This is a new legal setback for a company basing its model on self-entrepreneurship. Tuesday, December 19, the Paris industrial tribunal reclassified as an employment contract the missions carried out by a self-employed person, at the time without papers, on behalf of the Monoprix brand and through the platform -StaffMe form. The two companies were declared joint employers of this individual and will have to pay him compensation, in particular for concealed work and abusive breach of contract.
This story is that of Alain (the first name has been changed), a worker who immigrated to France in 2018. He registered, at the age of 22, on the StaffMe application, which offered him his first mission in a Monoprix store on 15e district of Paris, March 16, 2020, the day before national confinement. “I was undocumented [ce n’est plus le cas aujourd’hui]. I had no choice to accept or refusehe says. I did some shelving. Everything went well, so I then went to the cashier, or order picker in another Monoprix. » For two months, he was surrounded by a few store employees, but above all others “staffers” self-employed, called in to compensate for a high rate of absenteeism. The weeks are busy, up to seventy hours of work per week.
On May 15, at the end of confinement, he was suddenly disconnected from the platform, like other self-employed people, because “We were told that our papers did not work for working in France. We were used, then we got thrown away.”, he summarizes. When he worked at Monoprix, his identity document was simply indicated “under validation” on the app.
The company StaffMe, which connects companies and young self-employed people looking for small jobs, claims 12,000 clients and 800,000 young people registered since its launch in 2016. This is the second requalification decided against the platform , after that of a glacier, obtained in January. “It was the same deciding judge who made the decision. It is therefore a decision more against the platform than against Monoprix”reacts Philippe Bouchez El Ghozi, lawyer for the brand.
Working time and lack of health protection
For Kevin Mention, Alain’s lawyer, it was a matter of demonstrating that his client was treated in the same way as an employee, under the subordination of store management, and that he did not have the leisure to choose their working hours and conditions. “We got everything we wanted, including damages for non-compliance with working time rules”specifies the lawyer, who also argued the absence of health protections at the start of confinement.
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