Horacio Gómez is starting to think that Spain’s labour unions and leftist government are in collusion against him and his fellow ‘riders,’ the ubiquitous delivery workers buzzing around European cities on bicycles, scooters, and even on foot fulfilling orders made on mobile phone apps for everything from dinner to diapers.
“Every time I hear a shot, I look behind me wondering if it’s the unions and government coming after me,” Gómez jokes. “Neither one has stood up for the workers.”
Both proclaimed to be defending ‘riders’ when they reached an agreement that resulted in Spain’s Rider Law, but with few exceptions, those working with online delivery platforms such as Uber Eats, Amazon Flex, or Deliveroo have seen their income drop dramatically, with no substantial improvement in their working conditions since it went into effect September 2021.
Now, through its directive on platform work, the EU is following almost the same path as Spain to create a near-carbon copy of the Rider Law for the whole bloc, meant to regulate other types of platform work.
The offerings of on-demand or near-on-demand services, obtainable through websites and mobile phone apps, range from foreign language classes to food delivery, taxi, and handyman services. To make money, these websites and apps, generally called platforms, have to capture both the clients who buy the service and the workers who provide it—in an equally flexible and wide-reaching manner. Just as almost anyone can download the app or go to the website to be serviced in a matter of days, hours, or even minutes, so anyone who meets the basic requirements of the platform can work at will—download the app, set up an account, go through a quick training, and it’s off to work as much or as little as the person wants. Thanks to these apps, hiring certain services has been made easier than ever; efficient organisation of service providers has created the workforce of the ‘uberised’ ‘gig economy.’
To some, these companies of the digital transition are disruptive, free market heroes ‘creating jobs’, but according to others, they are capitalist tech bros who need to be regulated out of exploiting the proletariat. For most riders, they are a little bit of both, and the riders themselves are taking advantage of the opportunities the platforms provide while working to change the most exploitative aspects of the job.
That is, until left-leaning governments stepped in.
“They ruined a job that was really nice,” Gómez complained.
Being a successful rider is, without a doubt, a hustle. Maximising the earning potential of rider gigs requires sometimes working 12-hour days, signing up with multiple apps, being fast, and minding the rewards and penalties built into each platform’s algorithm. But compared to other low-skill jobs, ‘riders’ had it good. While most full-time low-skill employees in Spain make around €1,200 a month gross, riders could earn double or triple that, raking in anywhere from €2,500 to €4,000 a month. As independent contractors, they didn’t have employment benefits such as the right to paid sick and vacation time, but they had more flexibility and more earning potential than the average low-skill employee.
Gómez also points out that the nature of the online platforms’ business model—sometimes called crowdsourcing—made the independent contractor model function well for both the company, the client, and the rider. Riders could work for various platforms simultaneously and companies had the greatest access possible to riders so that both the platforms and the riders could take advantage of the sometimes unpredictable but widespread demand for delivery services. Companies also avoided the expenses and hassles of paying social security taxes for their employees, an expense Gómez says they can’t afford. As registered self-employed workers, the riders paid into social security from their gross income.
Riders had also organised themselves into associations and were leveraging their collective power to bring the app companies to the negotiating table to discuss policies the riders considered unfair. Even before the Rider Law was written, three rider associations had already gotten a group of platforms to sign an agreement committing the companies to monthly meetings with the riders and to making basic changes such as taking weather conditions into consideration and informing riders of changes to the app’s algorithms. Riders were also pushing platforms for additional benefits—accident coverage during deliveries, a small number of vacation and sick days, and a minimum pay guarantee for periods when no deliveries came in.
The one thing neither the riders nor the platforms had laid out on the negotiating table was the riders’ status as independent contractors. In its study of the conditions of platform workers, the EU Commission acknowledged that platform workers in several parts of Europe had been successful as contractors, in negotiating improvements in the platforms.
But challenges to the platform model of independent contracting were coming through the courts. Both individual riders and governments had brought lawsuits against the platforms, claiming riders as falsely self-employed.
Courts have sided both for and against the reclassification of riders as standard employees. According to the EU Commission’s own review of court decisions within the bloc, jurisprudence has found that platform work has an equal number of characteristics of conventional employment and independent contracting, and courts have differed on which elements have more weight.
Nevertheless, in Spain, jurisprudence in favour of conventional employee status for riders became an excuse to legislate riders out of their independent contractor jobs with the support of a small minority of riders and Spain’s major trade unions, which receive substantial government funding.
