Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

First collective agreement for platform workers in Spain

Luz Rodríguez 13th January 2022

The agreement follows a critical Supreme Court judgment and the ‘riders’ law’ deriving from social dialogue.

collective agreement,platform workers,Spain,Just Eat
Stronger together—Just Eat workers in Madrid (alvarobueno/shutterstock.com)

A survey in 2018 by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre found that Spain led the European Union in the volume of work conducted via platforms, with 18 per cent of the working-age population involved. It is therefore no surprise that Spain is also leading the way—in court decisions and labour legislation—on how platform work is treated.

After several reports by the labour inspectorate and contradictory judgments by the courts, in September 2020 the Supreme Court finally ruled that platform workers were employees and not self-employed workers—and that, therefore, the labour and social-security rights applying to all other workers had to apply to them as well.

The Supreme Court reasoned that platform workers performed their jobs ‘strictly subject’ to the instructions of the platform. They lacked the ‘essential infrastructure needed to perform the duties of their activity’—not their mobile phone or bicycle but the computer programme developed by the platform. Nor did they enjoy real autonomy in determining schedules, because if a worker was not connected for a certain number of hours or did not take a certain number of orders they were penalised. In short, platform workers were subject to the management power of the platforms and were therefore employees, not self-employed.

Ley rider

After that ruling, a process of social dialogue began, which led to the approval of Law 12/2021, better known as Ley rider (the riders’ law). This presumes an employment contract between the worker and the platform, because the former is in effect subject to decisions stemming from the latter’s algorithm. The law is not so much a pioneer in content—the presumption of an employment contract had already been established in California—but in how it came about, via an agreement between the most representative trade union and employer organisations in the country.


Our job is keeping you informed!


Subscribe to our free newsletter and stay up to date with the latest Social Europe content. We will never send you spam and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Sign up here

The path taken by Spain is being followed by the EU: in the European Commission proposal for a directive published last month, the presumption of an employment contract between worker and platform is also the chosen formula. And now this whole journey appears to be culminating in the signing of a first collective agreement, between the delivery platform Just Eat and the CCOO and UGT trade union confederations.

This is not the first agreement for platform workers signed in Europe: others have preceded it in Denmark and Italy. But it represents the first step in normalising platform work within the Spanish model of industrial relations and its labour market. More than 2,000 people whom Spaniards see on the streets with a food box on their back delivering meals on their bikes will, like thousands of other workers in the country, be covered by a collective agreement regulating their wages, working time and conditions.

Income insecurity

Their annual wage is set in the agreement at €15,232, or €1,270 per month, to which supplements will have to be added for working at night or on holidays or for mileage if a worker uses their own vehicle. This comes in the wake of studies by the International Labour Organization showing that the primary concern among platform workers is income insecurity—income from the job tending to be below the minimum wage in many countries.

Also according to the new agreement, platform workers will have a maximum working time of nine hours per day. Two uninterrupted days of rest a week must be respected, including one Sunday per quarter, in addition to a guaranteed 30 days holiday per year. Currently their working time around the world usually extends beyond the standard averages of the country concerned, not infrequently exceeding 12 hours a day.

The mobile phone used by a worker to connect to the application must be provided by the platform, as well as all other work tools (vehicle and food box). If a vehicle is the worker’s own, then the platform must pay corresponding compensation. The costs of the tools are thus to be assumed by the platform, not the worker as in most countries.

Open-ended contracts

The agreement in Spain further defines the open-ended contract as the prototype, with a fixed employment quota of 80 per cent—so temporary workers will represent no more than 20 per cent. Part-time contracting will also be possible but with a minimum of 12 hours on weekends and a minimum of 16 hours for the full week. Mini part-time contracts of meagre duration are thus not permitted.

Finally, the platform undertakes to respect the right to data protection and to inform workers’ representatives about the algorithm it uses to manage their work. A joint committee will be created, the ‘algorithm committee’, complying with the duties of transparency and human judgement in algorithmic decision-making, which have become the banner of protest by platform workers throughout the world.

