Pöördumise edastamine

Hertogswetering 159 P.O. Box 9208 T +31 88 368 03 68

3543 AS Utrecht 3506 GE Utrecht I www.fnv.nl

Dear Prime Minister Kallas, Prime Minister Attal, and Prime Minister Mitsotakis,

Dear Minister Heil, Minister Riisalo, and Minister Michailidou, At this moment, a common set of EU norms to end legal uncertainty of platform workers and to clarify the boundaries of the use of digital technologies in our labour markets is lacking. Over the past years, national Courts have tried to fill the gap, but showed to be insufficient. EU-legislation to protect platform workers is badly needed. Platform workers are essential in our EU economy. Not only in transporting people, delivering meals, but also as internet moderators, data annotators, clickworkers, cleaners, temporary agency workers and beyond. However, all too often those essential service providers are exploited by the business model of false self-employment of platform companies. This abusive business model must be stopped. The political agreement at the last trilogue aims at establishing the correct employment status of platform workers: either as employees or as genuinely self-employed persons. And that is crucial to stop millions of workers being wrongly classified as false self-employed, which allows platform companies to avoid paying the minimum wage, holiday or sick pay, and social security contributions. Platform workers across Europe urgently call upon you to support the political agreement. We cannot accept a business model that platform companies use to evade social security contributions and which is undermining our social welfare systems. The platform economy transcends food delivery and passenger transport; it encompasses all forms of work, whether blue-collar or white-collar.

Date

6th of March 2024

Our reference

24 023 PB/ES/ae

Subject

Platform worker across Europe urgently call upon the Governments

of Estonia, France, Greece and Germany to support the

political agreement on the Platform Work Directive

Extension number

+31 88 368 03 68

Email address

[email protected]

Annex

-

Date

6th of March 2024 Reference

24 023 PB/ES/ae Page

2 of 2

Hertogswetering 159 P.O. Box 9208 T +31 88 368 03 68

3543 AS Utrecht 3506 GE Utrecht I www.fnv.nl

The political agreement, in addition, is establishing transparency in the use of algorithmic management systems. Today, all too often algorithmic management systems are used by platform companies to treat workers as a commodity. But labour is not a commodity. It is therefore urgently needed to protect platform workers against the violation of their right to privacy, the erosion of protections against workplace hazards, and the imposition of opaque, algorithmic decision-making that undermines their income and future prospects, leading to legal, social, and administrative insecurity. Our European social economic model has to be just and sustainable. It cannot be built upon giving companies that trample workers' rights free rein. We call upon you to avoid leaving millions of hardworking people open to exploitation. It is time to deliver for platform workers. We call upon you to support the political agreement between the Belgian Presidency of the Council and the negotiators of the European Parliament, on March 11th at the EPSCO Council! With the highest esteem, Petra Bolster – Damen

FNV International Secretary

Also on behalf of:

DGB, Germany

EAKL, Estonia

GSEE, Greece

CGT, France

CGT Transports, France

TPN, France

ABVV-FGTB, Belgium

ACV-CSC, Belgium

ČMKOS, Czech Republic ELSU, Ireland

CGIL, Italy

ZSSS, Slovenia

FNV Riders United, the Netherlands

Hertogswetering 159 P.O. Box 9208 T +31 88 368 03 68

3543 AS Utrecht 3506 GE Utrecht I www.fnv.nl

Dear Prime Minister Kallas, Prime Minister Attal, and Prime Minister Mitsotakis,

Dear Minister Heil, Minister Riisalo, and Minister Michailidou, At this moment, a common set of EU norms to end legal uncertainty of platform workers and to clarify the boundaries of the use of digital technologies in our labour markets is lacking. Over the past years, national Courts have tried to fill the gap, but showed to be insufficient. EU-legislation to protect platform workers is badly needed. Platform workers are essential in our EU economy. Not only in transporting people, delivering meals, but also as internet moderators, data annotators, clickworkers, cleaners, temporary agency workers and beyond. However, all too often those essential service providers are exploited by the business model of false self-employment of platform companies. This abusive business model must be stopped. The political agreement at the last trilogue aims at establishing the correct employment status of platform workers: either as employees or as genuinely self-employed persons. And that is crucial to stop millions of workers being wrongly classified as false self-employed, which allows platform companies to avoid paying the minimum wage, holiday or sick pay, and social security contributions. Platform workers across Europe urgently call upon you to support the political agreement. We cannot accept a business model that platform companies use to evade social security contributions and which is undermining our social welfare systems. The platform economy transcends food delivery and passenger transport; it encompasses all forms of work, whether blue-collar or white-collar.