Only one of the five associations of riders, RidersxDerechos (riders for rights, RxD) supported the Spanish Rider Law. According to Gómez and Gustavo Gaviria, RxD represents only 5-10% of riders, works with the government-funded labour union Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), and was the only riders’ association that the government met with when writing the law, despite repeated requests for meetings with Yolanda Diaz, the employment minister, from Gómez and Gaviria.
In a lengthy interview with Santiago Abascal, the leader of the right-wing party VOX, Gustavo Gaviria, founder of the Madrid-based organisation Repartidores Unidos, told a story going back years before the Rider Law came into force. According to him, already in 2018, the UGT had attempted to insert itself in the riders’ self-organisation, coming to the riders and insisting that they needed to fight for the status of employees instead of working as independent contractors, a proposal rejected by most riders. Nevertheless, a small group of riders were convinced by the UGT and formed RxD, while the rest continue to advocate for riders’ independence and certain additional benefits.
Gómez goes even further in his accusations. According to him, Fernando Garcia, who was active in the media as a spokesperson for RidersxDerechos while the Rider Law was being legislated, is an individual member of the UGT who signed up with a platform and performed a few deliveries simply to be able to say he was a rider. The Spanish newspaper El Diario also reports that Garcia is tied to the UGT.
RiderxDerechos denies the accusation lobed against Garcia. Garcia has thrown around his own accusations as well.
Live on Spanish television, he accused Gaviria of being a Glovo executive posing as a mere rider. Gómez said he has faced similar libels. Both deny the accusations. Gaviria released his social security employment report to the Spanish media, and according to the report, he has always been self-employed.
Effects of the Law
Since the Rider Law went into effect in 2021, riders have seen their earnings slashed in half or even worse, and riders’ associations estimate that 10,000 of the country’s 30,000 riders lost their jobs altogether as platforms either left Spain or stopped working with independent contractors. To conform to the law, platforms have mostly either subcontracted riders or adjusted their platforms to be able to retain their riders as independent contractors. In either case, riders now typically earn around €1,000 a month, according to Gómez and other riders.
For example, The Objective reports that Just Eat switched all its riders to employees and signed an agreement with Spain’s two main labour unions for a salary of €8.5 an hour for riders. For a full-time rider, this amounts to just over €15,000 a year, the same low pay as almost all low-skill jobs in the country.
Glovo, the Barcelona-based company with the largest market share in Spain, famously maintained its riders as contractors. According to Gómez, the platform eliminated the requirement that riders sign up for shifts and has also lowered what it pays per delivery. The law turned out to be a boon to the company because many riders who weren’t willing to accept full-time employee conditions signed up with the app. Now, Gómez said, not only are there fewer deliveries for each rider but they also earn less per trip.
Another platform, Uber Eats, initially complied with the law by making its riders work through subcontractors but found that only a quarter of its riders were willing to work under the new conditions, and it lost them to Glovo. Finding its market position threatened, it complained to the government about its competitor but got no response. Finally, in September 2022, Uber Eats reconfigured its platform and rehired its riders as independent contractors. To conform to the law, it eliminated ratings of riders by clients and allows riders to set a minimum price they will accept for delivery, though price setting by service providers on platforms tends to create a race to the bottom for compensation.
Restaurants, too, have lost revenue thanks to the Rider Law. With less flexibility in crowd-sourcing riders, apps have concentrated on large restaurants and franchises with higher volumes of delivery orders, leaving many small restaurants without the delivery service that in the last three years has become an important part of the industry.
Sucked into Spain’s regulation and union structure, delivery platform work has been turned into the lowest common denominator of low-skill work in the country: an eight-hour workday, the schedule set by the boss, and take-home pay hovering around €800 a month. A few riders have seen their income increase and now enjoy some basic benefits such as a right to vacation. Glovo, too, now provides accident insurance for riders during deliveries, Gómez said, but he maintains that riders have overall lost more than they gained.
The law also failed to address another major problem: riders renting out their accounts to unauthorised workers. Most riders are immigrants, according to Gómez, who is himself originally from Uruguay, and many of those actually doing the deliveries are working illegally. Immigrants, who have either moved on to other work or left Spain, maintain their rider accounts and rent them out to newly arrived immigrants who don’t have the legal right to work. The only solution he sees is granting those immigrants the right to work, as the platforms themselves aren’t interested in addressing the problem since doing so would leave them short on riders.
The EU Directive
History then repeated itself in Brussels. In preparing the draft directive, the Commission met with the major Spanish labour union, Comisiones Obreras (CCOO), and with RidersxDerechos, according to statements by both organisations. Gaviria’s group, Repartidores Unidos, wrote to the Commission asking for a meeting. The letter to the commissioners is posted on the group’s website, but not a response, indicating that they never received one. The European Conservative reached out for comment but did not get a response.
