Tonight

Food delivery workers on strike again in Salzburg

(Bild: Markus Tschepp)

Food delivery workers on bicycles have been discussing a pay rise with their employers for months. They regularly go on strike. Today it's that time again, including in the city of Salzburg.

The dispute over the 2024 collective agreement for bicycle delivery drivers is entering a new round. Today between 17:30 and 22:00, the main time for food deliveries, the delivery staff will be protesting in front of Lieferando and Foodora locations in Vienna, Salzburg, Graz, Innsbruck and Klagenfurt.

There have been six rounds of negotiations so far, with the vida union demanding a wage increase of 8.7 percent for the approximately 2,000 employees affected, while the employers are offering 5.8 percent. However, there is not only a thick air between employees and employers, the companies are not quite on the same page either. 

This is because only half of them are in a proper employment relationship with a job and a collective wage - the other 50 percent are freelancers - or, from the trade unions' point of view, pseudo-self-employed. Lieferando, in particular, hires its employees on the basis of a collective agreement; according to the company, around 95 percent of the Foodora fleet are freelancers. 

According to vida, the gross monthly wage of bike messengers is just under the current poverty line at 1,730 euros for a 40-hour week. The average age of a bike messenger in Austria is 30 years.