Date

6th of March 2024

Our reference

24 023 PB/ES/ae

Subject

Platform worker across Europe urgently call upon the Governments

of Estonia, France, Greece and Germany to support the

political agreement on the Platform Work Directive

Extension number

+31 88 368 03 68

Email address

[email protected]

Annex

-

Date

6th of March 2024 Reference

24 023 PB/ES/ae Page

2 of 2

Hertogswetering 159 P.O. Box 9208 T +31 88 368 03 68

3543 AS Utrecht 3506 GE Utrecht I www.fnv.nl

The political agreement, in addition, is establishing transparency in the use of algorithmic management systems. Today, all too often algorithmic management systems are used by platform companies to treat workers as a commodity. But labour is not a commodity. It is therefore urgently needed to protect platform workers against the violation of their right to privacy, the erosion of protections against workplace hazards, and the imposition of opaque, algorithmic decision-making that undermines their income and future prospects, leading to legal, social, and administrative insecurity. Our European social economic model has to be just and sustainable. It cannot be built upon giving companies that trample workers' rights free rein. We call upon you to avoid leaving millions of hardworking people open to exploitation. It is time to deliver for platform workers. We call upon you to support the political agreement between the Belgian Presidency of the Council and the negotiators of the European Parliament, on March 11th at the EPSCO Council! With the highest esteem, Petra Bolster – Damen

FNV International Secretary

Also on behalf of:

DGB, Germany

EAKL, Estonia

GSEE, Greece

CGT, France

CGT Transports, France

TPN, France

ABVV-FGTB, Belgium

ACV-CSC, Belgium

ČMKOS, Czech Republic ELSU, Ireland

CGIL, Italy

ZSSS, Slovenia

FNV Riders United, the Netherlands

1

ELSU Submission to the Enterprise, Trade and Employment Committee’s Discussion on Platform Work

Houses of the Oireachtas, Dublin 9.30am Wednesday March 6th 2024

We thank the Enterprise, Trade and Employment Oireachtas Committee members who contacted us to request this submission ahead of your committee’s vital discussion on Platform Work. Next Monday, March 11th, there will be one final attempt, in this legislative cycle of the European Parliament to arrive at an agreement that could finally result in an EU Platform Work Directive. Very little public and legislative attention has been given to the significance of this for all Irish workers, partially because the majority of those who could be currently described as “platform workers” in Ireland are non-native English language speakers, who are less likely to know and defend their rights, are less likely to be registered voters and/or paid up members of a traditional general union. This is an international, Europe-wide trend, so not limited just to Ireland. At our recent meeting in Brussels, when hundreds of platform workers’ groups and unions from across the world came together to discuss the challenges faced by platform and click workers, this was one of the common themes. This has seen newer, smaller, specialist, ad-hoc unions and solidarity groups emerge to fill the void left by unions who seem to expect a pro-forma approach to organisation to be applicable and transferable to an emerging, culturally and linguistically demographics, who do not share a traditional shop floor or common language. The out-going/former head of one of the general unions in Ireland and the UK repeatedly stated that the reason why no resources would be given to organising such workers here under their watch was because, theirs was “a workers’ union and not a students’ union”, despite the fact that it is patently obvious to anyone with eyes and a heart, that those who are most exploited on our streets today are non-European students who need to work as much as possible in order to survive. There may be latent racism involved as well as the calculation that these are not “bankable” union membership candidates due to the high turnover and short legal stays associated with those engaged in such work, hence an unlikely conspiracy of exploitation arises between government, platform companies and the established unions who for at least a decade have been hedging their bets on the sector instead of being multi-lingually proactive. This results in leadership being assumed by migrant groups and their voluntary inter-lingual allies, such as the Brazilian riders in the UK who led the two recent delivery work strikes on the 2nd and 14th of February, the latter which we joined in with here in Ireland. Though the workforce is indeed often transient, the work and management practices associated with Platform Work are “here to stay” in the words of our own Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, who has predicted a great expansion of platform work into new sectors right across our society. Therefore the terms and conditions associated with that work are incredibly important to every single citizen, worker, voter, candidate and party, whether they realise this yet or not. In our March 2021 meeting with the current Taoiseach, he and his officials claimed that they had not previously been aware of the fact that most of the individuals who do this platform work, at least in the delivery sector, were not either Europeans nor Stamp 4 visa holders and that the sub-rental of these delivery accounts is absolutely key to the business model of the likes of Deliveroo, UberEats and Just Eat. These companies get away with paying workers in the sector way below minimum wage because they are well aware that they are providing a way for those here on Stamp 2 visa permissions to circumvent the out-dated

