In recent years, Spain has been and remains one of the most intense battlefields over the gig economy, with an existential conflict unfolding between the country's largest food delivery platform, Glovo, and the Spanish Government over the question of employment status. Platform workers have also been key participants in this battle, whether it be the pro-employment rights 'RidersXDerechos' or the anti-government protest movement 'Sí, soy autónomo'. It is now almost three years since the Spanish Government's so-called Rider Law entered into force, which was the first law in Europe to establish a general legal presumption of employment in the food delivery sector. What effect has this law had on the lives of food delivery couriers? Fairwork's first Spanish platform ratings, launched at an event hosted with Complutense University of Madrid and the CCOO union on Thursday (which you can re-watch here), provides us with a deep insight into this question. The results for the three food delivery platforms analysed - Glovo, Just Eat and the co-operative La Pájara - are stark. Glovo, which has refused to comply with the Rider Law and continues to hire almost all of its riders on a freelance basis (apart from those who carry out grocery delivery), scored zero out of 10 for meeting minimum standards of fair working conditions. Just Eat and La Pájara, which do employ their riders, scored seven and eight out of ten respectively. Zero out of ten is, obviously, extremely bad, but to put just how bad that is into context, we could only find one other major food delivery platform which had been rated zero out of 10 in Fairwork's ratings across Europe: Uber Eats in the UK. The fact that, almost three years into a law specifically designed to ensure the rights of food delivery couriers, a platform which hires around 12,000 riders across the country can still not evidence anything by way of basic guarantees and protections for its riders is an indictment and should be a political scandal.That doesn't mean working conditions are even satisfactory for riders which are employed. Just Eat, which signed a collective agreement with the UGT and CCOO unions as well as complying with the Rider Law, lost points in its rating because it doesn't offer a decent living wage (salaries are slightly above minimum wage), it hasn't proved that its subcontractors guarantee its riders' contracts with the same rights as those which are employed directly by the firm, and it doesn't have inclusion policies. "Just Eat, the platform that has been most respectful of the application of the Rider Law and which offers by far the best work standards in the sector, continues to use subcontracting and mobilises its own workers on part-time (permanent) contracts," the authors' write. "The platform offers its workers a reduced number of working hours, which they extend from time to time, flexibly and unilaterally depending on the daily evolution of demand. "The overall income obtained by the riders is usually insufficient for their subsistence, and they have to resort to moonlighting, with a high labour turnover (which limits the establishment of rights in the company)."Indeed, ridehail (VTC) drivers in Spain are employed via intermediary firms, but the two ridehail platforms studied, Uber and Cabify, both received just two out of 10. "Their cases show that labourisation and the employment contract are not enough to guarantee fair work if the rest of the working conditions are far from a decent work model," the authors' conclude on VTC platforms.The final two platforms studied were TaskRabbit and MyPoppins. TaskRabbit is a US handyman-type platform which scored two out of ten. MyPoppins is a home cleaning platform which equalled Glovo in scoring zero out of ten. Interestingly, MyPoppins doesn't deny that there is an employment relationship, but argues that is between the home cleaner and the client, not with MyPoppins. In practise, MyPoppins does nothing to enforce this on its platform, meaning "undeclared employment" proliferates. In fact its even worse than that, as the sub-letting of MyPoppins accounts to undocumented migrants, in return for a % of the worker's wage, proliferates, which is another thing that MyPoppins has in common with Glovo."In a certain way, the platform, through its operation,
actually acts as a facilitating infrastructure for informality
in employment," the report states in respect to MyPoppins.It's a sad irony that many care platforms promote themselves on the basis that they are professionalising a domestic work sector that has been notoriously informal. Yolanda Díaz, the Spanish Government labour minister, has said that she plans to extend the Rider Law to include platform care workers as part of the transposition of the EU Platform Work Directive, a much needed measure, but some care workers may be wondering if they will suffer the same fate as Glovo riders, left in limbo as the government and the platform do legal battle.To be fair to Díaz, it's not like the government is not trying to bring Glovo to heel. The Labour Inspectorate has re-classified 41,000 Glovo couriers as employees since the company was founded, more than three times its current workforce. Glovo has racked up almost €300 million in fines and back-dated social security payments for bogus self-employment, a punishment that has contributed to the firm being on the verge of liquidation. On top of that, the government is pursuing criminal sanctions against Glovo's executives for bogus self-employment, which could see them face jail time. But none of this has dislodged Glovo as the primary force in Spanish food delivery, with Just Eat struggling to compete in a market where it pays higher labour costs than its two big rivals (Uber Eats also refuses to employ its riders). How Spain's food delivery war will end still remains unclear, but what FairWork's report shows conclusively is that while employment status is by no means the be all and end all, it can make a profound difference to the working conditions of platform workers.
Ben Wray, Gig Economy Project co-ordinator
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Gig Economy news round-up |
- FOODORA SHUTS DOWN IN DENMARK: Food delivery platform Foodora closed down permanently in Denmark on Friday [14 June], sending customers and riders on to its rival, Just Eat, instead. Foodora, owned by German multi-national Delivery Hero, only set-up in Denmark at the end of 2022, announcing that it planned to become the biggest platform in the Scandinavian country, but it has quickly retreated, as part of a wider plan by the German company to narrow its focus. Delivery Hero-owned Glovo has also left Slovenia and Ghana in recent months, while the company sold its FoodPanda operation in Taiwan to Uber. Unusually, as part of the company's exit from Denmark it agreed a deal with one of its main rivals in Europe, Just Eat, to direct its customers and its riders to its competitor. 'BT' reports that Foodora sent out "messages to users and partners to inform them that they can become part of Just Eat". Jitse Groen, CEO of Just Eat, tweeted: "This week we struck a deal with Delivery Hero regarding Denmark". Delivery Hero has been seeking to raise cash to improve its faltering financial position, selling a stake in the company to Uber Eats and selling its own stake in British platform Deliveroo at a discount. Rasmus Hjorth, a Just Eat courier and member of the 3F union, criticised Foodora's statement to its couriers about the company's exit from the country, tweeting: "Platforms that do not employ their workers are unscrupulous and provide no security." Read more here.
