Deliveroo deliverers are employees, the Supreme Court has ruled. That ruling could have far-reaching consequences for hundreds of thousands of self-employed people without employees.
Years ago, the trade union FNV started a lawsuit against the British meal delivery company Deliveroo. Meal deliverers work for the company as a self-employed person, but are actually just employees, the union said. Lower courts ruled in favor of the union. They thought it was bogus self-employment. In name, the delivery drivers are independent, but in practice they are completely dependent on Deliveroo for their work. That means that they are in fact just employees.
Straight
Deliveroo appealed against that ruling to the Supreme Court, the highest court in the Netherlands. But the Supreme Court also ruled that delivery drivers are actually employees.
This means that the deliverers – ‘riders’ in Deliveroo jargon – are entitled to wages, even for the time they had no orders, are entitled to a pension and that the employer must pay social security contributions. Then they are entitled to unemployment benefits and continued payment in the event of illness, for example.
Although Deliveroo loses, the platform’s deliverers have relatively little use for it. Deliveroo left the Netherlands at the end of November. Competition with Thuisbezorgd.nl and Uber Eats made a healthy return impossible, the delivery service stated. Trade union FNV suspected a different cause: Deliveroo feared that it would have to employ its 4,500 riders on a permanent basis.
Hundreds of thousands
,,This ruling of the Supreme Court is important for hundreds of thousands of self-employed people without employees,” responds Anja Dijkman of FNV. Dijkman has been working for years on the position of freelancers in the so-called platform economy. These are companies like Uber, which allows people to work as self-employed people. “Now it is clear that they are just employees.”
The union is also looking at companies such as Temper, which lends self-employed workers to companies. The trade union has been fighting the bogus self-employment of self-employed people for years. They work at low rates, do not build anything and can be thrown out in no time. “We have been trying to tackle these abuses for years through, for example, collective bargaining agreements and complaints to the Labor Inspectorate,” says Dijkman.
False self-employment
But it is time for the government to crack down on platform companies. A law has already been passed that tackles bogus self-employment, but that law is not being enforced. This means that the companies can simply continue with their practices. “The cabinet has said that they will only enforce the law from 2025. But with this ruling in hand, they can start today,” said Dijkman.
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