It hasn’t been an easy road to reach this point, and it doesn’t promise to get any easier. But signing this agreement represents a milestone which shouldn’t go unnoticed. Those riders visible on the streets of Spain will now be workers who have rights.


We need your support


Social Europe is an independent publisher and we believe in freely available content. For this model to be sustainable, however, we depend on the solidarity of our readers. Become a Social Europe member for less than 5 Euro per month and help us produce more articles, podcasts and videos. Thank you very much for your support!

Become a Social Europe Member

Luz Rodríguez
Luz Rodríguez

Luz Rodríguez is professor of labour law at the University of Castilla-La Mancha. Her latest books are Plataformas Digitales y Mercado de Trabajo (2019) and Tecnología y Trabajo: el impacto de la revolución digital en los derechos laborales y la protección social (2021).

You are here: Home / Economy / First collective agreement for platform workers in Spain

Most Popular Posts

Visentini,ITUC,Qatar,Fight Impunity,50,000 Visentini, ‘Fight Impunity’, the ITUC and QatarFrank Hoffer
Russian soldiers' mothers,war,Ukraine The Ukraine war and Russian soldiers’ mothersJennifer Mathers and Natasha Danilova
IGU,documents,International Gas Union,lobby,lobbying,sustainable finance taxonomy,green gas,EU,COP ‘Gaslighting’ Europe on fossil fuelsFaye Holder
Schengen,Fortress Europe,Romania,Bulgaria Romania and Bulgaria stuck in EU’s second tierMagdalena Ulceluse
income inequality,inequality,Gini,1 per cent,elephant chart,elephant Global income inequality: time to revise the elephantBranko Milanovic

Most Recent Posts

Pakistan,flooding,floods Flooded Pakistan, symbol of climate injusticeZareen Zahid Qureshi
reality check,EU foreign policy,Russia Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: a reality check for the EUHeidi Mauer, Richard Whitman and Nicholas Wright
permanent EU investment fund,Recovery and Resilience Facility,public investment,RRF Towards a permanent EU investment fundPhilipp Heimberger and Andreas Lichtenberger
sustainability,SDGs,Finland Embedding sustainability in a government programmeJohanna Juselius
social dialogue,social partners Social dialogue must be at the heart of Europe’s futureClaes-Mikael Ståhl

Other Social Europe Publications

front cover scaled Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship
Women Corona e1631700896969 500 Women and the coronavirus crisis
sere12 1 RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?

ETUI advertisement

The EU recovery strategy: a blueprint for a more Social Europe or a house of cards?

This new ETUI paper explores the European Union recovery strategy, with a focus on its potentially transformative aspects vis-à-vis European integration and its implications for the social dimension of the EU’s socio-economic governance. In particular, it reflects on whether the agreed measures provide sufficient safeguards against the spectre of austerity and whether these constitute steps away from treating social and labour policies as mere ‘variables’ of economic growth.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Eurofound advertisement

Eurofound webinar: Making telework work for everyone

Since 2020 more European workers and managers have enjoyed greater flexibility and autonomy in work and are reporting their preference for hybrid working. Also driven by technological developments and structural changes in employment, organisations are now integrating telework more permanently into their workplace.

To reflect on these shifts, on 6 December Eurofound researchers Oscar Vargas and John Hurley explored the challenges and opportunities of the surge in telework, as well as the overall growth of telework and teleworkable jobs in the EU and what this means for workers, managers, companies and policymakers.


WATCH THE WEBINAR HERE

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

The winter issue of the Progressive Post magazine from FEPS is out!

The sequence of recent catastrophes has thrust new words into our vocabulary—'polycrisis', for example, even 'permacrisis'. These challenges have multiple origins, reinforce each other and cannot be tackled individually. But could they also be opportunities for the EU?

This issue offers compelling analyses on the European health union, multilateralism and international co-operation, the state of the union, political alternatives to the narrative imposed by the right and much more!


DOWNLOAD HERE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


DOWNLOAD HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube