The multinational food delivery company Glovo continues to be under the scrutiny of the Labor inspection, led by the second vice president of the Government, Yolanda Díaz, and a new line of investigation is being opened against it in this case for violating the right to the privacy of its workers outside their working hours.
This was announced this Tuesday by the acting Minister of Labor during her speech at the ‘Metafuturo: Cities of the Future’ forum organized by the Atresmedia group. “We are seeing today how in Spain the Labor Inspection has just opened a new investigation regarding Glovo because it is allegedly violating nothing more and nothing less than the privacy of workers outside the performance of their professional activity,” warned the vice president.
However, neither Díaz nor his department have wanted to give more details about this new avenue of investigation, claiming that it is in the hands of the Labor inspectors and must be allowed to take its course, although he has given a clue by placing this case as a example of the misuse of Artificial Intelligence in labor matters.
However, this newspaper has learned that this new investigation, which is added to the many that this company has already accumulated for using false self-employed workers, could be related to the fact that Glovo, by having its workers monitored in order to carry out its job, could collect too much information about them, more than is necessary to perform their job, and send this personal and geolocation data to other companies even when workers are not active. Even the Inspection is waiting to see if the multinational could be a way of spying on its workers to maintain a hidden scoring system for the delivery drivers without them being informed of it.
What the leader of Sumar did highlight during her speech is the progress that the approval of the Rider Law meant for Spain, which has become a pioneer in Europe, and she advocated the importance of approving the European directive on the regulation of digital platforms under the Spanish presidency, a rule that neither the Czech nor the Swedish Presidencies of the EU were able to carry out.
More than 200 million fines
Glovo has already accumulated more than 200 million euros in fines in Spain for irregularly employing more than 37,300 workers, who act as false self-employed workers and some of them without papers. The total amount in records of violations stands at 125.3 million, to which we must add 80 million in settlement records for unpaid contributions. In addition to paying the penalties, the inspection forces them to regularize these workers and, therefore, for them to become part of their workforce with the same rights, such as payment of social contributions, vacations, sick leave, unemployment, compensation in case of dismissal, etc.
The rider law, in force since August 2021, forces digital delivery platforms to hire their delivery drivers as employees. Thus, the rule recognizes the presumption of employment of workers who provide paid delivery services through companies that manage this work through a digital platform, in line with the ruling issued by the Supreme Court in September 2020, in which it established that delivery people are employed workers and not self-employed.