The Courier With the Green Bag Is Belgrade's New Proletariat

On the corner of Krunska and Resavska, on a Tuesday afternoon, I was waiting for a friend who was twenty-five minutes late. I sat on the bench next to the flower shop and, as usual, I started counting. I counted couriers passing me on bicycles with green, orange and blue bags on their backs.

The counting lasted thirty-one minutes. Eleven couriers went by. Most were heading the same way, toward Vracar. All of them were watching a phone mounted on the handlebar. None of them stopped, none of them spoke to another courier when they passed each other. The exchanged glances were short, instrumental, without recognition.

What struck me in the scene was not their number. The number of Belgrade couriers has been rising for years. What struck me was their isolation. Each of them, in the thirtieth minute of my counting, was in the same administrative status, the same business model, the same kind of contract. And yet none of them had a single point of connection with any of the others. They were the same, and in the meantime did not know they were the same.

A pivot to Sassen

I pivot to the sociology of globalisation as formulated by the Dutch sociologist Saskia Sassen. In the book “The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo” (Princeton University Press, 1991; Serbian translation, Faculty of Political Sciences, 2008), Sassen developed a thesis that in the nineties still looked odd but is now confirmed almost daily:

The global economy does not only produce exceptionally rich centres and exceptionally poor peripheries. In every global city it simultaneously produces two strata that are never shown together: a high-paid professional layer visible in the media, and a vast invisible layer of service work that sustains it. The second layer is never represented as a class in national statistics.

Sassen wrote about this mostly through New York and London. Her thesis is that the global city is not simply a city where global companies are visible. It is a city in which global companies produce local work, usually undervalued, usually informal, usually with migrant labour.

Belgrade in 2026 is, sociologically, one such global city. Glovo, Wolt, Bolt Food and similar platforms are not Serbian firms. They are global corporations with services in more than ten languages, headquartered in Madrid, Berlin and Tallinn. But the work they organise is strictly local, bodily anchored, on bicycles circling Vracar, Dorcol and Vozdovac.

What it actually means to be a courier in 2026

To avoid abstraction, I turn to concrete conditions. From informal accounts offered by couriers I have spoken to recently in order to understand their position, the structure looks like this.

Couriers in Serbia mostly work as flat-rate self-employed entrepreneurs (paushalci), with delivery as their registered activity. With the platform they have a service contract, not an employment contract. That means:

• no right to minimum wage, only a per-order commission
• no right to sick leave, annual leave or holiday allowance
• no right to union representation, because they are not employees
• pension contributions paid by the worker, if there is anything to pay with
• bicycle, phone and phone batteries bought by the worker
• a fall from the bicycle is the worker’s private matter

The algorithm that assigns orders is invisible and explains no reasons. If the algorithm decides a courier is performing poorly, that decision cannot be contested in court, because it is not a judgement. It is simply a business decision by the platform toward its supplier.

The counter-argument about choice

Here comes the counter-argument one often hears from people who speak about the gig economy from a distance. By that logic, no one is taking the couriers’ freedom of choice away. They themselves chose to work on this platform. If the conditions do not suit them, they can move to another platform or find another job. No one is forcing them.

The argument is formally accurate but sociologically dishonest. In Serbian labour statistics for those under thirty-five, the alternative to courier work is not a better job but unemployment or emigration. Sassen drew that distinction precisely. The global city produces work under conditions in which the worker chooses between a lesser evil and a greater evil, which is formally a choice, but sociologically not freedom.

The second part of the argument, that another platform exists, is also only half true. All three large platforms in Serbia use the same structure. All three require flat-rate registration. All three communicate with the courier through an algorithm. All three take a commission of around 25 to 30 percent. The difference between them is marginal. The net of choices is formal freedom under conditions of structural constraint.

A class without its own language

Here, at this point in the essay, I enter what is sociologically the most important observation. The Serbian language, the Serbian media vocabulary, the Serbian political vocabulary, still has no name for what the couriers are. They are not workers by the classical definition. They are not entrepreneurs in the small-business sense. They are not self-employed in the sense of a craftsman. They are not precarious in the sense of occasional work.

They are something new. Saskia Sassen called them the infrastructure class, because they form the infrastructure of other people’s lives while remaining invisible themselves. In Serbia we do not yet have a translation of that phrase that has taken root. Thirty years ago the Serbian vocabulary had a developed and precise language for the textile worker, the railwayman, the bricklayer, the fisherman. For the courier, today, that language has not yet formed.

A class without its own language has a second consequence. It cannot articulate its interests in the public sphere. It does not know how to approach unions, because it is not employed. It does not know how to formulate a position for politicians, because it is not an identified voter category. It remains, as Sassen put it, sociologically invisible, even when it has passed me eleven times in thirty minutes.

Back to the corner of Krunska

I go back to the bench in front of the flower shop. When my friend finally arrived, he asked what I was reading in my notebook. I showed him the list of eleven tally marks I had made over thirty minutes. He asked: “What does that mean?” I answered, as I usually do when I am not yet sure: “I don’t know exactly, but I know we need a word for something that has no word yet.”

The question I leave at the end of this text, which I share with those who have read this far, runs roughly like this. Are we ready to recognise, when we read tomorrow in the media that there are around a hundred thousand couriers in Serbia, that this is a class worth speaking about. And, the harder sociological question, will we be able to speak about them without first finding the language in which such speaking is possible at all.