The Union That Started as a Group Chat

Lisbon —

The first meeting of what is now the Associação de Estafetas do Tejo had no agenda, no venue, and no membership list. It had a group chat of about ninety riders, most of whom had joined it to warn each other about a particular intersection.

“Safety information first, then rates,” said Bruno Cardoso Neto, one of four riders who administered the original chat. “Nobody joins a union chat. Everybody joins a chat about the intersection where three people got hit.”

Speed was the whole advantage

The organization’s early effectiveness came from a structure that no established union could have replicated. When a platform changed its per-delivery rate on a Thursday evening, the chat knew within eleven minutes, had screenshots from four cities within an hour, and had a coordinated refusal to accept jobs below a stated floor by the following morning.

That first action lasted six hours and reversed the change. The riders were, by their own account, astonished.

The cost of becoming an institution

Winning made informality untenable. A negotiated agreement requires a counterparty that legally exists. Enforcing it requires records. Representing a member in a dispute requires a mandate. By 2024 the association had a registered legal form, two paid staff, a bank account, and a constitution running to nine pages.

It also had, for the first time, a response time measured in days.

• Decisions that took an evening now require a committee with quorum rules.
• Statements must be checked by the association’s lawyer before publication.
• Membership is formal, which means it can be counted — and also that non-members are now outside something.
• The original chat still exists, with four thousand members, and is no longer where decisions are made.

Cardoso Neto is unsentimental about the trade. The association has recovered unpaid earnings for members, secured a written injury protocol, and survived the departure of three of its four founders, none of which the chat could have done.

The unresolved problem is generational. The riders who built the association are, on average, four years older than the riders working now, and turnover in the trade runs somewhere near forty percent annually. An institution designed to outlast its founders has to be joined by people who did not experience the thing that made it necessary.

The association’s answer, so far, is a safety briefing offered to any new rider in the city, member or not, held on Sunday afternoons in a borrowed room. Attendance is modest. It is also, Cardoso Neto pointed out, exactly how the original chat started.