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 activity without any kind of insurance, without vacations, without unemployment benefits and without any of the reasonable protections that the law applies to salaried employees was unacceptable.

Did it give its workers flexibility? Again, that’s the theory. Theoretically they could decide to take a day off, or work for another company, or work fewer hours. But in real life, what the vast majority of them did was very simple: go to work or stop working when they were told to, always for the same company, no vacations, and expose themselves to an accident that would invariably be their problem, and on top of that, consider themselves lucky to have a job. Under these conditions, flexibility is just a theory, far removed from reality. Even if you can decide the length of your working day, when that becomes in practice an unaffordable luxury, it’s just part of a pompous theory, or a legal loophole, albeit one that a few companies have built an entire economic empire within.

Has Spain’s Rider Law led to the dismissal of several thousand workers? No, what it has meant is the end of a legal loophole that meant they had to work under unacceptable conditions. Is it possible that some might be willing to accept those conditions in exchange for having a job? Maybe, but as a society, we could not and should not allow it. That is the paradox of some injustices: that on many occasions, the subject of the injustice pretends that the best thing is to maintain it.

Technology allows many things: a powerful computer we all carry in our pockets that enables us to receive and accept orders at any time made possible the development of an industry that, let’s not forget, was based on carrying out an activity with very low costs, thanks to the exploitation of its workers. When we extrapolate these conditions to thousands of people, the fact that they have to provide their own vehicle, pay for their own gasoline, face possible accidents or work without the right to unemployment or vacations adds up to a great deal of money. But in practice, we are generating a caste of workers subjected to conditions not seen in civilized countries for many decades, in what was an unacceptable regression that said nothing good about the societies in which it took place.

No, as tempting as the narrative may be, Deliveroo is not leaving Spain because of an unjust law from an overly interventionist government has stymied its business. No. It is leaving because it has seen that if it had to regularize all its contracts in a market that it largely failed to dominate, the profitability its investors demanded never materialized. That’s all. So let’s have less cheap liberalism and more common sense. Goodbye, Deliveroo. Go and exploit your workers somewhere else.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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