The riders directive, as the future community standard that will regulate the rights of workers on digital platforms such as Glovo, Deliveroo or Uber Eats is informally known, has entered the final phase of European negotiations, leaving part of its ambitions along the way initials.
The labor ministers of the Twenty-seven agreed on Monday their negotiating position in view of the talks with the European Parliament, contacts from which the final legal text will emerge, probably during the second half of the year, under the Spanish presidency of the Union. Spain and seven other countries (Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Romania, Malta and Slovenia) however distanced themselves from the agreement and abstained in the final vote, considering that the text agreed at the request of the Swedish presidency of the EU did not is ambitious enough.
The Twenty-seven claim, for example, that, in order to determine whether employees of digital platforms are truly employed and not self-employed, at least three of the seven defined criteria must be met, instead of two out of five, as proposed in the original text of the European Comission. Elements that will be considered in reaching a conclusion include whether companies set caps on the amount of money workers can earn, limit their ability to refuse work, decide on their appearance or monitor their work electronically.
Another aspect that Spain and the rest of the countries that abstained in the vote on Monday also criticize is that the agreement renounces, for example, recognizing by law a minimum level of protection that has already been recognized by national courts. It is necessary to “establish the presumption of employment without restrictions or exceptions, since this would only perpetuate the current imbalance between digital platforms and the people who work on them and even between intermediaries, which has led to the existence of thousands of false self-employed workers in Europe and precarious working conditions”, they lament in a joint statement.
The second vice president and Minister of Labor, Yolanda DÃaz, considered yesterday that the compromise text agreed by the Swedish presidency is “out of common sense” and hoped that the negotiations with the European Parliament would allow “improving” the text. For Spain, which already has its own more ambitious rider law, “it is essential to make work, the digital economy, compatible with human rights and labor rights,” DÃaz stressed.
