ZURICH, SWITZERLAND. On Sunday, couriers who deliver meals for the platform Just Eat will set their bags down across Zurich and the Glattal district, and several hundred of their positions will stop being even the fiction they were. They will gather at Stauffacher square to explain to passersby that these jobs, though formally nonexistent, pay their rents. The demonstration exists because the jobs do not. It is timed for the lunch shift, when absence is easiest to taste.
The mechanism is elegant. Just Eat engages its riders as independent commercial partners, a classification meaning either party may end the relationship at will. For years the platform sold this as the product itself: flexibility, advertised alongside the food. The couriers accepted, worked nights and rain, and eventually asked whether the flexibility could run in both directions. Fixed shifts. Sickness cover. A floor beneath the fee. What returned was the discovery that several hundred partnerships could be concluded at once, and that this was not a malfunction of the model but the model.
"They told us for years we were entrepreneurs," said Selma Aydın, a courier in Zurich for four years, whose wages pass through a bank and out again to family abroad. "One client, one uniform, no vote." A person familiar with the platform's planning agreed, with the calm of a man describing weather: "We are taking nothing from them. A partnership can only expire. Ours are doing so in groups."
Here is the trick, filed by number. Step one: sell flexibility as freedom. Step two: watch the couriers arrange their entire survival around it, rent, remittance, winter boots. Step three: receive their request for stability. Step four: withdraw the flexibility, together with the couriers attached to it, and record both operations under the same heading, growth. In my years with the Octopus Collective of Rigel Nine, eight tentacles signed every contract, which rendered this maneuver arithmetically impossible.
The platform's defenders hold defensible ground: a permanent partner is merely an employee with superior marketing, and permanence is expensive. Still, I searched the founding documents for the author of the timing, believing every trick has someone who wrote it down. The documents contain only the word "growth," repeated. So on Sunday the couriers will perform the one freedom the contract always guaranteed: to become invisible together, in public, at noon. The jobs are fictional. The rent is not.
