Friday, March 29

Riders, taxi drivers and freelancers unite to denounce Glovo before Competition: “They are a cartel”


Elite Taxi, Riders X Rights and the Union of Associations of Autonomous Workers and Entrepreneurs (UATAE) have come together to file a complaint against Glovo before the National Commission of Markets and Competition (CNMC) for unfair competition. To carry it out, these three groups have formed the Observatory of Work, Algorithm and Society.

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“We are opening with a complaint that, for the first time, is not for labor issues, but for unfair competition. They have set up a cartel against which it is impossible to compete”, assures Núria Sotto, a member of Riders X Rights. The complaint has been filed considering that Glovo works with freelancers, as the company assures. In this case, the company would be carrying out “an illegitimate agreement between competitors. The self-employed should be free to set prices and this is not happening. It is Glovo who sets the compensation”, explained Montserrat Ribot, lawyer for the Observatory. This “illicit” agreement between competitors would entail a violation of the first article of the Law for the Defense of Competition.

Now, in the event that Glovo were in breach of the Rider Law and the freelancers with whom it works were, in reality, false self-employed workers, in addition to committing an infraction in the field of labor rights, it would also be in breach of article 3 of the Competition Law. “We would be facing a relationship with elements of dependency that would imply a distortion of the market”, clarifies the lawyer.

In any case, according to the Observatory, Glovo would be engaging in unfair competition. The final decision depends on the CNMC, the body before which the complaint was filed on October 3. Now it has a period of approximately one year to decide whether to initiate proceedings against Glovo. If there is a positive response, the CNMC would have 18 months to investigate and impose a sanction that, at most, would be equivalent to 10% of the company’s turnover.

The Labor, Algorithm and Society Observatory opens, therefore, with a complaint against Glovo that, according to Tito Álvarez, spokesman for Elite Taxi, “opens the ban to continue with other companies that work with false self-employed workers and violate workers’ rights. The objective is that breaking the law is not free for them.” In this way, this union intends to “improve the labor inspection strategy to uncover mafia practices of large companies”, as stated by Raúl Salinero, president of the UATAE, who recalled that, with the rise of digitization, “New forms of exploitation have been created that facilitate the use of false self-employed figures.”



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