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French court fines Deliveroo for ‘undeclared labour’

A Paris court has fined British meal delivery group Deliveroo after ruling it was guilty of "undeclared labour" for using freelance riders who should have been classified as employees, depriving the state of millions of euros in payroll taxes.

Published: 20 April 2022 08:51 CEST
A Deliveroo food delivery driver on a scooter
A liveried Deliveroo food delivery driver on a scooter in Toulouse. (Photo: Georges Gobet / AFP)

It was the latest move by European courts to recognise the rights of “gig economy” workers used by start-ups and other firms, which often claim they are simply go-betweens for clients and independent contractors.

The court ordered the maximum fine of €375,000 sought by prosecutors and also handed suspended one-year prison sentences and €30,000 fines to two former French executives at the company.

A third executive got a suspended four-month sentence and a €10,000 fine for complicity in the system, and Deliveroo was also ordered to pay €50,000 each in damages to five labour unions who joined the case as plaintiffs.

State prosecutor Celine Ducournau had sought in vain to question Deliveroo’s American founder and CEO Will Shu over a “fraud” that gave “all the benefits to the employer… without any of the inconveniences.”

“The question is not to determine if the status of independent contractor is appropriate, but to acknowledge that in this instance, Deliveroo used a fake legal arrangement that did not correspond to the reality of how the delivery riders work,” the presiding judge said in her ruling.

A Deliveroo spokesman said the company “categorically contested” the decision and said it was considering an appeal.

“Our business model offers our deliverers the flexibility they need and which they tell us they appreciate,” he said.

Legal grey area
More than 100 Deliveroo riders were plaintiffs in the case prosecutors opened in 2015 but which got fresh impetus in 2020, when France’s URSSAF agency in charge of employer social security collections demanded millions of euros in back payments.

Several riders told the court they had sought jobs that offered scheduling freedom only to find intense pressure to work at peak meal times, strict oversight of their routes and days off, and penalties if orders weren’t delivered fast enough.

Deliveroo France had already been found guilty of undeclared labour in a civil case in February 2000, when a court sided with a rider seeking to be recognised as an employee and not a contractor.

URSSAF is seeking to recover some €9.7 million from Deliveroo, and a court had already ordered in 2020 the seizure of €3 million in Deliveroo’s account while the case was ongoing.

The ruling comes as the European Union is taking aim at the business model of gig economy companies like Deliveroo and the ride-sharing service Uber, with plans that could force them to reclassify their workers as fully-fledged employees.

The companies insist the workers are self-employed, and courts across Europe have issued contradictory decisions – sometimes forcing companies to provide workers with standard contracts, at other times upholding their status as independent contractors.

In December, Deliveroo won a case in Belgium where a court found that riders did not have to be requalified as employees, with the requisite social security and tax obligations.

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BUSINESS

French barber still trimming at 90

French barber Roger Amilhastre could have hung up his clippers decades ago but he said his passion for the business gives him a reason to get up in the morning.

Published: 26 April 2024 15:01 CEST
French barber still trimming at 90

“I love this job, it’s in my bones,” the 90 year old said, leaning on one of his cast-iron barber’s chairs from the 1940s.

“And despite my age, my hands still don’t shake.”

Even with arthritis, he is on his feet from Tuesday to Saturday, tending to his customers’ hair and beards in his shop in the small southern town of Saint-Girons, in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

“I would have liked to retire at 60, but my wife was sick and I needed to pay for the care home,” he said, which cost more than €2,000 a month.

Even after his wife died in January, he kept going to work to stave off sad thoughts.

“I’m not grumpy getting up [to go to work],” he said.

France’s national hairdressers’ union believes Amilhastre may be the country’s oldest active barber.

“We have a few who continue late in life, but 90 years old is exceptional,” union president Christophe Dore told AFP.

“I’m not sure if he is France’s oldest barber, but if not, he can’t be far off.”

According to national statistics institute INSEE, a little more than half a million people over 65 still work in France.

In the southern region of Occitanie, where Amilhastre lives, only 1.65 percent of people older than 70 years old still work, including 190 79-year-olds. But statistics do not go beyond that age.

Many of Amilhastre’s customers call him Achille, after his father who founded the barber’s shop in 1932, giving it his name and then teaching his son the profession.

The shop witnessed the German occupation of France during World War II.

“During the war, German police came to find my father to groom a captain who had broken his leg,” Amilhastre said.

German troops had taken over a large stately home in town called Beauregard.

“We were scared because they used to say that anyone who went up to Beauregard never came back,” he said. “Luckily, he did.”

He said he remembered a “tough period” for businesses when he first picked up the scissors in 1947.

But then the town rebounded, he said, with its men following a flurry of new hair trends from greased quiffs in the 1950s, to 1970s bowl cuts.

The barber’s shop survived an economic downturn as local paper mills closed in the 1980s sparking mass layoffs, and supermarkets pushed small shops out of business.

“People started looking for work further afield, so we had to adapt and stay open later in the evening,” Amilhastre said.

That same decade, the Aids epidemic worried customers, who understood little about the illness at the time.

“People were scared,” Amilhastre said. “They no longer asked to be shaved and when we did, we were petrified there’d be a cut, that someone would bleed and the virus would be passed on to the next customer.” 

Jean-Louis Surre, 67, runs the nearby cafe where Amilhastre once taught him to play billiards as a young boy.

Behind his bar, Surre said he remembered his mother taking him across the road to see Amilhastre for a haircut every month as a child.

“He’d pump up the chair to reach the mirror, use his clippers and then at the end perfume you with some cologne – you know, squeezing those little pumps,” he said.

He is one of several older customers to regularly drop by Achille’s – even just to read the newspaper or have a chat.

Inside the barber’s, Jean Laffitte, a balding 84-year-old, said he no longer really needed a haircut. “With what little is left up there, these days I come out of friendship,” he said.

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