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restrictions on legal working hours of 20 hours a week as they have very few other options when it comes to making ends meet, leading them to working extra hours for way less than minimum wage. It must please be accepted by all Oireachtas members that there is no way of surviving in Dublin or any other Irish city on just 20 hours of legal work a week. That’s a maximum legal income of €254 weekly on minimum wage, out of which Stamp 2 visa holders are supposed to pay their €600 (average) rent, their food, their tuition and also save up for their follow on third level course once their two years of English tuition is complete, at exorbitant non-EU rates. That money needs to come from somewhere. Such legislative knowledge gaps only happen when Oireachtas members fail to engage with those whose fingers are most on the pulse, whether by accident than by design. Your meeting this morning is very important, but the failure to include those with the most experience at the coalface of platform work here in Ireland means that we will now all be playing catch up at best, instead of helping each other to get ahead of the curve. There seems to be a great reluctance on the part of the Irish Government to accept that their current rules around the ELE sector are pro-actively pushing law-abiding new recruits from abroad into cowed guests of the nation who have no other choice but to flout the terms of their visas if they are indeed to survive here. The objective and metric for success of the ELE schools and the DFHERIS is exponential growth of that sector, however it is becoming increasingly obvious that we are recruiting people to come to Ireland only to experience extreme poverty, including food poverty and the types of living conditions that are an agar jelly for exploitation, abuse and racism. These hellish outcomes are effective government policy for as long as they refuse to agree capacity and regulate either sector. The Irish Government should decide what our national capacity is for both students in the ELE sector and delivery accounts active in the state. Outsourcing that responsibility to narrow private interests is a recipe for disaster that turbo-charges the race to the bottom. Right now, it’s a completely hands off, laissez-faire, let-the-market-do-what-the-market-wants-to-do, greed is good and the suffering of thousands doesn’t matter, approach to how platform work and the ELE sector intersect here in Ireland. There are frequent accidents and deaths that happen in the communities affected by this unholy alliance that go unnoticed by the media and public. Under-reporting of crime, as well as Garda in-action are compounding the problem. At the end of the Valentine’s Day Strike I personally witnessed three men in balaclavas come up to a group of riders on O’Connell Street and demand the deletion of a video that showed the location of an Elephants’ Graveyard of stolen bikes with the threat of violence and future retribution. I personally called 999 and reported what was happening at the foot of the main street of our nation’s capital and waited for up to an hour afterwards and no Garda ever came. It seemed that as soon as the Garda on the other side of the line found out that it was delivery riders who were being threatened it immediately dropped down the priority list. One of the riders who was threatened at that moment told me that his preferred place to wait for orders was right there because he heard that Daniel O’Connell was our emancipator, and he felt safer in his shadow. He was not safe that day, no rider is safe any day in Ireland and it seems we always have to wait for a Thiago Cortes, or a Josh Dunne, or a Joao Ferreira or a Caio Benicio situation before our elected representatives say they will get involved and do something, they call us for a day or two, and then interest fades again until the next time blood is spilled on our streets. This is the sad reality and you know this is true, we’ve been doing this tragic dance for years now. At the moment, in its current form, platform work represents a return to feudalism in Europe, this time controlled by AI, algorithms and off-shore hedge funds instead of lords and kings, cyber-serfdom if you

3

will. With no government or human oversight, platforms can at any given moment, access and weaponise real time data from thousands of workers, either online or offline and manipulate the supply and demand of workers so that there is only ever one outcome, ever-decreasing pay for an ever-increasing amount of time spent working. Though we now have rules that protect employees from being contacted by their employers after they finish their normal working hours, no such protections exist for the thousands of platform workers in Irish cities who feel they need to work every waking hour in order to survive life here as the cost of living increases and payments continue to drop. Riders who are attempting to get to sleep, take a day off, attend class, spend time with their friends or loved ones, or indeed go on strike or engage in collective action are constantly being bombarded with pop-up prompts, incentives and even threats to remain available and work as the platform wants them to work, always for less and less pay. Think of the worst type of Instagram or TikTok addiction and add the element of economic survival and the algorithmic conditioning of the most precarious and vulnerable members of society and you might begin to imagine just how dystopian life has become for thousands of workers here in Ireland and millions across Europe. During the Valentine’s Day strike, ELSU voxpopped some of the hundreds of riders who travelled from the GPO to Leinster House to demand better pay and treatment by the platforms. One of the most poignant answers to the question of “Why are you protesting today?” was from a Brazilian rider who heart- breakingly remarked how he came from a family that only escaped slavery in Brazil a couple of generations ago, yet now he feels that he was currently being actively enslaved by platforms here in Ireland again himself. This is not an exaggeration, the regression associated with the current practices of Platform Work go against the entire trajectory of European history since the beginning of the early modern era. When workers feel that they do not control the number of hours they need to work in order to survive, or the payment they receive, it is effectively a new form of cyber-serfdom that we are allowing to take root here in the Irish Republic in the 21st century. That’s on you, if you are a member of the Oirechtas, I’m very sorry to say so, but this is happening on your watch. Cyber slaves are cowering, come rain, wind or shine in the shadow of our very own O’Connell. This Valentine’s Day, hundreds of delivery workers attended protests and actions in different Irish cities hundreds more stayed at home and took the opportunity for a rare, needed and well-deserved day off in conjunction with their counterparts in the UK and elsewhere on that day, there was fantastic support from the Irish public, media and from some politicians. Riders really appreciated the public’s sympathy and support, thanks to the media for doing such a good job at relaying their messages. Another pertinent message that people responded to was the fact that Deliveroo charges our local restaurants a 35% commission, while only charging McDonalds and Burger King 10%. That’s another example of how these platforms represent a public health risk as well as an assault on Main Street. This sort of national Irish conversation was something that London-based Deliveroo had to try to immediately destroy and undermine through lies, intimidation and threats. In the days immediately after the very successful strike, Deliveroo baselessly accused riders in Ireland of “physically preventing” other riders from collecting orders and of “tampering” with their vehicles. It then said that accounts of those suspected would be deactivated. This was a particularly malicious move, there were zero examples of protesting riders preventing other riders from collecting orders in any part of the Republic of Ireland. The subtext of this email was, if a worker dares stop work for one day to protest payments dropping by over 50%, then Deliveroo could deactivate that account, an account that is normally rented from someone else, so there is double the pressure on the worker to put up or shut up.

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This is the sort of gas-lighting and coercive control that Deliveroo tried to exert on the riders who stood up for workers’ rights here in Ireland on Valentine’s Day. These companies need to be fined by the billions for this sort of verbal, emotional and economic abuse of our non-native English speakers and this is where we need legislators and unions to apply pressure, for a start. It is the equivalent of a slave that tried to escape the plantation, upon being recaptured, having their hamstrings or Achilles’ tendons cut in full view of other slaves to ensure their obedience. This is the type of platform economy we are allowing these Bermuda and Cayman Island-registered Hedge Fund controlled Platform Giants to build here in the Republic of Ireland and across Europe if we fail to regulate them as soon as possible. The other form of coercive control, is reminding these platform workers how replaceable they are, in the past couple of weeks, delivery drones have been trialled in Dublin 15. Our feedback from the Irish public is that there is not consent nor appetite for a dystopian urban landscape where the same inanimate forms that are threatening and taking lives in the Gaza Strip be welcomed to our streets to replace the only type of work that is available to thousands of our society’s members. From our experience and feedback, the Irish Public support dignity and proper pay for all kinds of work here and value the human interactions that are essential to social cohesion and our collective emotional and mental well-being. We call on Oireachtas members to support the right of any member of the Irish public to disable and safely remove any drone that replaces anybody’s job, infringes in any way on our livelihood or peace of mind, from our skies just as farmers are entitled to do. No consent has ever been given for such technology to be allowed to be given free reign in any part of our Republic and such automation must be rejected, resisted and placed in the recycle bin. We have a number of capital infrastructure projects that could benefit from the transitioning of those currently under the yoke of abusive platform work into the training and employment associated with achieving our national housing and other such objectives. We need to be offering training courses and contracts to those who want to be part of our national revitalisation, I know elected members of both Fine Gael and Sinn Féin who agree strongly with this, it only makes sense. Let’s please get something done. After our March 2021 meeting with the current Taoiseach, one of the delivery riders who personally spoke with Leo was very soon afterwards physically attacked, and threatened to such an extent that he was forced to disavow his activism and flee Dublin in fear of his life. Leo has yet to respond to this, but no matter what our political views are, it is unacceptable that someone can meet the Minister of Enterprise, Trade and Employment to discuss how payments were in free fall and within days be beaten up and mortally threatened. This cannot be permitted and must be pro-actively punished. It is known that Uber actively recruit from CIA and other intelligence community veterans and Deliveroo’s shareholders have explicitly called for financial inducements to be paid to parties and politicians that do their bidding. In this regard, Platform Work, in its current form represents a threat to our democratic institutions as well as a quantum leap backwards in terms of the labour conditions of millions of workers in Europe. The current behaviour of Uber and Deliveroo represents an attempted Coup D’état in the EU and the member states, an assault on all citizens and workers. Again, this is, unfortunately, no exaggeration. Platform companies that behave as described above must be treated like the anti-democratic slavers they are. They must be treated like political pariahs and the only engagement between them and ourselves should be when workers, legislators and unions demand their regulation, accountability and replacement by alternatives that better suit both workers and restaurants alike.

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We call on Irish and European legislators and unions to support all efforts to claw-back and fight for a Platform Work Directive that places the well-being of workers before the private interests of Platform Giants and their hedge-fund backers in Brussels next Monday, the 11th of March. Macron has made himself vulnerable by his continued support for these companies despite what was uncovered by the Uber Files, as have the other members of the German coalition by hiding behind the failing FDP, as have the Estonian government exposed themselves as being extremely compromised by their position vis-à-vis the EU Platform Work Directive, constituting a “blocking minority”. This must all be thoroughly investigated, and it will be. A failure to reach an agreement on the directive next Monday will result in ethics investigations at European and national level as it becomes increasingly obvious to more and more voters across Europe that Uber and Deliveroo have been every bit as manipulative as Qatar was found out to have been just before the last World Cup. Senior heads may well roll and criminal investigations into the illegal lobbying practices of Uber and Deliveroo will have to be conducted by Europol and national police services if indeed we allow private interests keep millions of our workers in such dystopian precarity instead of proper regulation of Platforms, which is so obviously in the public interest. It is guaranteed to become a much hotter political topic between now and the European elections as parties from both left and right are becoming increasingly vexed and outspoken about the negative effect we are allowing these faceless companies to have on our societies. They are explicitly attempting to replace the traditional and well-establish norms associated by the relationship between worker and employer or business owner. Until now there has always been some sort of accountability, something they want to destroy forever as more and more sections of our society are actively enslaved by AI and algorithms as we have seen here with delivery riders. ELSU recommends that Irish parties, politicians and candidates of all political persuasions ensure that they are recorded as being on the right side of history, without delay. The silver-lining, from the Irish perspective, is that our current Government has finally got off the fence and supported the draft EU Directive, this is welcome and we ask all Oireachtas members to make sure that regardless of the outcome of next Monday’s last ditch attempt to reach an agreement on the EU Directive, that there will be absolutely zero delay in legislating nationally on the basis of that provisional agreement. We ask for your support for a national €5 minimum payment per delivery. We thank SIPTU, Social Justice Ireland and Eurofound for their submissions and thank the Oireachtas members who have engaged with riders through us since 2020. We strongly encourage everyone to get around a table soon to discuss what the challenges are and how do we overcome them together. The essence of our Irish Republic and European Union is at stake and minimising the threat currently being posed must become yesterday’s game. Oireachtas members, unions, workers and others who want to request any further information are welcome to get in contact via email on [email protected] Here is a link to the agreed statement from the hundreds of platform workers representatives who met in the European Parliament on the 21st and 22nd of February, we encourage others to email [email protected] so they can add their organisations’ names to those in support and adopt this as our common position ahead of future negotiations: https://braveneweurope.com/the-brussels-appeal-proposal-from-the-forum-on-alternatives-to- uberisation-21-22-february-2024