- GETIR CEO AGREES TO ELECT NEW BOARD AS CRISIS GOES ON: Getir's CEO and founder Nazim Salur has agreed to hold an annual general meeting and elect a new board, in a possible resolution to the Turkish grocery delivery platform's management crisis. Getir is in danger of running out-of-cash by the end of the month if they cannot get their largest investor, Abu Dhabi state investment fund Mubadala, to stump up a new funding package. Mubadala has said the money won't be coming unless there is changes at executive level, with Salur stepping down as CEO and a former head of strategy, who was fired by Salur, re-installed. Bloomberg reports that it remains unclear about whether Salur is willing to step aside, but that the two sides are working on an agreement whereby "Salur may have a different role at the company but that hasn’t been determined yet". Getir announced last month that it was exiting all of its foreign markets, including the UK, Germany, Netherlands and the United States, and would only operate in its home nation of Turkey, a re-structuring which was financed by Mubadala and other investors. But there remains strong disagreement over Getir's future course which threatens the survival of a company that was valued at over €10 billion just two years ago. Read more here.
- UBER GRANTED A LICENCE IN YORK DESPITE PROTESTS: Uber drivers in the English city of York will once again be able to get licences there, after a six-year ban came to an end. The Council's decision to grant the licence on Tuesday [11 June] came despite protests from the York City Taxi Association and concerns from some councillors about how secure personal data was with Uber. There was a data breach at the company in 2016 which affected 57 million users, but Uber did not report the breach to authorities. That led to York Council revoking Uber's licence in 2017, but councillor Jason Rose told the licencing decision meeting that it was unclear Uber had improved its data practises since then. "We have no idea if they are better or worse than that now because they have chosen not to tell us for seven years about anything they legally didn't have to," he said. A taxi driver told the meeting that drivers were "struggling", calling on the Councillors to "please help your local drivers to get enough to feed our families". Uber said they believed they had "met the fit and proper test definition" for a licence. Read more here.
- FRENCH PUBLIC PROSECUTOR REQUESTS PRISON SENTENCES FOR DELIVEROO EXECUTIVES: On Friday [13 June], France's public prosecutor requested to the Paris Court of Appeal that three executives at British food delivery platform Deliveroo are given suspended prison sentences for the crime of 'concealed work', i.e. bogus self-employment. On the first day of the trial, which started last week, Deliveroo abandoned its attempt to overturn the criminal conviction for employment mis-classification of 113 riders, which was handed out in 2022. The court proceedings ended on Friday, with the verdict set to be decided on 5 September. The prosecutor is seeking a 12 month suspended sentence and a €30,000 fine for one of the Deliveroo executives found guilty, a nine month sentence and €20,000 fine for the second, and a four month sentence and €10,000 fine for the third. The company will have to pay a fine of €375,000. One rider called 'Warren', who has worked for Deliveroo since 2016, told Le Parisien that he hoped the Executives are condemned by the court "not only for what they did to us, taking us for robots, playing on our youth and our precariousness, but also for the future.” Jérôme Pimot, one of the leaders of Parisian rider collective CLAP and one of the 113 riders pursuing the case against Deliveroo, said the criminal conviction was "necessary to demonstrate this scam of liberalism". Their lawyer, Kevin Mention, said that they would pursue Deliveroo through the labour courts for "back pay, damages and interest", with each rider able to obtain a minimum of €30,000. Despite Deliveroo giving up on the case, it continues to hire riders on a self-employed basis in France. Read more here.
Have we missed something important? You can help keep us informed about what's going in the gig economy in Europe by e-mailing GEP@BraveNewEurope.com. |
A Rebel's Guide to the Gig Economy |
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Ep 3: What's the Algorithm?In Episode 3, Ben and Marini uncover the secrets of ‘the algorithm’; the method by which management instructions are delivered via an app. They find that algorithms accentuate the power imbalance between bosses and workers, especially when the rules which govern them remain a ‘black box’ for workers..
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Ep 4: Are gig workers their 'own boss'?In Episode 4, Ben and Marini take down the myth that food delivery couriers and drivers working on a digital labour platform are their ‘own boss’. They find that employment misclassification is a means for platforms to avoid their responsibilities to their workers.
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Ep 5: Is gig work really 'flexible'?In Episode 5, Ben and Marini challenge the widely espoused notion that working in the gig economy offers workers 'flexibility'. They find that to have true flexibility in your life requires social protections and economic security, neither of which are on offer in the gig economy.
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- Friedrich Ebert Stiftung's Competence Centre on the Future of Work is launching a new study on 'Care Platforms: impacts and challenges from a trade union perspective' at a webinar on 24 June, 1pm CET. Click here for full details and to register.
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The Gig Economy Project is a media network for gig workers and we welcome contributions from workers, writers, academics, activists - anyone who wants to stand up for workers' rights in the gig economy.
If you would like to write for the site, discuss arranging an interview with GEP, or simply have information about developments in the gig economy in Europe you think we should be aware of, get in touch.
Contact project co-ordinator Ben Wray at GEP@BraveNewEurope.com or send a direct message to the Twitter: @project_gig.
And if you like the Gig Economy Project weekly newsletter, why not get your friends and colleagues to subscribe? Here's the link.
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