For the first time in Spain, a platform capitalism manager will testify in court as being investigated. This is Oscar Pierre, founder and general director of Glovo, who this Tuesday will appear before the magistrate of the 31st investigative court of Barcelona accused of a crime against workers’ rights. The company’s controversial labor model is still in court, but it has moved from social to criminal jurisdiction.
The case is open for a crime against workers’ rights, although the group of workers riders (an Anglicism by which Glovo delivery drivers and other companies are known) is organizing to try to expand the criminal offenses that Pierre faces when it understands that the Prosecutor’s Office “has fallen short,” according to workers’ sources.
The RidersxDerechos collective, pioneer in the fight of delivery workers against false self-employed workers in the sector, together with the Algorithm and Society Work Observatory (TAS) tried to appear as a popular prosecutor in the case, but the judge set a very high bail (20,000 euros) . Now it is being considered that the delivery drivers appear as private accusations to try to expand the case to tax crimes and crimes against Social Security, fraud and document falsification.
While waiting to see if this quantitative leap in terms of crimes is successful, the key and the future of the case depend on the answer to one question. Did Glovo maintain its false self-employed work model after the Supreme Court declared it illegal? For the Prosecutor’s Office yes, but for the company and its founder, no. The final decision will correspond to the investigating judge, María Isabel Hernando Vallejo, who must decide whether to send the case to trial.
On the magistrate’s table, the prosecution and defense have presented documents to reinforce their respective theses, consisting of sentences and Labor Inspection minutes. According to the Prosecutor’s Office, they show that Glovo maintained its employment relationship model with the riders after the historic Supreme Court decision of 2020. On the contrary, Pierre’s defense maintains that he did change his model of labor relations with the ridersadapting it to the conditions set by the Supreme Court to keep the delivery workers as self-employed.
This is proven, they argue, by recent rulings by the National Court (also subsequent to the Supreme Court ruling) that have revoked Social Security sanctions by confirming that the delivery drivers “could connect or not to the application whenever they wanted, with total and absolute freedom”, unlike the model that the Supreme Court overturned and that rewarded delivery workers with reservations for the time slots with the highest demand.
In its complaint, the Prosecutor’s Office does not focus so much on the issue of time slots, but attributes other strategies by Pierre to maintain the relationship of false self-employed workers with their delivery people. For example, not guaranteeing riders a professional salary in accordance with the work day performed and stop paying the corresponding labor contributions to Social Security. All of this would have, in the prosecutor’s opinion, the objective of “reducing business costs” for Glovo, that is, the same as the false self-employed model.
To all the documentation of the parties we must add the more than 20 riders who have so far appeared as witnesses. According to legal sources, all of them have made several complaints about the operation of the company, although there has not been unanimity when it comes to declaring themselves self-employed or employees of Glovo.
The complaint from the Prosecutor’s Office represented a jump to criminal proceedings after the various sanctions that, through administrative means, the Labor Inspection already filed against the company for ignoring the historic ruling of the High Court that declared that the riders of the company were false self-employed.
The Ministry of Labor, led by Yolanda Díaz, has maintained pressure on the company to monitor whether it maintained its model of false self-employment until reaching criminal proceedings. The Government approved the Rider Law in 2021 with the aim of ending the systematic abuse of the figure of false self-employed workers among the main home delivery companies. The rule was supported by the CEOE, but not by the Catalan employers’ association Foment del Treball, which supported the Glovo model.
In its desire to prosecute these practices, the Government also modified the Penal Code to prevent abuse by false self-employed workers. The crime that Pierre faces is punishable by prison sentences of six months to six years and sanctions employers who restrict the rights of their workers by abusing their situation, including those who abuse false self-employed workers.
The case opened in Barcelona at the request of the Prosecutor’s Office does not currently have replicas in the rest of Spain, unlike the carousel of labor trials in all the cities where Glovo operates that the Supreme Court settled in 2020 and that continues to occupy almost five years later. to the courts.
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