The Commission’s draft directive presented in December 2021 had the same objective as the Spanish Rider Law in assuming a standard employer-employee relationship between platforms and workers, though it includes more platform workers, not just delivery services. In the Commission’s draft, when two of five conditions were met—for example, that the worker is supervised and evaluated through the platform, and that the app company sets rules for the dress and behaviour of workers—the worker is assumed to be a standard employee with rights to benefits such as overtime pay. The European Commission estimates that of the 28 million independent contractors in the Europe Union, 5.5 million are “false self-employed” workers and expects that up to 4.1 million workers could be reclassified under its version of the directive.
However, the EU Parliament had initially pre-empted the Commission when in September 2021 it overwhelmingly adopted an own-initiative report led by MEP Sylvie Brunet of Renew Europe that called for platform companies to provide supportive benefits for platform workers without reclassifying them. But when the Commission’s draft directive reached Parliament’s employment committee, the committee went even further than the Commission. The majority approved a report that tightened the presumption of a standard employee-employer with the intention of classifying all platform workers as employees, according to Swedish MEP Sara Skyttedal with EPP, who is opposed to both the Parliament’s and the Commission’s versions of the directive.
Skyttedal also told The European Conservative that Parliament’s version of the draft is unlikely to be accepted by the Council. She said the latest draft under discussion in the Council held closely to the Commission’s proposal, but that the question of platform workers’ classification should be left to member states anyway.
In fact, the Swedish Parliament evaluated the directive as beyond the EU’s competency and incompatible with the country’s current employment law and tax structure. With Sweden at the EU’s helm at the moment, moving the directive forward is likely not a priority, but Spain is taking the helm of the EU in July.
“I think many people, MEPs included, have not appreciated the value that many platform workers put on flexibility. Myself and my office took many meetings, with platform workers as well as with trade unions, in order to get as good an understanding as possible of the situation at hand,” she said.
Gómez is continuing the fight. He has moved into a new entrepreneurial phase developing a new delivery service app, one that he believes will be more humane than what the government, the trade unions, and app developers are currently offering.
Gig Worker Labour Movement Usurped by Spain’s Social Transition
Photo: Erik Mclean
Horacio Gómez is starting to think that Spain’s labour unions and leftist government are in collusion against him and his fellow ‘riders,’ the ubiquitous delivery workers buzzing around European cities on bicycles, scooters, and even on foot fulfilling orders made on mobile phone apps for everything from dinner to diapers.
“Every time I hear a shot, I look behind me wondering if it’s the unions and government coming after me,” Gómez jokes. “Neither one has stood up for the workers.”
Both proclaimed to be defending ‘riders’ when they reached an agreement that resulted in Spain’s Rider Law, but with few exceptions, those working with online delivery platforms such as Uber Eats, Amazon Flex, or Deliveroo have seen their income drop dramatically, with no substantial improvement in their working conditions since it went into effect September 2021.
Now, through its directive on platform work, the EU is following almost the same path as Spain to create a near-carbon copy of the Rider Law for the whole bloc, meant to regulate other types of platform work.
The offerings of on-demand or near-on-demand services, obtainable through websites and mobile phone apps, range from foreign language classes to food delivery, taxi, and handyman services. To make money, these websites and apps, generally called platforms, have to capture both the clients who buy the service and the workers who provide it—in an equally flexible and wide-reaching manner. Just as almost anyone can download the app or go to the website to be serviced in a matter of days, hours, or even minutes, so anyone who meets the basic requirements of the platform can work at will—download the app, set up an account, go through a quick training, and it’s off to work as much or as little as the person wants. Thanks to these apps, hiring certain services has been made easier than ever; efficient organisation of service providers has created the workforce of the ‘uberised’ ‘gig economy.’
To some, these companies of the digital transition are disruptive, free market heroes ‘creating jobs’, but according to others, they are capitalist tech bros who need to be regulated out of exploiting the proletariat. For most riders, they are a little bit of both, and the riders themselves are taking advantage of the opportunities the platforms provide while working to change the most exploitative aspects of the job.
That is, until left-leaning governments stepped in.
“They ruined a job that was really nice,” Gómez complained.