Fiachra Ó Luain

1 April 2023 April 2023 2

P latform work is work organised through an app, such as UberEats, Deliveroo and Just Eat.

In December 2022, the Employment (EMPL) Committee of

the European Parliament considered the Terms of Reference for the new EU Platform Work Directive, passing the most progressive version of the amendments on offer. A plenary vote on February 2 reaffirmed this decision.

Sweden, currently holding the Presidency of the EU Council, is under pressure to reopen debate on consensus-agreed definitions of worker status. This means that the final Terms of Reference for the Directive may not be

finalised, and transposed into national law of Member states, until after the EU Council presidencies of Sweden’s Right-wing coalition and then Spain’s Pedro Sanchez-led Left-wing coalition.

Despite intense and sustained lobbying from platform-dependent companies aimed particularly at European People’s Party (EPP) MEPs, the key Article 4 pertaining to the “presumption of employment” was passed by the European Parliament and it is on this there is most focus. As it stands, the burden of proof will be on such companies to prove that any workers they want to regard as self-employed are genuinely self-employed. Otherwise they are by default to be considered employees.

Wexford-native James Farrar, whose legal case secured employment rights for 70,000+ workers in 2021 after vanquishing Uber in the

In 2021 members from both of Ireland’s main coalition parties supported the introduction of a ‘third category’ of worker, neither employee nor self-employed, but this was dropped by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael after workers expressed their opinion that this was not what was needed

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael reveal prejudices on labour contracts Some party representatives ran for cover on EU directive laying down presumption worker is an “employee”, while campaigners against the likes of Uber and Amazon faced untold abuse

By Fiachra Ó Luain UK Supreme Court, expressed concern right up until the December 12 vote that the Fine Gael MEP for Midlands-North-West, Maria Walsh, the only Irish MEP on the EMPL Committee, would join her EPP colleagues in abstaining or voting against the definitions of Article 4. This, in his opinion, would have neutered the eventual Directive. Walsh’s Swedish EPP colleague, Sara Skyttedal MEP appears now to be leading efforts to reject the mandate and reopen the Directive for amendments, to further water down an already compromised agreement.

Walsh has still not clarified how she voted on December 12 but, before the vote, committee members were warned that any MEP who voted against or abstained on measures designed to protect the welfare of workers, would be plied with Freedom of Information requests pertaining to any lobbying directed at them and their parties. All eyes are on such matters following exposure last year of the ‘Uber files’ in which Uber Chief-lobbyist in Europe turned whistle- blower, Mark MacGann exposed the extent to which Fine Gael and other EPP members had been lobbied by companies in favour of ‘light- touch’ regulation.

International recognition of the rights of oppressed app workers to date has been largely down to recent landmark legal cases and organisation by workers, activists and unions through the likes of the European Transport Workers Federation and Worker Info Exchange that study and challenge the algorithmic exploitation of workers.

In March 2020 Stamp Two (student) visa- holding delivery workers had a meeting through English and Portuguese with then Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise Leo Varadkar, supported by SIPTU and others familiar with the issues faced by non-EU workers and students in Ireland. In the months preceding, a series of well-attended meetings took place where workers expressed their concerns to Fianna Fáil Senator Mary Fitzpatrick, members of An Garda Siochána, Sinn Féin, Labour, People Before Profit and the Socialist Party.

POLITICS

1 April 2023 April 2023 2

who for a number of years have been receiving passive income from the many non-European workers who need to rent these accounts at up to €100/week in order to make ends meet here.

They characterised efforts to improve worker safety, pay and conditions in emotive McCarthyite terms, more relevant to the fault lines of recent Lula/Bolsonaro divisions in Brazil than the domestic situation here in Ireland, in an attempt to inhibit the involvement of the exploited workers here who may have arrived to Ireland from diverse political backgrounds but are all facing the same problems here.

Sinn Féin’s Louise O’Reilly, who helped the workers prepare for the Varadkar meeting, outlines the problems arising from the practice of bogus self-employment as being the creation of ‘winners’ in the form of employers who fail to classify their workers as employees. They win because they have “no PRSI to pay, no pension contributions to make, no sick, paternity or maternity leave to pay, no redundancy payments, no annual leave or public holiday pay”.

Meanwhile those losing out are the workers who have “less entitlement to social welfare supports if and when they need them, no access

to an occupational pension, no paid sick, paternity or maternity leave, no redundancy pay, no fixed breaks or rest periods, no paid annual leave or public holidays”.

