The dream of the collaborative economy produced monsters like Glovo. Only the sum of forces of workers organized in unions, and a government that defends labor rights, has managed to subdue a multinational that felt outside the law.
You don’t remember because you’re very young, but a few years ago we were talking about “collaborative economy.” It was the fashionable term, the latest revolution: technology would make us more free, with an app we could share anything: the car, the house when you go on vacation, the gadgets that you no longer use, and of course your time and your job. With just one click, our need would find satisfaction, our demand would find its supply, and vice versa. The future would be collaborative.
Then it turned out that the companies that were only going to act as intermediaries between consumers and producers, between sellers and buyers, or between workers and clients, became multinationals that imposed their rules, bypassed state laws, and took the world by storm. small businesses, the old “non-collaborative” companies, and labor rights. “Uberization” we call it. Among the most representative of that moment of euphoria, the delivery platforms that landed in the cities, all with a similar model: an easy-to-use app, and thousands of “free” workers rowing to the rhythm set by the tom-tom of the company. In reality, under their revolutionary appearance they were still the usual porters, those who in the past stood on the corners and squares waiting for a ticket to come their way. But now with a click. we call it startupbut their business is based on the sweat and fatigue of people who work with the body.
The dream of the collaborative economy produces monsters, and one of the fiercest seemed to be Glovo until today. A multinational of Spanish origin that imposes abusive conditions on its exploited riders, that obtains such exorbitant profits that even paying million-dollar fines and Social Security regularizations it continues to win, and that believes itself above good and evil, oblivious to laws, governments , labor standards and court rulings. Until today, when its founder sits on the bench, and the company has ended up bending its knee and agreeing to hire its fake self-employed workers.
The Glovo model exacerbated what my admired Juanjo Castillo already anticipated in an essential book from more than fifteen years ago: The loneliness of the globalized worker. The model of deregulation, outsourcing and “flexibility” of recent decades sought to isolate the worker, leave him alone before the company, “decollectivize” the collective worker, “that isolated, solitary, but globalized worker.” Only before the company, no: only before the multinational, the technological multinational that hides behind the app, which is nowhere and is everywhere, which lives in the cloud.
To beat Glovo it was necessary to join forces. Firstly, the workers, breaking with their isolation and their need to compete among themselves, joining forces in unions, the traditional ones and other newly created ones such as Riders x Rights. They have been denouncing the company before the labor authority and the courts for years. Along with them, the government, from the Ministry of Labor of Yolanda Díaz, which has championed this fight, legislating, using inspection and denouncing. The sum of forces of organized workers and a government that defends labor rights has managed to subdue the giant, in the manner of those superheroes who cross their rays to achieve a more powerful shot that knocks down the invincible villain.
The war continues, it is just a battle, and we will have to continue fighting for the rights of hired workers, since Glovo will predictably use other tricks. But in this time when good news is not abundant, it is comforting to see Glovo fall to the canvas for a while, and to be able to tell him, as he gets up, what we told the bullies: come on, pick on someone your size.
#Glovo #mess #size
