Food delivery workers’ mobilizations are on the rise across Europe. In the last year and a half, riders’ collectives have been formed in several cities across Italy, and they are increasingly winning recognition. While recent legal action against employers has not achieved the hoped-for gains, the riders’ visibility has allowed them to keep up the struggle and use public support to their advantage, drawing ever greater media and political attention to their condition.

Since the first strike against Foodora in Turin in October 2016, the need to regulate the gig economy has entered mainstream discourse: last week Bologna council negotiated a “Bill of Digital Labor Rights” with self-organized riders, unions, and some platforms. On Monday Italy’s new labor minister, the Five Star Movement leader Luigi Di Maio, proposed extending the bill to the national level, having met with a riders’ delegation as his first official meeting. In Spain, a judge in Valencia ruled for the first time in Europe that a Deliveroo rider is not a freelancer, but an employee.

The extreme visibility and recognizability of riders in every European city allows many different kinds of precarious and exploited workers to identify and solidarize with them. This has provided these workers an unexpected capacity to attract media attention and to force political institutions onto their side, partly compensating for the lack of any solid bargaining structure as well as for the platforms’ unfettered power in escaping regulation. In a landscape in which there are also real dangers, the labor movement needs to strategically exploit the opening of this window of opportunity.