Revenue is the other “big loser” as “huge losses in PRSI contributions mean serious consequences for the public finances and the Exchequer”.

Responding to the passage of the amendments through the EMPL Committee, former MEP and PBP spokesperson for workers’ rights, Paul Murphy TD, welcomed the news as the “result of workers and trade unions at a national and European level pushing for such legislation...It will also need to be matched with on the ground organising - ultimately the best defence of a worker’s rights is to be organised in a union”.

Labour Senator Marie Sherlock focused on another key element of the amendments that were passed, human oversight of artificial intelligence or algorithmic management of workers: “We need to recognise that it is a growing part of the labour market and ensure that the algorithms managing workers are transparent and regulated”. Sherlock launched the ‘Protection of Employment (Platform Workers and Bogus Self- Employment) Bill 2021’, in the same month as our meeting with the current Taoiseach.

Leo Varadkar, who in March 2020 quoted Terminator’s “There is no fate but what we make for ourselves”, has yet to say if he will accept and support the version of the amendments already

Increasing violence and decreasing pay were the main issues raised by workers present at these meetings though the problematic issue of worker misclassification was kicked down the road by the Department as an issue that would need to be legislated for at European level before it could be dealt with here, nationally.

Leo Varadkar stated that before this meeting he had not had any contact with Deliveroo and did not know the extent of the exploitation that occurs through the apps. He suggested Workplace Relations Commission scrutiny of Deliveroo practices. He held a subsequent meeting with Deliveroo and was to get back to us, as was his Assistant Secretary Clare Dunne who said she would send on a relevant contact in the Department of Social Protection regarding the status of workers. Over two years later and we are still waiting for both.

After the meeting with Leo Varadkar, workers and organisers who had been present were subjected to a series of concerted attacks based on anti-solidarity disinformation and smears, violence and bike-theft, leading to at least one worker being coerced into disavowing their activism and moving out of Dublin. Those behind this were, among others, individuals

Platform workers’ rights

Varadkar held a subsequent meeting with Deliveroo and was to get back to us, as was his Assistant Secretary; but over two years later we are still waiting for both

PB April 2023 April 2023 3

agreed by consensus twice in the European Parliament.

Nor has any member of Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil responded to requests for a statement on these recent developments from a party perspective.

We do know that in 2021 members from both of the main coalition parties supported the introduction of a “third category” of worker, neither employee nor self- employed, but this was dropped by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael after workers made clear that this was not what was needed nor was it something that had been asked for by workers.

The only coalition members who responded to our requests for comment are the Greens, with Dublin MEP Ciarán Cuffe stating that he is “very happy with the agreement” as it will help stop “the race to the bottom whereby companies that treat their workers fairly are crowded out of the market by their less scrupulous competitors. The freedom to work whenever and wherever you want has become a dystopian future for many. We must ensure that platform working is regulated and produces decent pay and conditions for all”.

A spokesperson for the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment stated: “Ireland has mechanisms for the determination of employment status and supports the ambition behind this EU proposal on improving working conditions in Platform Work”.

To square this circle the national governments are going to have to solve the interdepartmental Rubik’s cube of work permissions for non-EU migrants. In Ireland the bulk of this work is done by those on Stamp Two visas trying to provide for their education and survival in Irish cities. Stamp 2 workers are prohibited by the terms of their visas from being self-employed and therefore cannot legally be platform workers even if companies such as Deliveroo insist on purporting to designate them as such. Such companies are of course aware that their business models flout such basic employment rules.

They often earn less than the minimum wage doing deliveries, and are currently prohibited from owning their own accounts on platforms such as Deliveroo and UberEats, forcing them to ‘rent’ these accounts from Europeans or Stamp 4 visa holders who, unlike Stamp 2 visa holders, can legally work full-time and can be legally “self-employed”.

This results in a passive income for the official account owners from the labour of more vulnerable Stamp Two workers who have to risk life-and-limb, uninsured. From what can be observed, these companies have built their business model on such “grey-area” dynamics.

Whenever they make a rare appearance to distribute their branded bags and clothing to workers here in Ireland, those working on behalf of management, at least in the case of Deliveroo, conspicuously refuse to identify themselves nor

do they make any attempt to identify the workers who seek this equipment from them. From 2019 the estimated number of Deliveroo accounts in Ireland has jumped from 2500 to 5000, while the basic payment per delivery for a Deliveroo worker in Ireland has dropped by 30%, from €4.39 to €2.90.

At a mouse-click in London, significant drops in pay often come without warning, and always with zero consent from workers here. Moreover the company closed its Dublin office during the same period and now operates everything in Ireland, including the gathering of metadata from workers here, remotely from London. It is unclear as to what extent they have been paying any corporation tax here, despite Deliveroo having vastly expanded its business here. Irish Amazon Prime members are now being offered free deliveries via ‘Deliveroo Plus’ following a deal with Amazon, as pay and conditions continue to deteriorate. ‘The Invisible Ones’ is a short YouTube documentary on the plight of Dublin delivery workers by Jesús Tiscareño and fellow Griffith College Stamp Two students.

