Goodbye, Deliveroo, and good riddance
The news that British food delivery company Deliveroo is closing its operations in Spain has been reported in some media as response to legislative overzealousness, an attempt to protect workers that, in the end, ends up harming the very people it sought to protect.
The reality could not be more different: firstly, Deliveroo never managed to position itself as a leader in Spain in an industry based, until the arrival of what is known as the Rider Law, on the systematic exploitation of its workforce. After the law was introduced, Deliveroo remain exactly what it was before: a failed competitor that, in addition, was going to have to regularize its 3,871 men and women who delivered food to homes, something that the British parent company was not willing to accept so as to maintain its operations in a market it never gained traction.
Why is it exploitative for a company to employ people who choose to work for it? Because, while the theory is nice, the practice wasn’t. People who in theory could work for whomever they saw fit every day, in practice ended up systematically spending long days on a bicycle or a motorcycle in the middle of city traffic, always working for the same company, but without any of the rights labor unions had fought for over many years. The idea that in the middle of the 21st century, somebody was forced to carry out his or her…
