The Gig Economy Project newsletter has moved to Substack. This is not a cosmetic change. The move to Substack is part of a plan to enhance the newsletter, in three main ways.
First, GEP is going to start regular interviews with people at the cutting edge of thinking and action on platform work around the world. Substack provides us with the functionality to host these interviews ‘live’, so that subscribers to the newsletter can participate and ask questions directly. These will act as forums for regular engagement, where you can also suggest ideas for newsletter topics and guests. We hope that this can help build a more engaged community and allow for greater knowledge sharing.
Our first GEP Forum will be brought to you live from the European Trade Union Confederation’s annual platform work conference, ‘the Platforum’, taking place this year in Gdansk, Poland. The GEP forum will take place in the early evening of Friday 25 September - more details to follow.
Second, we also now have the functionality to produce different types of articles. As well as our regular newsletter, we will also be producing more technical briefings, starting with the specifics of the Platform Work Directive transpositions being introduced in different European countries. We will compare and contrast platform work laws across the 27 EU member-states to gain a better understanding of the substance of these new laws. As well as technical briefings, we will also sometimes produce longer theoretical notes exploring specific issues in more depth.
Finally, GEP has always been narrowly focused on Europe and we have been quite rigid about staying in our lane. But we think that now is the time to open up a bit more to the rest of the world. There is a global community of workers, activists, academics, trade-unionists and policy makers who are intensely interested in the gig economy, and we want GEP to better reflect that. While reporting on Europe will always remain at the heart of what we do, we will carry more interviews and generally engage more with key developments beyond the ‘Old World’.
Of course, none of this can be done for free. Moving to Substack is also an attempt to make GEP reader-funded. GEP has survived over the years through small grant funds, trade union institutional support and help from the Brave New Europe website, but it’s not possible for the project to have a long-term future through irregular bits of funding here and there. To make GEP sustainable, we are asking for 100 readers to step-up and donate €5 per month.
If we get 100 donors, not only will we be able to sustain GEP, we will also be able to ensure that the content does not go behind a pay-wall. We believe that if you are writing about precarious gig workers, you should be producing content that gig workers themselves can afford: which means making it freely available. But unless we get the funding from the subscribers who can afford it, we may have to look at creating pay-walls for some of the content, which is the norm these days but not one that we like. So if you donate not only are you keeping GEP alive so that you can access the content, you are also ensuring that the content can be accessed by everyone.
The purpose of GEP remains the same as it always was: to provide useful information on the gig economy from a pro-workers’ rights perspective. This is an attempt to adapt and upgrade the project: we want you to be part of that.
News:
THINK-TANK CALLS FOR TAXI ON ROBOTAXIS: Just as the first robotaxis have hit the streets of London, a UK think-tank has called for autonomous vehicles to be taxed to offset job losses and congestion. The Centre for British Progress believes hundreds of thousands of private hire drivers could lose their jobs over the next decade as autonomous vehicles become ubiquitous, calling for the government to step-in and tax the AVs before there is a significant constituency of voters who would have an interest in opposing the move. The study finds that half the mileage of Waymo’s robotaxis in California occur with no passenger inside and that driving around passenger-less may be cheaper for robotaxis than incurring parking charges, even though it will add to congestion. The GMB union told the Guardian that neither robo-taxis operators nor government have addressed their concerns about a lack of a plan to re-skill the UK’s private hire drivers. Meanwhile, the FT reports that, at least in the US, Uber has aligned with unions to slow the roll-out of robo-taxis to protect the company’s market position. Read more here.
COURIER IS EMPLOYEE AND MUST BE PAID FOR WAITING TIME, ITALIAN COURT FINDS: The Labour Court of Turin has found that a Glovo rider who was fired last year was an employee and should be paid for his whole time at work. The Judge found that the rider should be paid full compensation for unpaid wages starting from 1 October 2024 and re-instated to the company. Glovo, a Spanish food delivery platform, had accused the rider of accepting orders without making the deliveries and without requesting reassignments, but the judge found that the evidence from the data did not point in this direction, with the rider actually being reassigned orders immediately. The USB union said that the verdict was “a new step towards the recognition of the rights of platform workers”. The union went on to state that “politics must recognise what the judiciary is increasingly clearly stating”, Adding that it was “unacceptable” that workers always had to go to court to reclaim their rights. Read more here.
