New legal setback for Deliveroo. The meal delivery company and two of its former managers were sentenced on Tuesday, April 19, by the Paris court, for having employed thousands of delivery people under the status of independent workers, when they should have been employees. .
The platform, which had already been sentenced in 2020 for “concealed work”, was fined 375,000 euros, the maximum sentence required by the prosecution. She will also have to post a condemnation message for a month on her site. Two former managing directors were sentenced to a one-year suspended prison sentence, and a former operations director to a four-month suspended prison sentence and a fine of 10,000 euros. A Deliveroo spokesperson told franceinfo that the platform “considered” to appeal.
More than a hundred delivery men had filed a civil action for this first criminal trial of “uberization”. The prosecutor claimed that Deliveroo had set up “an instrumentalization and misuse of labor regulation”with the aim of organizing a “systemic concealment” delivery jobs.
“It’s a first battle won and a result we’ve been waiting for for years”greeted on franceinfo master Kevin Mention, lawyer for several dozen Deliveroo deliverers. “These delivery men now have a recognized victim status”he added, and “they will now be able to benefit, with a trial to come to the prudhommes, from paid leave, from retroactive wages up to the minimum wage.”
DMany elements revealed, according to the prosecutor, a relationship of subordination between the company and its deliverers, characteristics of an employee relationship: very precise rules on the way of delivering, choice of routes, checking that the deliverers got up in the morning … Other delivery companies have chosen to employ their deliverers under salaried contract, but Just Eat has decided to lay off a third of its deliverers hired on permanent contracts because of the economic difficulties.
Deliveroo was also ordered to pay 50,000 euros in damages to each of the five unions that had filed civil suits for “moral damage”: CGT, Union Solidaires, Sud commerces et services, Sud commerces et services Ile-de -France and Syndicate of light transport.