The judgment is the result of an appeal of the shopping deliverers, led by Picnic against a decision by the court in 2024, he had already ruled that shopping deliverers should follow the collective agreement. With the current judgment, (former) employees can request overdue payment of night and weekend services. It concerns around 35,000 employees.
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The shopping deliverers believe that the work is fundamentally different from them than those in stores, because employees mainly work in distribution centers and with delivery cars. According to the Court, however, the difference in work is not great: “If a customer buys a banana online, it will ultimately also have to end up physically with the customer. All activities (from Sterk and Picnic, ed.) Can be regarded as the exploitation of a virtual store,” writes the councilors in the judgment.
The Court follows the reasoning of the trade unions and the independent supermarkets that together faced the meal deliverers.
Minister of De Zet
The shopping deliverers continue to argue that their business model is different from that of supermarkets and that the supermarket collective agreement does not apply to them. They have now established their hope on the Minister of Social Affairs who must declare collective agreements generally binding. At the moment, the minister is still looking at whether the current collective labor agreement will be generally valid for supermarkets.
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According to the delivery people, the minister can also look at ‘economic arguments’. “E-commerce players more often have adult employees and therefore already considerably higher wage costs than supermarkets in their own collective labor agreement. The imposition of the supermarket collective agreement on the e-commerce parties would only strengthen this disadvantage.” Says the E-Commerce Netherlands Association in a response.
Picnic CEO Michiel Muller. © ANP / AFP
Talk
Picnic CEO Michiel Muller says that there is a weaving error in the CAO system that allows supermarkets to print newcomers from the market with employment conditions of minors in particular ‘. According to Muller, his sector has little influence on the content of what is agreed at the negotiating table between trade unions and supermarkets.