Being a successful rider is, without a doubt, a hustle. Maximising the earning potential of rider gigs requires sometimes working 12-hour days, signing up with multiple apps, being fast, and minding the rewards and penalties built into each platform’s algorithm. But compared to other low-skill jobs, ‘riders’ had it good. While most full-time low-skill employees in Spain make around €1,200 a month gross, riders could earn double or triple that, raking in anywhere from €2,500 to €4,000 a month. As independent contractors, they didn’t have employment benefits such as the right to paid sick and vacation time, but they had more flexibility and more earning potential than the average low-skill employee.
Gómez also points out that the nature of the online platforms’ business model—sometimes called crowdsourcing—made the independent contractor model function well for both the company, the client, and the rider. Riders could work for various platforms simultaneously and companies had the greatest access possible to riders so that both the platforms and the riders could take advantage of the sometimes unpredictable but widespread demand for delivery services. Companies also avoided the expenses and hassles of paying social security taxes for their employees, an expense Gómez says they can’t afford. As registered self-employed workers, the riders paid into social security from their gross income.
Riders had also organised themselves into associations and were leveraging their collective power to bring the app companies to the negotiating table to discuss policies the riders considered unfair. Even before the Rider Law was written, three rider associations had already gotten a group of platforms to sign an agreement committing the companies to monthly meetings with the riders and to making basic changes such as taking weather conditions into consideration and informing riders of changes to the app’s algorithms. Riders were also pushing platforms for additional benefits—accident coverage during deliveries, a small number of vacation and sick days, and a minimum pay guarantee for periods when no deliveries came in.
The one thing neither the riders nor the platforms had laid out on the negotiating table was the riders’ status as independent contractors. In its study of the conditions of platform workers, the EU Commission acknowledged that platform workers in several parts of Europe had been successful as contractors, in negotiating improvements in the platforms.
But challenges to the platform model of independent contracting were coming through the courts. Both individual riders and governments had brought lawsuits against the platforms, claiming riders as falsely self-employed.
Courts have sided both for and against the reclassification of riders as standard employees. According to the EU Commission’s own review of court decisions within the bloc, jurisprudence has found that platform work has an equal number of characteristics of conventional employment and independent contracting, and courts have differed on which elements have more weight.
Nevertheless, in Spain, jurisprudence in favour of conventional employee status for riders became an excuse to legislate riders out of their independent contractor jobs with the support of a small minority of riders and Spain’s major trade unions, which receive substantial government funding.
Only one of the five associations of riders, RidersxDerechos (riders for rights, RxD) supported the Spanish Rider Law. According to Gómez and Gustavo Gaviria, RxD represents only 5-10% of riders, works with the government-funded labour union Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), and was the only riders’ association that the government met with when writing the law, despite repeated requests for meetings with Yolanda Diaz, the employment minister, from Gómez and Gaviria.
In a lengthy interview with Santiago Abascal, the leader of the right-wing party VOX, Gustavo Gaviria, founder of the Madrid-based organisation Repartidores Unidos, told a story going back years before the Rider Law came into force. According to him, already in 2018, the UGT had attempted to insert itself in the riders’ self-organisation, coming to the riders and insisting that they needed to fight for the status of employees instead of working as independent contractors, a proposal rejected by most riders. Nevertheless, a small group of riders were convinced by the UGT and formed RxD, while the rest continue to advocate for riders’ independence and certain additional benefits.
Gómez goes even further in his accusations. According to him, Fernando Garcia, who was active in the media as a spokesperson for RidersxDerechos while the Rider Law was being legislated, is an individual member of the UGT who signed up with a platform and performed a few deliveries simply to be able to say he was a rider. The Spanish newspaper El Diario also reports that Garcia is tied to the UGT.
RiderxDerechos denies the accusation lobed against Garcia. Garcia has thrown around his own accusations as well.
Live on Spanish television, he accused Gaviria of being a Glovo executive posing as a mere rider. Gómez said he has faced similar libels. Both deny the accusations. Gaviria released his social security employment report to the Spanish media, and according to the report, he has always been self-employed.
Effects of the Law
Since the Rider Law went into effect in 2021, riders have seen their earnings slashed in half or even worse, and riders’ associations estimate that 10,000 of the country’s 30,000 riders lost their jobs altogether as platforms either left Spain or stopped working with independent contractors. To conform to the law, platforms have mostly either subcontracted riders or adjusted their platforms to be able to retain their riders as independent contractors. In either case, riders now typically earn around €1,000 a month, according to Gómez and other riders.
For example, The Objective reports that Just Eat switched all its riders to employees and signed an agreement with Spain’s two main labour unions for a salary of €8.5 an hour for riders. For a full-time rider, this amounts to just over €15,000 a year, the same low pay as almost all low-skill jobs in the country.
