Government, trade unions and employers agree to turn delivery riders into employees

BarcelonaThe last meeting before the final proposal to regulate the work of delivery riders has ended without a formal agreement, but with the approval of all parties involved to turn them into salaried employees. "There is enough consensus to acknowledge the fact that they are employees," say sources from the Ministry of Labour. "The novelty is that the business organisations are agreeing to the fact that they are employees", the unions agree. This would seem to indicate that delivery riders will become salaried workers by law.

At least this is what the Secretary of State for Employment and Social Economy, Joaquín Pérez Rey, said a few days ago, stating that the legislative initiative could not depend on reaching an agreement. The obsession of this department is, in fact, to respond to court rulings against food delivery companies, which have generally found that delivery riders are not self-employed but company employees.

The next step to achieve this is to draw up a document that synthesises the proposals of all parties, which will then be sent to unions and employers. "Each of the partners will have to decide whether to enter or not," explains a spokesman for CCOO. What there will not be, he adds, is more negotiations

At this meeting it has also been confirmed that the law will only focus on food delivery workers. When negotiations started, Yolanda Diaz, Minister of Labour, hoped the law would also include digital platform workers in other sectors. The unions also aspired to create a registry of platforms and algorithms. All this has been left out of the discussions, partly due to the urgency of regulating food delivery platforms and partly due to opposition from businesses to more extensive measures.