Food distributors will be treated as employees

Spanish distributors offering their services in applications such as Deliveroo or UberEights will now automatically be considered employees. For the first time in Europe, Spain on Thursday announced a change in the labor code to ensure the social protection of these precarious workers.

“Everyone will be employed from now on and will be able to benefit from all the security”, comes from this regime, with Labor Minister Yolanda Diaz saying that Spain is “the first country in the European Union.” Who makes the law in this case ”.

These workers, whose numbers have skyrocketed in recent years by bicycle or motorcycle, have complained of the uncertainty of their working conditions on the road and in court in Spain.

The agreement, which took place on Wednesday night between the government, the main Spanish unions and employers, “provides for changes to the labor code to add an estimate of pay for employees who provide payment delivery services to employees who would have done so “The project is mandatory thanks to an algorithm that manages the service or working conditions through a digital platform,” the ministry said in a statement.

“I have said many times that an employee who crosses our cycle paths with an application is not an entrepreneur,” said Dith.

“From now on they will be employees, companies will pay contributions for them and they will have the right to any social security that they do not have today,” he clarified.

The text also states that unions should be “informed of the rules governing algorithms and artificial intelligence systems, which may affect working conditions”.

The performance of the working hours according to the profile created by the algorithm in an opaque manner is greatly criticized by the distributors.

Dieth said the reforms would be approved by the cabinet in the coming weeks and the companies would have three months.

The Left government is based on a Spanish Supreme Court ruling in September that recognized the existence of an “employment relationship” between a food distributor and the Spanish company Glavo.

In a joint statement, Deliveroo, Stuart, Glowo and UberEats look at the reform as the creation of an “essential staff (…), which proposes € 700 million in national GDP”, an obligation to disclose the algorithm ” .

A collective of Riders x Derekos distributors welcomed the improvement by posting on Twitter, but said with regret that it focused on “riders only”.

Other types of digital platforms “Ana Hines, a labor law specialist at Assade School,” employ “many more people” without regulation.

However, Spain remains a pioneer, as no European country has any such legislation so far. Distributors are generally considered self-employed, mainly in Spain.

In 2017, Belgium legislated a 10% tax on working income for these platforms, but without providing status or social security to distributors.

In Italy, the major platforms signed an agreement in September with a minority association, which states that each distributor is a self-employed entrepreneur and can work whenever he wants, setting specific criteria for earnings and accident insurance Can do.

But most unions refused to sign because they did not cover leave and maternity leave.

In the UK, distributors are also independent, but unions try to get them recognized as employees through ongoing litigation, such as against Deliveu in front of the London Court of Appeal.

However, some companies have decided to formalize their relationships with their distributors: Fudora has signed collective bargaining agreements with Sweden and Norway with better pay, while JustAtt employs 22,000 distributors worldwide And has promised to hire 4.500 employees.

California, unique in the United States, passed a law in 2019 that required companies in the so-called “gig economy” to treat their employees as employees and provide them with adequate social security. But it was rejected outright in the referendum held last November.