Alex Trelinski
Home delivery firm Glovo has been fined €56.7 million for breaking employment laws in Spain
The Labour Inspectorate said the penalties were for taking on bogus self-employed staff and people without a contract in the Madrid area.
Glovo said it would appeal the fine and said the inspected period was before new labour laws- the so-called ‘Rider Law’- were passed in 2021, which forced it to grant riders formal employment contracts.
The firm has now been fined €205.3 million in recent years.
In total, Glovo has been punished for acting improperly with 37,348 false self-employed or foreign workers employed by them without work permits.
The latest sanction refers to irregularities that the Labour Ministry say began in 2019 and affected around 8,000 people.
A Glovo statement said that ‘the employed foreign workers did not have a work permit, but were registered as self-employed’.
The home delivery sector has the largest number of bogus self-employed staff in Spain, with over half of the 80,468 people inspected by the Labour Ministry since 2019 found to be working illegally.
That provided a major stimulus for the government to introduce the ‘Rider Law’ two years ago.
Before that hit the statute book, the Supreme Court ruled in September 2020 that delivery couriers were wage earners in a case brought by an ex-Glovo employee.
READ MORE:
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