Minds have again focused since February 28 when Revenue sent out tax demands to delivery account holders, after over five years, on the very same day that the European Court of Justice ruled against Only Fans’ attempt to avoid paying similar taxes, by passing them on to account holders.

The interdepartmental Rubik’s cube of work permissions for migrants yields a passive income for the official account owners from the labour of vulnerable non-European workers who have to risk life-and-limb while working without insurance, leading the basic payment per delivery for a Deliveroo worker in Ireland to drop from €4.39 to €2.90.

Success to date has only been possible through meaningful multi-lingual engagement between migrant workers of all backgrounds, the International Transport Workers Federation and others, with the welcome support of parties across the Irish political spectrum.

Workers appreciate when parties and politicians listen to their concerns without trying to impose their own ideological or party agendas, respecting the space in which an interlingual consensus is sustainably built within this emerging demographic of precarious workers in Ireland.

Platform workers will remain at risk from evolving technology for the forseeable future for example the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy was recently launched by Robert Troy and Tánaiste Micheál Martin who pushed for the use of artificial-intelligence technologies in the workplace. Unsurprisingly, there was no mention of safeguards.

In the era of plutocracy and technocracy, workers are always at least one step behind. Notwithstanding this, meaningful engagement and international organisation is bearing fruit, proving that passivity to algorithmic management and exploitation by Platforms Giants is not the fate that we are choosing for ourselves.

Fiachra Ó Luain is Co-Founder of ELSU.ie, the English Language Students’ Union of Ireland

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ELSU Submission to the Enterprise, Trade and Employment Committee’s Discussion on Platform Work

Houses of the Oireachtas, Dublin 9.30am Wednesday March 6th 2024

We thank the Enterprise, Trade and Employment Oireachtas Committee members who contacted us to request this submission ahead of your committee’s vital discussion on Platform Work. Next Monday, March 11th, there will be one final attempt, in this legislative cycle of the European Parliament to arrive at an agreement that could finally result in an EU Platform Work Directive. Very little public and legislative attention has been given to the significance of this for all Irish workers, partially because the majority of those who could be currently described as “platform workers” in Ireland are non-native English language speakers, who are less likely to know and defend their rights, are less likely to be registered voters and/or paid up members of a traditional general union. This is an international, Europe-wide trend, so not limited just to Ireland. At our recent meeting in Brussels, when hundreds of platform workers’ groups and unions from across the world came together to discuss the challenges faced by platform and click workers, this was one of the common themes. This has seen newer, smaller, specialist, ad-hoc unions and solidarity groups emerge to fill the void left by unions who seem to expect a pro-forma approach to organisation to be applicable and transferable to an emerging, culturally and linguistically demographics, who do not share a traditional shop floor or common language. The out-going/former head of one of the general unions in Ireland and the UK repeatedly stated that the reason why no resources would be given to organising such workers here under their watch was because, theirs was “a workers’ union and not a students’ union”, despite the fact that it is patently obvious to anyone with eyes and a heart, that those who are most exploited on our streets today are non-European students who need to work as much as possible in order to survive. There may be latent racism involved as well as the calculation that these are not “bankable” union membership candidates due to the high turnover and short legal stays associated with those engaged in such work, hence an unlikely conspiracy of exploitation arises between government, platform companies and the established unions who for at least a decade have been hedging their bets on the sector instead of being multi-lingually proactive. This results in leadership being assumed by migrant groups and their voluntary inter-lingual allies, such as the Brazilian riders in the UK who led the two recent delivery work strikes on the 2nd and 14th of February, the latter which we joined in with here in Ireland. Though the workforce is indeed often transient, the work and management practices associated with Platform Work are “here to stay” in the words of our own Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, who has predicted a great expansion of platform work into new sectors right across our society. Therefore the terms and conditions associated with that work are incredibly important to every single citizen, worker, voter, candidate and party, whether they realise this yet or not. In our March 2021 meeting with the current Taoiseach, he and his officials claimed that they had not previously been aware of the fact that most of the individuals who do this platform work, at least in the delivery sector, were not either Europeans nor Stamp 4 visa holders and that the sub-rental of these delivery accounts is absolutely key to the business model of the likes of Deliveroo, UberEats and Just Eat. These companies get away with paying workers in the sector way below minimum wage because they are well aware that they are providing a way for those here on Stamp 2 visa permissions to circumvent the out-dated

