insiderblmSpain’s on-demand delivery platform Glovo has announced what it’s calling “The Couriers Pledge” — an initiative which commits its business to setting a new — “fairer” — social rights standard for its gigging couriers.
The self-defined “standard” covers earnings, safety, communication and support for development opportunities.
Glovo says the commitments will (eventually) apply to couriers working across its entire market footprint — whatever their exact employment status.
The delivery platform and dark store operator currently has 74,000 couriers across its market footprint (mostly in Europe and Africa) — but it says it expects to have 240,000 couriers active on the platform by 2023.
So the Pledge looks set to touch a lot of platform workers.
That said, the slated improvements to Glovers’ (as it calls gig workers’) working conditions will not arrive overnight.
Instead, changes to bring its various regional operations in line with the Pledge will be rolled out gradually, over the next ~24 months — to take account of local differences in regulations and operational conditions, per co-founder Sacha Michaud.
Nor will the application of the Pledge be precisely uniform; each market will have specifics, reflecting local differences in ops or indeed laws. (He notes, for example, that in some markets it works with third party contractors who supply couriers — so it can only ask those other companies to make sure their workers are covered.)
The first of markets where the Pledge will be applied happen to sit at the edges of Europe: Georgia and Morocco.
Beyond that, Glovo says it will be figuring out the rollout map as it goes along — so it’s not clear when its home market of Spain might be covered.
But it says its goal is to have its whole fleet of couriers covered by the end of 2023, and just under half (40%) by the end of Q2 2022.
Fairwork is involved, but is it fair work?
Glovo writes that it “collaborated” with Fairwork — an academic research project which benchmarks gig platforms against a set of fairness principles — to help it come up with the contents of the Pledge, which is comprised of four components (see below), aka “pillars” as Glovo calls them.
However Fairwork told TechCrunch it does not endorse Glovo’s Pledge as “fully instituting fairness for Glovo workers” — dubbing it only a “first step towards improving conditions”.
So the preliminary external assessment is that Glovo could still do a lot better.
Fairwork will be carrying out regular (possibly quarterly or biannual) audits to assess whether Glovo is living up to the commitments as it rolls the Pledge out across its markets.
Glovo has said these reports will be made public.
It also specifies that Fairwork is not being paid by it for this oversight work — in order to preserve its independence.
Going public about wanting to improve and being transparent about whether it actually has is a key part of the strategy here, per Michaud.
“We identified that this is the right thing to do and we’re going to commit openly to doing that,” he tells TechCrunch. “We need a window to execute on that in the different regions for the complexity of our business from an operations perspective and regulatory and we’ll find a way to make it happen in every single country — and the ones we launch in the future as well.”
Glovo co-founder Sacha Michaud speaking at TC Disrupt (Image credit: TechCrunch)
While Michaud is quick to talk up what he argues are the “good things” gig work has done for the world of work — reeling off familiar talking points like “easy access to income with very low barriers” for people who “maybe might have difficulty to find other types of work or income”; and of course the familiar gig platform claim of “flexibility”; or work that he euphemistically couches as having a “dynamic nature”; and maybe suits people who don’t do well with more traditional, rules-based employment — he accepts that a course correction is needed.
That said, there is no admission that the model itself is intentionally exploitative.
Rather he suggests gig platforms historically miscalculated — believing they were catering to a specific niche of people who just needed a “few” extra hours’ work to supplement their income. But now the reality is a “large number” of Glovo’s couriers depend on the platform as their primary — or even sole — source of income, he says.
Hence: “We have a certain responsibility as a company to give them more guarantees and more coverage so they can continue working on a certain baseline,” as he hedges its goal for the Pledge.
Michaud also rejects the idea that increased competition in the on-demand delivery space — with dark store/’q-commerce’ startups busy bubbling up all over Europe, as well as (new) on-demand delivery businesses zeroing in on dedicated niches (like pharmaceuticals or high end/lux brands) — is a (retention) motivation for Glovo offering couriers better conditions.
“I think regulatory wise it’s going to move in this direction — that we’re doing,” he hazards instead, adding: “We see no point in waiting.”
Why, then, aren’t these conditions Glovo’s standard already? “Operationally wise it’s complex,” is his response on that.
“The dynamics in every market is very different and regulation is very different — sometimes it’s not that easy,” he also argues. “It’s not a question of choosing which is the best model, generally and pretty much adamantly our couriers have said, very large percentage wise, that they want flexibility at the same time as having decent earnings and autonomy. And sometimes, depending on the regulation, it’s quite complex to manage both those things.
“So that’s why the commitment — and the two year window [to roll it out].”
Mind the fairness gaps
Michaud describes the goal for the Pledge as being to plug what he calls “gaps” in the fairness of couriers’ working conditions.
Glovo’s PR announcement also talks about creating “equality of access to social rights and benefits for couriers, independent of the way couriers work with the platform”.
“There’s some gaps still,” says Michaud in an interview with TechCrunch. “As a company — and other platforms as well — I think we need to fill those gaps.
“Our commitment to the pledge is to try and cover the gaps and improve them, and make a commitment that by a certain date — the end of 2023 — that any courier on our platform will have certain minimum guarantees or social rights.”
Below are the four components Glovo lists in the ‘Couriers Pledge’ — and how it (top-line) defines them:
FAIR EARNINGS
“Fair earnings per hour should be secured and regular collaboration has to be rewarded.”
360o SAFETY
“All couriers must have fully fledged insurances covering any unforeseen situation. Safety on the road has to be a top priority.”
