as his colleague and friend Nawaz. The pair share a room, along with two other men.
“The agency helped us find rooms and provided bikes to use for the work. Our room is small, we each have a bed, a small desk and a cupboard in it. We share a bathroom. It can be very uncomfortable, and it’s hard to rest with the others there, but it’s not so expensive. We each pay €250 a month and we are grateful to have this,” says Nawaz, who talks more candidly about what he and his fellow couriers are facing.
“I terribly miss my family and my home. I have a wife and a little daughter and my parents and two younger sisters who I have to support. I work six days a week for 10-12 hours, and on my days off I often end up only sleeping and talking to my family, that’s all.” It’s taking a long time to build up savings. “It pains me that I cannot make more money and then just go back home,” Nawaz says. “I am saving on whatever I can. I’ve already lost a lot of weight since I got here, because I try to spend as little as possible on food.”
Living off scraps
The golden years of food ordering were during the pandemic, when restaurants saw home delivery as the best chance of survival. According to statistics from the grocery delivery app Flink, almost five times more people signed up as bike couriers in March 2020, while many new restaurants also appeared on the takeout platforms. But by 2022, the enthusiasm had died down and it became increasingly difficult to get new delivery staff. This shortage was partly filled by migrant workers – many of them from South Asian countries.
According to the Federal Statistical Office, around 22,000 Bangladeshis currently live across Germany. Thirty percent work in the hospitality sector; the rest are employed in trade, engineering, and information and communication sectors. The populations of skilled migrants with Pakistani and Indian backgrounds are far higher – around 140,000 Pakistanis and 137,000 Indians.
While Germany may have encouraged workers from these countries to come – last October, the country upped the number of visas granted to skilled Indian workers by 70,000, and government officials reported Bangladesh as one of the focus countries for hiring skilled labour – the reality upon arrival is a financial tightrope. Abdul and his coworkers are officially not employees of Wolt, so they have to pay a percentage of their wages to the agency as a commission, in addition to taxes and health insurance.
He works as much as he can, preferring the evening shifts when people often tip more. Housing and food are added costs, which Abdul says ultimately leaves him with little money for himself after sending most of his income back home to his family. Still, he’s happy to have found a steady work, he says, because it wouldn’t have been possible in Bangladesh.
The couriers’ wages are partly performance-based, so there is huge pressure to do well each day. “We have a base salary of €11 an hour, and then we get extra per each fulfilled delivery – plus the tips. So it can be anywhere between €12 and €20 an hour. Rainy days are always better!” says Abdul.
(In a statement, Wolt told The Berliner that the hourly wage of couriers is “usually above” the statutory minimum wage.) Nawaz laughs out loud, adding that weather might be better money-wise, but drivers are often not mindful of them and splash water all over them as they pass. “Sometimes I think they do it on purpose. People can be very cruel.”
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. (Wolt uses an algorithm based on location, estimated delivery time and past efficiency to assign deliveries to individual couriers.)
Customers, too, can be cruel, making comments about their backgrounds or that they don’t speak German very well. “We do meet some nice people though,” admits Nawaz, who says his situation in Berlin has made him very humble. “Some restaurants offer leftovers at the end of the day and then we can save a lot of money on food but still have full bellies!”
No seat at the table
Aju Ghevarghese John, a Berlin-based lawyer and researcher at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, has been an activist on the topic of courier treatment for years now and even hosted a podcast called Delivery Charge. He sees the situation of South Asian workers as problematic in many respects and is pushing for changes. “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.
“The practice of ‘renting accounts’, where delivery workers rent accounts on the app from another person — right now, the rent is around €200 per month — and are then paid in cash by that person, is also prevalent and tacitly tolerated by both companies. Some work through a labour intermediary who manages a group of workers and pays them in cash, sometimes after first taking money from them to be able to access the platform,” he said in an interview last September. These structures, he claims, allow Wolt and similar companies to skirt some of the standard responsibilities of an employer.
“In Germany, couriers are permanently employed, either directly by Wolt or via partner companies, in order to meet local demand. It goes without saying that we comply with all legal regulations, including minimum wage and protection against dismissal, vacation and sick leave,” the company told The Berliner, noting that Wolt in Germany employs people from more than 80 different nations, with 10 of the top 15 countries with the most employees not belonging to the EU. ”We have clear guidelines to protect our couriers.”
Uber Eats provided a similar statement, saying the company “works exclusively with professional delivery partners who employ their couriers subject to social security contributions. The couriers therefore earn at least the statutory minimum wage. Our business partners are also contractually obliged to comply with the applicable laws.”
Sometimes we have so much work that we barely have time to eat or drink anything.
Many of the South Asian couriers are foreign students who need to find ways to support themselves while studying in Germany. They are facing visa regulations that limit their working hours, and this makes them perfect candidates for using labour platforms such as the staffing agencies. “Accepting the conditions of low-wage work is a price they are willing to pay to eventually achieve economic success on the high-skill labour market,” says John.
Ashikh*, an engineering student from India, is currently in his second semester at Technische Universität. He completed an A2 German course organised by the Goethe Institut back home and arrived here last September. His family supported him as much as they could, but his father fell ill with lung cancer, and Ashikh quickly realised that life in Berlin was not as cheap as he had hoped; he had to look for a job.
“I wanted to find something connected to my studies, but I couldn’t because of my lack of German and I needed something flexible, so I signed up with Wolt,” he says. It’s often a struggle to get shifts that don’t conflict with his classes, and he ends up having to choose between attending lectures and making a living. His dream is to eventually earn enough to bring his parents to Germany as well so that his father can get the treatments he needs.
According to John, one of the reasons platforms are able to exploit the grey areas of German labour law is that labour standards emerge primarily from collective bargaining. Over half the country’s workforce are covered by collective bargaining agreements that set out standards concerning wages, working time, termination processes and health and safety.
“Delivery workers, however, are not covered by any collective bargaining agreement, and no union has been able to win one. Even after several months of strikes and campaigning, the Food, Beverages and Catering Union (Gewerkschaft Nahrung-Genuss-Gaststätten) has not been able to compel [rival takeout delivery service] Lieferando to come to the negotiating table. Presumably, the food delivery company understands that the majority of its workers are not union members.”
He sees a solution in unionising, but it is not that easy – many of the workers are reluctant to do anything that would jeopardise their jobs. “German unions need to conduct more outreach among Hindi-, Urdu-, and Punjabi-speaking students to understand why people who aspire to stay in Germany and thus have a stake in better working standards are still hesitant to join unions, and take corrective action.
Labour courts must become more accessible to precarious migrants who are often hesitant to claim their rights for reasons that include unfamiliarity not only with the German language, but also with the availability of state funding for some litigation and applicable labour regulations,” explains John. “In the absence of a right to vote, demonstrations and protests by large numbers of workers remain one of the few ways in which migrants can influence politics.”
For now, improvements for Berlin’s couriers move slowly. “I often feel like a beggar, to be honest,” Nawaz says. “Even if I work for my money and luckily the agency pays us on time, I feel like I am not really earning it but rather begging for it, because people don’t appreciate what I do. But how would your sushi get to you tonight if I wasn’t delivering it?”
*Names have been changed for privacy