TRIAL BEGINS IN FRICHTI CRIMINAL BOGUS SELF-EMPLOYMENT CASE IN FRANCE: Corporate executives at former grocery delivery platform Frichti are being pursued in the Paris Criminal Court for hiring workers, including undocumented migrants, on a bogus self-employed basis. URSSAF, the French social security agency, is demanding €5.4 million in unpaid social security contributions for nearly 2,000 riders. More than 200 riders are also represented in the trial, with their lawyer Kevin Mention stating that: “For the first time in an ‘uberisation’ file, there will be talk of the use of undocumented people.” The top executives of Frichti, which went into liquidation in 2023, are being accused of “concealed work” and “the illegal employment of illegal foreigners” between 2015 to 2021. The bogus self-employed work conditions first came to light when the undocumented migrant workers, most of whom are from West Africa, organised a strike at Frichti in 2020 for employment contracts so that they could secure residency permits. Read more here.
GLOVO FOUNDERS CONSIDER BUYING-BACK THE PLATFORM: Oscar Pierre and Sacha Michaud, the founders of Spanish food delivery platform Glovo, are considering the possibility of re-purchasing the platform in response to Delivery Hero’s planned sale of the company. Pierre and Michaud, which still run Glovo, sold the platform to German multinational Delivery Hero at the end of 2021. In July, a deal was agreed for Uber to buy Delivery Hero, which operates over 60 brands around the world, pending regulatory approval. However, brands which are in direct competition with Uber Eats, including Glovo in Spain, were not part of the deal, and instead are supposed to be siphoned off to US private equity firm SSW Partners. Instead of this, Pierre and Michaud are considering a “management buy-out”, according to El Periodico. Asked by the newspaper about it, Michaud said that the buy-out was one of several options being considered. Glovo is the largest food delivery platform in the Spanish market and also operates in multiple other European countries. It has paid or is set to pay over €500 million in government fines in Spain for bogus self-employment, with another €300 million plus in fines still in the pipeline. The company eventually moved to an employee model in Spain last year. Read more here.
UBER SELLS ENTIRE STAKE IN SERVE ROBOTICS: Uber sold-off its entire stake in Serve Robotics in the second financial quarter, the company’s regulatory filings show. Serve Robotics specialises in sidewalk delivery robots and was originally part of Uber before it was spun-out of the Silicon Valley ridehail giant in 2020. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi had recently made comments in an earnings call that the company was pushing forward on drone delivery, but that development in sidewalk delivery was stalling somewhat. Sidewalk robots have faced particular problems with petty vandalism. Serve Robotics co-founder and CEO Ali Kashani said that the two companies had “differing views” about how to scale the sidewalk autonomous delivery fleet. Kashani said that while Uber had bee moving away from Serve, another delivery company had increased its usage of Serve robots by 50% in one financial quarter. Delivery robots have long been pursued by food delivery platforms but remain a negligible part of their commercial operations. Read more here.
From around the web:
Are gig jobs going to be automated, from freelancers on Fiverr to delivery couriers on Deliveroo? FT journalist Sarah O’Conner thinks they might be.
Pía Garavaglia reflects on the recent INDL-9 conference on digital labour in Geneva, where AI was high-up the agenda.
US gig economy scholars and researchers Veena Dubal and Katie Wells have written a stimulating analysis of “predetermined purchasing power”: how algorithmic pay systems make workers predictably poorer.
Drivers in Atlanta in the US say Waymo robo-taxis are driving down their pay, Frank Landymore finds.
New study on occupational health and safety of platform workers in India by Janpahal finds alarming levels of risk and virtually no protections.