PROACTIVE MANAGEMENT
“We will hear and act upon couriers’ needs and issues in a transparent manner following a two-way communication.”
CARING FOR COURIERS
“Working as a rider should be a temporary thing. Fostering learning opportunities and keeping an open dialogue is a key goal.”
There’s a little more detail in the fuller document Glovo also shared — where, for example, “proactive management” boils down to “Demostrable Service Level Agreements (SLAs)” being implemented “to guarantee effective communications” between courier and platform staff, and it offers the commitment that: “Any difficult concept or the algorithm logic needs to be explained in a simple and understandable way, so they know how the Glovo platform works.”
It also pledges an “easy appealing process” if a courier is disabled from the app.
But there is zero talk of collective bargaining — something workers in the EU are entitled to as a right.
Michaud bills the initiative as “open” — hence why, presumably, Glovo isn’t branding it ‘The Glovo Couriers Pledge’ — as he’s “hopeful” other delivery platforms will sign up.
Although he adds that it hasn’t yet approached any competitors about doing so.
On this, it’s worth noting that Uber already came out with its own suggestion for “a new standard for platform work” (as it put it) for Europe back in February — when it published a whitepaper lobbying the EU to adopt California-style laws that don’t disrupt its business model (i.e. by requiring it to pay full employment benefits).
Whether Glovo’s Pledge has more substance than Uber’s whitepaper remains to be seen — but engaging Fairwork as an auditor is certainly an interesting and laudable step. After all, the group wasted no time blasting Uber’s whitepaper as “corporate lobbying masquerading as progressiveism”.
Fairwork also accused Uber of trying to “legitimize a lower level of protection for platform workers than most European workers benefit from” — arguing there’s plenty of scope for it to improve conditions for workers within existing laws and further excoriating it for claiming improved conditions are dependent on regulatory change.
So Glovo will need to tread carefully to avoid a similar accusation that it’s delaying rolling out better working conditions for portions of its gig workers as a cynical ratchet to try to drive local policy change to align with its business model.
The wider context here is of course that gig platforms have — even from the get-go — faced accusations that they are inherently exploitative of labor and seek to erode workers rights.
Critics accusing them of applying a bogus classification of ‘self-employment’ that exploits delivery couriers by extracting the labor of an army of precarious but essential (to the business’ function) labor force without providing the benefits and rights of employment.
Platforms typically counter such accusations by arguing that couriers want gigging ‘flexibility’ rather than traditional employment — and further claiming ‘outdated’ employment laws don’t allow them to provide benefits without applying the sort of rigid conditions their workers don’t want.
They have also often lost litigation challenging their employment classifications.
In the UK, for example, Uber lost a long running employment litigation earlier this year, after the Supreme Court ruled that a group of drivers were workers, not self-employed contractors as Uber had tried to argue (for literally years).
While, in Spain — one of the markets where Glovo operates — the country’s top court rejected its classification of delivery couriers as ‘autónomos‘ last year. And lawmakers there have since passed a labor reform specifically targeted at recognizing platform delivery couriers as employees. (Portugal is also reported to be eyeing a similar law.)
Glovo did not responded to the change in Spanish law by instantly employing the circa 10,000 couriers active on its platform in the country. It has said it will be hiring around 1,800 couriers (but Michaud admits it hasn’t yet hit that figure).
It has also chosen to make changes to how it operates the platform to try to justify keeping a majority of its local Glovers as ‘freelance’ couriers. (Some of whom may be employed by third party agencies — at which point they are essentially being subcontracted to do gig jobs on its platform but which it argues Spain’s labor reform allows.)
The net result is that even with a labor law in place that says delivery couriers working on platforms like Glovo are employees, plenty of platform workers in the country are (still) not employed and thereby face a variety of working conditions.
This in turn means Glovo’s decision not to prioritize rolling out the Pledge to couriers in its home market looks, well, interesting.
Michaud claims Spain’s regulations make applying the commitments there more “complex” — since he argues that most of its local couriers don’t want to be employed; and that local employment law on freelancers/self-employed ties its hands on giving additional benefits — “because it would imply a labor relationship”.
“Again, I insist, most of these workers don’t want [employment] — so you’re excluding them,” is his familiar line of argument.
This suggests Glovo will be directing its efforts in Spain (at least initially), not on improving working conditions for the majority of couriers but pushing for amendments to the labor reform to allow it to (eventually) raise courier benefits (somewhat) — without having to reclassify them as full-fat employees as the law intends, and which would instantly give them… well… far better working conditions.
So it is, to put it politely, rather tautological.
Nonetheless, Michaud summarizes its domestic plan as: “Working with the social agents and finding common ground to get those workers that stay autonomous… the benefits and the guarantees that they need.”
He also points to how Glovo is now operating in Italy — calling it “a good guideline” of what it’s hoping to achieve elsewhere via the Pledge — flagging a recent gig economy regulation he says covered a lot of the things that are already in the commitments.
“For example we give guaranteed income per hour there — but they’re freelancers. We begin paying their social security directly — so they’re covered when they’re ill. It includes safety, training and obviously material. And obviously it includes further education — so all the pieces that sometimes are missing. So that’s a fairly good reference.
“There we are giving guaranteed income, earnings per hour… It maintains the flexibility, they’re autonomous… they have collective voice, they’re represented by trades unions.”
Still, there are further steps Glovo believes it can make for couriers there too, per Michaud, who adds: “Italy will hopefully be under the Pledge early next year.”
