For Christmas, all the 29 couriers, parties to the case against Deliveroo, wanted was a favorable ruling from the Brussels labor court. This is exactly what they obtained, on December 21, before this court which ruled on appeal, following a judgment of the labor court of December 8, 2021.
The magistrates fully agreed with the couriers’ arguments, thus following French, Italian and Spanish courts. The delivery men should have been considered as employees, stipulates the court, provided with an employment contract, and benefited from social protection. As for the company, it should have declared these workers as employees, paid social security contributions and respected the sector’s collective agreements. These workers must therefore be “requalified” as employees.
“This is an important jurisprudential precedent, says Fabrizio Antioco, magistrate and spokesperson for the Brussels prosecutor’s office, the public prosecutor’s office for social criminal law cases. Beyond the situation of the people who took part in the proceedings, an entire system was dissected, analyzed and questioned. It is a decision of principle from which we will have to learn all the lessons in the future. » It’s a decision that matters to the audience. It was the public prosecutor’s office which, in October 2017, initiated a criminal investigation and entrusted several social inspectorates with the task of conducting the investigation, during which 115 couriers were interviewed.
An “exciting” stop
The labor court was seized by the prosecutor in 2019, before other parties, and not the least important, joined the cause: 29 couriers, the Belgian Transport Union and two unions, the General Federation of work of Belgium and the Confederation of Christian Trade Unions (CSC). For Martin Willems, national manager, within the CSC, of United freelancers, in defense of self-employed workers, this judgment is “exciting, because the court [leur] proves right across the board, even if [ils] the welcome[ent] with caution, because this is not the end of the matter”. Deliveroo threatened to appeal to the Court of Cassation.
The company is affected at the heart of its model. Because the judgment confirms that meal deliveries through the Deliveroo platform are not part of the “collaborative economy regime”. This regime, integrated into Belgian law in 2016, allows paid services to be provided from individual to individual, for activities “unprofessional”, while being exempt from social security contributions and paying only 10.7% tax for any income below a ceiling of 7,170 euros. This extraordinary regime, which escapes classification in “employee” or in ” independent “, and therefore does not offer social protection, covers more than 85% of Deliveroo couriers. For the court, it is very clear: the working relations between a courier and the platform correspond to a professional activity and do not adhere to this exceptional regime.
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