We wish you a safe ride

“The only requirement for the job as a food delivery person is to be able to ride a bike”, said a CEO of a food delivery platform. In fact, the riders, most of them migrants, have almost no labour protection. Their urgent dependency on these jobs fuels exploitation. Precarious working conditions on the basis of free service contracts here in Austria are standard. During WIENWOCHE, the project initiators call for active solidarity in connecting the festival audience with the riders, whose work shifts will be taken over by volunteers on a solidarity basis. In this way, the riders will use the time off duty to learn about their rights and connect to colleagues, who they have been deliberately disconnected from through the working environments dictated by the platforms. In order to strengthen the knowledge on the matter of informal unionizing and the prevailing working conditions, daily workshops will be held. The project team will open the doors to its workshops for the festival audience and offer performative on-boarding sessions, after-work-decompression and get-togethers. A documentation of the working process as well as portraits of the participating riders will be featured. In the long term, the project aims to reach out for more solidarity, unionized representation and good working conditions for delivery platform riders, here in Austria and elsewhere.

Credits

Concept & production: Fabio Hofer/ State of Matter

Artistic direction: Ana Mikadze/ State of Matter

Project management: Madelaine Engstler/ State of Matter, Sundaraprasad Ramasamy Paramaguru/ RidersCollective

Performance art: Rasa Kavaliauskaite/ RidersCollective

Tour: Kira Lappé, Rajna Avramova, Onur Arisan

Special thanks: Toqa Eissa, Mohammad Abou Chucker, Miki&Ebi, Victoria Plasteig, William Häußler, Robert Walasinski