“Our ad campaign simply brings certified facts about the company to the public,” Uber spokesman Nickerson said. “Uber supports strong and enforceable directives to ensure that platform workers maintain the independence they want and receive the protections they deserve.” , such as minimum wage, holiday and sick pay.”
For Uber, key to the new rules is the employment classification of its Uber drivers and UberEats couriers. Jeremias Adams-Prassl, a professor of law at the University of Oxford, said: “From maternity leave to discrimination protections, this is why you also see the appeal of misclassifying workers. If you are concerned about By misclassifying individuals, you can try to avoid all these obligations”.
Officials disagree on how to classify platform workers. Many MEPs favor rules that would assume that all platform workers are employees unless the platform can prove otherwise. But some EU member state representatives in the European Council prefer a system that would allow staff to work on the platform. Ludovic Voet, Secretary General of the European Trade Union, said that one must first prove that they meet a number of criteria before being able to challenge their employment status. This is because member states are concerned that if the rules are too strict, platforms will respond by reducing their workforce. TUC. “Some of these countries do not want to face business models that might exclude people from employment statistics.” Four months later, Spain launched Rider’s LawThe bill stipulated that delivery workers should be considered employees, and Deliveroo shut down its operations in the country entirely.
Platform staff worry that member states will have difficulty enforcing any new rules adopted by the EU. Standing in the Brussels rain, Peters explained that he had been working at UberEats in the city for the past six years. In January, new rules came into effect in Belgium aimed at making it easier for platform workers to be classified as employees. “You know what’s changed? Nothing,” Peters said. “The price I pay for rent has gone up. The price I’ve paid for food has gone up. But my [employment] Nickerson said Uber complies with all applicable laws wherever it operates. “In Belgium we offer free injury, sickness and paternity insurance to all independent drivers and couriers.”
In Spain, the “rider law” has been criticized “Glovo, the biggest company out there, has failed to comply with this law for years with complete impunity,” said Corredor, who worked as a Deliveroo courier in Spain between 2016 and 2017 and is now an activist for platform workers group Riders x Derechos . Spain’s rider law also aims to force platforms to classify more workers as employees. Instead of doing this, Glovo has adjusted the working terms of many couriers so that they can still be classified as independent workers. “We are confident that the Spanish operating model we launched in August 2021 will meet all regulatory requirements,” Corredor said. Glovo spokesman Felix Eggert said.
For Corredo, this is all part of a larger fight, in which platform workers are fighting for basic rights that exist in other parts of the economy — a minimum wage and maximum hours. [the platforms’] “I think that’s very problematic,” he claimed.