Perhaps it's a coincidence that those waiting for the call in front of the statue of Carlo Felice suddenly stop understanding. It happens every time you mention the word "rights": it's enough to make them forget their Italian—sometimes even their politeness—and revive their initial mistrust. In the best of cases, they'll point you in the direction of the road ahead. Because for them, that's all there is to it: rights; who knows where the rest is. And if you dare mention gangmastering, you end up waiting too: "No, Italian. I don't understand," says the young Pakistani man who, in half a second, blends in with the crowd of tourists and pigeons. It's no use insisting, even in the office on the corner of Corso and Via Sassari; the one outside, with extremely flexible but tough hours and twenty daring delivery drivers competing in a market where local workers are increasingly rare. In fact, in the morning spent chasing these modern-day Forrest Gumps—on bicycles but perhaps without any protections—you don't even meet a single one. We end up having to argue about this as well, as well as everything else.
Timed days
They look like lost souls, their eyes glued to their cell phones while the algorithm decides their fate. A thankless, certainly inhumane, dynamic that ultimately seems to pit everyone against everyone else. "We don't decide the deliveries; others do. You can only refuse," explains the Bangladeshi with the unpronounceable name, who immediately says, "No photos and no videos." He also explains that if you miss a delivery from above, you end up not working for several hours.
A sort of punishment, which weighs heavily and seems like psychological blackmail in a situation that's already anomalous from the ground up. "They pay very little, three euros per delivery," says Ali, a 27-year-old Pakistani with a family to support back home. Then he thinks better of it and says it's three euros and seventy cents, "but only with Deliveroo," because with Glovo, he assures us, it's twenty cents less. "There are days when you don't earn anything, others when you make a lot of deliveries, but there's so many of us and there's not enough work for everyone," interjects the compatriot wearing the turquoise t-shirt from the platform with a heart in London and arms everywhere.
