Uber Eats He has fulfilled his threat and from this Wednesday he returns to distribute with ‘riders‘ freelancers. This has been confirmed by EL PERIÓDICO from company sources, who claim to have received “thousands” of requests from delivery men to work as self-employed in a few days. Distributors consulted by this means confirm that the application is already operational in Barcelona. The multinational has already alerted the Ministry of Labor that it was planning to return to operating with this model -which it will combine with the subcontracted fleets-, in order to gain in operability and compete with Glovogiven that this company has never stopped operating with freelancers despite the multiple million-dollar Labor Inspection sanctions and the entry into force of the ‘Rider law’.
Uber has lasted a little over a year operating exclusively with the subcontracted fleet model, to which the new regulations agreed between the Ministry of Labor, employers and unions pushed the main companies in the sector. All except Glovo, which has maintained the bulk of its fleet as autonomous. False self-employed, according to the repeated failures of the Inspection. The ‘Rider law’ established the “presumption of employment” of digital platform delivery men. In other words, everyone had to be salaried while the companies could not prove otherwise. What the main firms in the sector fulfilled by subcontracting the distribution to intermediaries such as Adeco, Randstad, deliveries, Stuart either Shargo, among others. Until now, that Uber Eats has decided that it no longer wants to compete with Glovo in unequal conditions and has returned to operate with autonomous ‘riders’, who will have to pay for Social Security, the vehicle, the mobile phone and will no longer have the right to sick leave or paid vacation.
“Given the success of the pilot, we launched our new model for all those delivery people who want to work as self-employed, in compliance with current regulations, in the rest of Spain. This new model includes important changes that offer the delivery person greater control over their activity , such as the possibility of setting your rate freely,” say Uber Eats sources.
Changes to feint the law
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The multinational’s programmers have been testing a new application in recent weeks, different from the one used by the platform’s delivery men before the ‘Rider law’. In it they have introduced variations, with which they aspire to feint the regulations and that the Labor inspectors and the judges, in the future, do not conclude that the ‘riders’ operated as false self-employed and impose sanctions on them for it. Sanctions that, if they occur, will take months or even a year to arrive, given the times with which the ‘labor police’ are operating on other platforms.
Two of the most relevant modifications are the following. On the one hand, the possibility of the dealer to set his own rate for delivery, something that until now was not possible. It was the platform itself that told the ‘rider’ how much it offered for a ride. And this or he accepted it or rejected it. And the other change is that it suppresses the user and restaurant evaluation system for the delivery man, which could produce biases when it comes to rewarding, among others, those who accepted the most orders and harm the most intermittent delivery men. Two elements that the courts highlighted as arguments in favor of the thesis that the distributors acted as false self-employed workers and that the platform actually had absolute control of the distribution system.