Their names are Arthur, Ilan, Ludovic, Kevin, Simon, Edouard, are in their thirties, express themselves with ease and worked for Deliveroo between 2015 and 2018. They were students, entertainment workers, waiting for a job, and for the most part, were living their first professional experience. From the platform, they keep a bitter memory, which they came to tell, Wednesday, March 9, before the Paris Criminal Court. All are civil parties, alongside more than two hundred other couriers, represented by Mr.and Kevin Mention, who has been defending them since 2016, and the SUD and CGT unions.
Arthur Hay worked for Deliveroo in Bordeaux for a year, from 2016 to 2017, and was among the first to take action against the platform. “We started meeting every week in a bike shop, he said. There were about ten of us, we were discovering the world of work, in fact. To denounce our employment contracts, we launched a snail operation, that is to say that we simply respected the highway code during our deliveries…”
Minors or undocumented
For him, as for Edouard Bernasse and Ludovic Boison, the experience was the genesis of a militant commitment. Arthur is still a courier but in a cooperative society and he has become a CGT union representative. Ludovic also remained courier “with a company that pays its employees” and also militates with the CGT. Edouard, collaborator of a communist senator, is secretary general of the Collective of autonomous deliverers of Paris (CLAP). Testimonies which represent only a minority of the thousands of couriers who cycle or scooter through large cities, their insulated bags on their backs, and who offered Deliveroo’s lawyer, Mand Antonin Levy, the opportunity to denounce “the tunes of a political forum” taken by the trial. Above all, they tell of a bygone era, that of the beginnings of Deliveroo, which no longer corresponds to what we observe today.
One of the witnesses is the first to agree: “Before, we lent our account to a friend. Today, delivery people spin their number to a minor or an undocumented person. » Those, whom we see circulating on self-service bicycles, or who share the subscription to the electric bicycle of a third party, in exchange for the payment of a commission, were not represented at the Deliveroo trial. They constitute the new delivery infantry, which allows the platforms to claim rightly to give work to a population rejected everywhere else. But who, as observed by M.and Eric Gaftarnik, lawyer for the National Union of Light Transport (SNTL) – that of the “last mile logistics” – also explains the benevolence of the public authorities with regard to these platforms which make it possible to “to lower the unemployment figures, to increase the number of business creations, to calm the suburbs and to buy social peace, but which, in the long term, destroy salaried employment”.