Join us for a screening of “The Delivery Guy”, a documentary by Debarun Dutta, that follows immigrants from South Asia navigating present-day realities as food delivery workers. The Screening will be followed by a panel discussion on the precarity of migrant labour in Germany's platform economy.
Germany is an enigmatic destination for young people from South Asia seeking to build a career in the West. Many take on significant financial and emotional burdens to migrate to cities such as Berlin as students, hoping to secure decent employment after completing their education. These aspirations, however, often collide with the harsh realities of immigration. Private universities are rarely a pathway to secure livelihoods, and many graduates find themselves working as food delivery riders for platform companies under precarious conditions.
The Delivery Guy, created by Hertie School MPP graduate Debarun Dutta, tells the story of two South Asian immigrants who moved to Berlin as students, tracing their migrant dreams and their present-day realities as food delivery workers. Despite the state turning a blind eye to working conditions in platform-based delivery companies and the largely unregulated private university sector, the film highlights how these young people continue to resist and persevere in the hope of building a life in Germany.
The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with the filmmaker, scholars and policymakers, exploring labour rights in the platform economy and the precarious working conditions faced by migrant workers in Germany’s platform-based food delivery sector.
This event is hosted by the Centre for Fundamental Rights and is part of its Fundamental Rights in Practice event series.
Prior registration is required. To attend, please register here.
Speakers
Jan Dieren has been a Member of the German Bundestag since 2021. In the Bundestag, he is a member of the Petitions Committee and the Committee for Labour and Social Affairs. He is also deputy spokesperson for labour and social affairs for the SPD parliamentary group in the Bundestag. His focus is on labour law issues. Among other things, he is responsible for collective bargaining compliance, the further development of co-determination, and change and the future of the world of work in the interests of employees. Dieren is also a solicitor in a law firm specialising in employment law.
Debarun Dutta is a policy communicator with over 15 years of work experience with non-profits in India. He has a master’s degree in Human Rights, a PGDM in Development communication and a Master's in Public Policy from the Hertie School, Berlin. He has worked with GIZ in 2023-24 and is with Fairwork, Berlin. Debarun Dutta has made over 50+ films on a range of human rights issues.
Patrick Feuerstein is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the global Fairwork Project hosted by the Oxford Internet Institute and the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and one of the Principal Investigators for Fairwork Germany. Before joining the Fairwork project, Patrick was a lecturer, research associate, and acting professor of sociology at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen. He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Göttingen with a thesis on the impact of IT offshoring on working conditions of software developers in Germany and India. Recent research projects have focused on collaborative and open innovation processes in the IT industry and on working and living conditions of workers in global production networks in the automotive and chocolate industries.
Anke Hassel is Professor of Public Policy at the Hertie School. From 2016 to 2019 she was the Scientific Director of the WSI at the Hans Böckler Foundation. Anke Hassel has extensive international experience and scientific expertise in the fields of the labour market, social partnership, codetermination and the comparative political economy of developed industrial nations. She was an expert in the fact-finding committee on growth, prosperity and quality of life in the German Bundestag (2012-13); the expert commission on the future of the Hans Böckler Foundation (2015-17) and chairwoman of the expert group on Workers' Voice and Good Corporate Governance in Transnational Companies in Europe (2015-2018).
Nitesh Kumar is a migrant worker based in Berlin. Originally from India, he holds a Bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology and a Master’s in Healthcare Management from IU International University of Applied Sciences, Berlin. After arriving in Germany in 2023, he financed my studies and living costs by working as a food delivery rider, gaining first-hand experience of the precarity, racism and legal insecurity faced by migrant workers in the platform economy.
Moderator
Silvia Steiningeris a postdoctoral researcher at the Hertie School's Centre for Fundamental Rights. Her research engages in interdisciplinary perspectives on international law and domestic, regional, and international courts, in particular in the area of human rights and economic law. Silvia is also Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg. Silvia lectured on human rights, public international law, and international dispute settlement at universities in Germany, France, and Denmark.