The Labor Inspectorate wants to take serious action at Uber Eats because of the delivery platform’s lax policy regarding meal couriers without a valid work permit. Uber Eats would have to go dark for a month in the Amsterdam region and would not be allowed to deliver meals there.
This serious measure would hit restaurateurs and delivery drivers hard. Thousands of restaurants in and around Amsterdam depend on Uber Eats for a significant part of their revenue. The intention to tackle a large American tech company in this way shows that the Labor Inspectorate and the ministry are serious. According to them, Uber Eats has been misleading the government for years, allowing couriers without a work permit to continue delivering food.
The ministry confirms Uber Eats’ intention to impose a “preventative suspension of operations”. NRC. This was discussed during an appeal to the Council of State in mid-December. Lawyer Michiel de Lange, who spoke on behalf of Minister Mariëlle Paul (Social Affairs, VVD), was very skeptical about Uber’s claims that the company has been doing everything it can for years to keep illegal meal couriers off the platform.
Since the summer of 2021, violations have been identified at the delivery platform on seven occasions, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Social Affairs emails NRC.
Figures from the Labor Inspectorate and the police show the recidivism by Uber Eats. Since the summer of 2021, violations have been identified at the delivery platform on seven occasions, a ministry spokesperson emails NRC. This concerns five checks in five years on Uber Eats delivery drivers, with the Labor Inspectorate “finding several violations during each check.” Uber Eats also received two fines based on information from police investigations.
Of the 44 Uber Eats meal couriers whose work permits were examined by inspectors during checks in recent years, around 60 percent were “illegally employed”, according to figures from the Labor Inspectorate. At the last check – on February 4, 2025 – this applied to half of the couriers, even though Uber Eats had repeatedly assured the ministry that the checks were now really conclusive.
Food delivery phenomenon
Meal delivery took off in the Netherlands in 2015, when the London stock exchange-listed company Deliveroo introduced its services in the Netherlands. The following year, Uber Eats, the delivery branch of the American mobility company Uber, followed. The two companies recruited independent couriers who were paid per trip, in contrast to the Dutch Thuisbezorgd.nl, which employed the delivery drivers.
The meal delivery phenomenon had a tailwind in the years that followed. The companies had an abundance of venture capital due to the low interest rates, while the supply of delivery drivers due to the hype lasted until 2023, when the Supreme Court ruled that Deliveroo could not treat its delivery drivers as self-employed but had to employ them as employees. After this, the company withdrew from the Netherlands.
Uber is not the problem, those are the people who are committing fraud
Uber Eats stayed and adjusted its business model. Since the beginning of this year, Uber couriers have had to register with a temporary employment agency and receive an hourly wage. Uber Eats hires thousands of people through this route and is constantly looking for new people. For example, on the Randstad website there are 115 vacancies for meal delivery at Uber Eats, throughout the Netherlands.
Even now that the delivery people work through a temporary employment agency, the attraction for undocumented workers is great. When they are delivering, they never have direct contact with Uber Eats. During delivery, their identity is only checked digitally: the couriers must regularly take a photo of themselves and send it to the platform. In any case, that check was notoriously susceptible to fraud until the last inspection by the Labor Inspectorate. Couriers let another delivery person log in and take a selfie, or scan photos, instead of photographing themselves.
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Mega session
At the hearing at the Council of State, three people directly responsible for Uber Eats sat in the front row of the public gallery. They heard how lawyer De Lange argued that Uber Eats has repeatedly provided incorrect information to the judge and the ministry about the reliability of its systems.
De Lange gave two examples. For example, during a mega hearing at the Amsterdam court in December 2024, where five cases between the ministry and the platform were simultaneously handled, Uber Eats stated that “identity fraud actually no longer occurred.” That same day, Uber stated that it had taken measures that made ‘account sharing’ – where foreigners without a work permit share an Uber delivery account with a legal courier – impossible. But when the Labor Inspectorate stopped ten meal deliverers during its inspection in February this year, it turned out that “five of the ten meal deliverers inspected were employed illegally.” Three of them involved “identity fraud”, according to De Lange.
The tightened ‘selfie control’ that was intended to prevent the sharing of accounts also turned out to be “easy to circumvent”, according to De Lange, despite Uber’s assurances that they worked well. “The meal delivery person who receives a selfie request can ask the account holder to take a selfie on another phone, which apparently does not require that the phones be in the same location,” he said in surprise at the Council of State.
Uber, through lawyer Jan Reinier van Angeren of the Stibbe office, expressed itself to the Council of State as “shocked by the fierce tone taken by the minister” and “dismisses all accusations”. According to the lawyer, the delivery company has now got the checks in order. The problems with selfies have been resolved with new measures, the lawyer said. “Uber is not the problem, those are the people who commit fraud,” Van Angeren said in court.
No grip
NRC reported more than three years ago that platform companies Uber Eats and the now departed Deliveroo offered work to undocumented meal deliverers on a large scale. Stories about this problem also appeared in neighboring countries, apparently without the authorities taking action.
The latter is not correct, as became apparent during the Council of State session. The ministry and the Labor Inspectorate appear to have been working for years to force Uber Eats to implement better controls, without really gaining control over the delivery platform. This is partly due to the size of the platform. The fines from the Labor Inspectorate are a deterrent for smaller companies, but this hardly applies to Uber Eats. The platform remains popular with consumers, pays all fines and appeals every time.
The question is whether and when the ministry will receive permission to shut down Uber Eats in the greater Amsterdam delivery region for a month. In 2023, Uber Eats already received a so-called warning decision, a mandatory intermediate step before the actual order to shut down the platform. That decision was overruled by the Amsterdam court earlier this year, because the ministry had not mapped out the consequences of such a temporary closure.
The hearing at the Council of State was the appeal in this case. If the ministry, as it plans, actually decides to black out Uber Eats in Amsterdam for a month, the delivery platform can appeal against this in a separate procedure.
In the meantime, Uber has had KPMG conduct research into the consequences of a temporary closure. These are serious, according to the delivery platform. Consumers would have “much less choice” for a month, delivery drivers “would largely lose their income” and restaurants would “lose an average of 27 percent of their turnover”, according to lawyer Van Angeren at the Council of State.
A spokesperson for Uber Eats said the company has “a zero-tolerance policy toward illegal account sharing.” “Any delivery person who shares his or her account will be removed from the platform,” he emails. In recent years, the platform has “dramatically tightened its processes and controls”, deploys “very advanced resources” and is therefore “at the forefront of the sector”.
The Uber Eats spokesperson said: “The investigation at issue in this case began years ago and does not reflect the extensive improvements that have been made since then.” This includes “stronger controls to ensure the right delivery person does the job” and “renewed document verification procedures.”
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