Glovo, the Barcelona-based company with the largest market share in Spain, famously maintained its riders as contractors. According to Gómez, the platform eliminated the requirement that riders sign up for shifts and has also lowered what it pays per delivery. The law turned out to be a boon to the company because many riders who weren’t willing to accept full-time employee conditions signed up with the app. Now, Gómez said, not only are there fewer deliveries for each rider but they also earn less per trip.
Another platform, Uber Eats, initially complied with the law by making its riders work through subcontractors but found that only a quarter of its riders were willing to work under the new conditions, and it lost them to Glovo. Finding its market position threatened, it complained to the government about its competitor but got no response. Finally, in September 2022, Uber Eats reconfigured its platform and rehired its riders as independent contractors. To conform to the law, it eliminated ratings of riders by clients and allows riders to set a minimum price they will accept for delivery, though price setting by service providers on platforms tends to create a race to the bottom for compensation.
Restaurants, too, have lost revenue thanks to the Rider Law. With less flexibility in crowd-sourcing riders, apps have concentrated on large restaurants and franchises with higher volumes of delivery orders, leaving many small restaurants without the delivery service that in the last three years has become an important part of the industry.
Sucked into Spain’s regulation and union structure, delivery platform work has been turned into the lowest common denominator of low-skill work in the country: an eight-hour workday, the schedule set by the boss, and take-home pay hovering around €800 a month. A few riders have seen their income increase and now enjoy some basic benefits such as a right to vacation. Glovo, too, now provides accident insurance for riders during deliveries, Gómez said, but he maintains that riders have overall lost more than they gained.
The law also failed to address another major problem: riders renting out their accounts to unauthorised workers. Most riders are immigrants, according to Gómez, who is himself originally from Uruguay, and many of those actually doing the deliveries are working illegally. Immigrants, who have either moved on to other work or left Spain, maintain their rider accounts and rent them out to newly arrived immigrants who don’t have the legal right to work. The only solution he sees is granting those immigrants the right to work, as the platforms themselves aren’t interested in addressing the problem since doing so would leave them short on riders.
The EU Directive
History then repeated itself in Brussels. In preparing the draft directive, the Commission met with the major Spanish labour union, Comisiones Obreras (CCOO), and with RidersxDerechos, according to statements by both organisations. Gaviria’s group, Repartidores Unidos, wrote to the Commission asking for a meeting. The letter to the commissioners is posted on the group’s website, but not a response, indicating that they never received one. The European Conservative reached out for comment but did not get a response.
The Commission’s draft directive presented in December 2021 had the same objective as the Spanish Rider Law in assuming a standard employer-employee relationship between platforms and workers, though it includes more platform workers, not just delivery services. In the Commission’s draft, when two of five conditions were met—for example, that the worker is supervised and evaluated through the platform, and that the app company sets rules for the dress and behaviour of workers—the worker is assumed to be a standard employee with rights to benefits such as overtime pay. The European Commission estimates that of the 28 million independent contractors in the Europe Union, 5.5 million are “false self-employed” workers and expects that up to 4.1 million workers could be reclassified under its version of the directive.
However, the EU Parliament had initially pre-empted the Commission when in September 2021 it overwhelmingly adopted an own-initiative report led by MEP Sylvie Brunet of Renew Europe that called for platform companies to provide supportive benefits for platform workers without reclassifying them. But when the Commission’s draft directive reached Parliament’s employment committee, the committee went even further than the Commission. The majority approved a report that tightened the presumption of a standard employee-employer with the intention of classifying all platform workers as employees, according to Swedish MEP Sara Skyttedal with EPP, who is opposed to both the Parliament’s and the Commission’s versions of the directive.
Skyttedal also told The European Conservative that Parliament’s version of the draft is unlikely to be accepted by the Council. She said the latest draft under discussion in the Council held closely to the Commission’s proposal, but that the question of platform workers’ classification should be left to member states anyway.
In fact, the Swedish Parliament evaluated the directive as beyond the EU’s competency and incompatible with the country’s current employment law and tax structure. With Sweden at the EU’s helm at the moment, moving the directive forward is likely not a priority, but Spain is taking the helm of the EU in July.
“I think many people, MEPs included, have not appreciated the value that many platform workers put on flexibility. Myself and my office took many meetings, with platform workers as well as with trade unions, in order to get as good an understanding as possible of the situation at hand,” she said.
Gómez is continuing the fight. He has moved into a new entrepreneurial phase developing a new delivery service app, one that he believes will be more humane than what the government, the trade unions, and app developers are currently offering.
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