Five days of hearings before the Paris Criminal Court have dispelled the fog which, for seven years, has surrounded the activity of the Deliveroo platform and the links it maintains with delivery people.
For the first time, a criminal court is, in fact, called upon to determine whether, yes or no, the organization set up by the company over a period running from 2015 to 2017 constituted a willful violation of labor law, by the use of thousands of couriers officially independent but, in reality, subordinate to the platform. Until then, there are, in fact, only industrial tribunal, civil decisions, targeting specific cases.
Wednesday, March 16 is a “knowingly exploiting the status of self-employed entrepreneur” and an “systemic concealment” denounced by prosecutor Céline Ducournau, requesting that Deliveroo France be sentenced to the maximum of the penalty incurred, a fine of 375,000 euros, together with an additional obligation to publish the decision in the Official newspaper and on the home page of the Deliveroo site, as well as the confiscation of the 3 million euros, already seized during the investigation. She asked for suspended sentences of twelve months’ imprisonment and a fine of 30,000 euros against the two former directors of the company on the date of the prevention, Adrien Falcon and Hugues Decosse, and a four-month suspended sentence against the ex-director of operations, Elie de Moustier.
Addressing the court, the prosecutor observed: “Your role is not to decide whether the delivery people were or are today satisfied with their status. If they feel free or if they would have preferred another status. Opinions on this issue differ. Your role is to determine whether the relationship that Deliveroo had with its deliverers establishes a permanent relationship of subordination”, constituting the offense of “concealed work”.
At the end of a demonstration as implacable as it is clear, the representative of the prosecution called on the judges to answer in the affirmative, dismissing the “legal fiction” maintained by the company Deliveroo since its arrival in France in 2015, two years after its birth in the United Kingdom.
A “permanent relationship of subordination”
That “fiction” rests on two pillars, behind which is entrenched the defense of the defendants. The first is the assertion that Deliveroo is only a platform for connecting customers, restaurateurs and delivery people. “Deliveroo’s business fully integrates a delivery company, objected the prosecutor. The deliverers do not perform a service through of the platform but with the platform. They are an integral part of Deliveroo. » So many reasons which, according to the prosecutor, mean that the company must indeed be considered as a “delivery platform. »
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