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restrictions on legal working hours of 20 hours a week as they have very few other options when it comes to making ends meet, leading them to working extra hours for way less than minimum wage. It must please be accepted by all Oireachtas members that there is no way of surviving in Dublin or any other Irish city on just 20 hours of legal work a week. That’s a maximum legal income of €254 weekly on minimum wage, out of which Stamp 2 visa holders are supposed to pay their €600 (average) rent, their food, their tuition and also save up for their follow on third level course once their two years of English tuition is complete, at exorbitant non-EU rates. That money needs to come from somewhere. Such legislative knowledge gaps only happen when Oireachtas members fail to engage with those whose fingers are most on the pulse, whether by accident than by design. Your meeting this morning is very important, but the failure to include those with the most experience at the coalface of platform work here in Ireland means that we will now all be playing catch up at best, instead of helping each other to get ahead of the curve. There seems to be a great reluctance on the part of the Irish Government to accept that their current rules around the ELE sector are pro-actively pushing law-abiding new recruits from abroad into cowed guests of the nation who have no other choice but to flout the terms of their visas if they are indeed to survive here. The objective and metric for success of the ELE schools and the DFHERIS is exponential growth of that sector, however it is becoming increasingly obvious that we are recruiting people to come to Ireland only to experience extreme poverty, including food poverty and the types of living conditions that are an agar jelly for exploitation, abuse and racism. These hellish outcomes are effective government policy for as long as they refuse to agree capacity and regulate either sector. The Irish Government should decide what our national capacity is for both students in the ELE sector and delivery accounts active in the state. Outsourcing that responsibility to narrow private interests is a recipe for disaster that turbo-charges the race to the bottom. Right now, it’s a completely hands off, laissez-faire, let-the-market-do-what-the-market-wants-to-do, greed is good and the suffering of thousands doesn’t matter, approach to how platform work and the ELE sector intersect here in Ireland. There are frequent accidents and deaths that happen in the communities affected by this unholy alliance that go unnoticed by the media and public. Under-reporting of crime, as well as Garda in-action are compounding the problem. At the end of the Valentine’s Day Strike I personally witnessed three men in balaclavas come up to a group of riders on O’Connell Street and demand the deletion of a video that showed the location of an Elephants’ Graveyard of stolen bikes with the threat of violence and future retribution. I personally called 999 and reported what was happening at the foot of the main street of our nation’s capital and waited for up to an hour afterwards and no Garda ever came. It seemed that as soon as the Garda on the other side of the line found out that it was delivery riders who were being threatened it immediately dropped down the priority list. One of the riders who was threatened at that moment told me that his preferred place to wait for orders was right there because he heard that Daniel O’Connell was our emancipator, and he felt safer in his shadow. He was not safe that day, no rider is safe any day in Ireland and it seems we always have to wait for a Thiago Cortes, or a Josh Dunne, or a Joao Ferreira or a Caio Benicio situation before our elected representatives say they will get involved and do something, they call us for a day or two, and then interest fades again until the next time blood is spilled on our streets. This is the sad reality and you know this is true, we’ve been doing this tragic dance for years now. At the moment, in its current form, platform work represents a return to feudalism in Europe, this time controlled by AI, algorithms and off-shore hedge funds instead of lords and kings, cyber-serfdom if you

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will. With no government or human oversight, platforms can at any given moment, access and weaponise real time data from thousands of workers, either online or offline and manipulate the supply and demand of workers so that there is only ever one outcome, ever-decreasing pay for an ever-increasing amount of time spent working. Though we now have rules that protect employees from being contacted by their employers after they finish their normal working hours, no such protections exist for the thousands of platform workers in Irish cities who feel they need to work every waking hour in order to survive life here as the cost of living increases and payments continue to drop. Riders who are attempting to get to sleep, take a day off, attend class, spend time with their friends or loved ones, or indeed go on strike or engage in collective action are constantly being bombarded with pop-up prompts, incentives and even threats to remain available and work as the platform wants them to work, always for less and less pay. Think of the worst type of Instagram or TikTok addiction and add the element of economic survival and the algorithmic conditioning of the most precarious and vulnerable members of society and you might begin to imagine just how dystopian life has become for thousands of workers here in Ireland and millions across Europe. During the Valentine’s Day strike, ELSU voxpopped some of the hundreds of riders who travelled from the GPO to Leinster House to demand better pay and treatment by the platforms. One of the most poignant answers to the question of “Why are you protesting today?” was from a Brazilian rider who heart- breakingly remarked how he came from a family that only escaped slavery in Brazil a couple of generations ago, yet now he feels that he was currently being actively enslaved by platforms here in Ireland again himself. This is not an exaggeration, the regression associated with the current practices of Platform Work go against the entire trajectory of European history since the beginning of the early modern era. When workers feel that they do not control the number of hours they need to work in order to survive, or the payment they receive, it is effectively a new form of cyber-serfdom that we are allowing to take root here in the Irish Republic in the 21st century. That’s on you, if you are a member of the Oirechtas, I’m very sorry to say so, but this is happening on your watch. Cyber slaves are cowering, come rain, wind or shine in the shadow of our very own O’Connell. This Valentine’s Day, hundreds of delivery workers attended protests and actions in different Irish cities hundreds more stayed at home and took the opportunity for a rare, needed and well-deserved day off in conjunction with their counterparts in the UK and elsewhere on that day, there was fantastic support from the Irish public, media and from some politicians. Riders really appreciated the public’s sympathy and support, thanks to the media for doing such a good job at relaying their messages. Another pertinent message that people responded to was the fact that Deliveroo charges our local restaurants a 35% commission, while only charging McDonalds and Burger King 10%. That’s another example of how these platforms represent a public health risk as well as an assault on Main Street. This sort of national Irish conversation was something that London-based Deliveroo had to try to immediately destroy and undermine through lies, intimidation and threats. In the days immediately after the very successful strike, Deliveroo baselessly accused riders in Ireland of “physically preventing” other riders from collecting orders and of “tampering” with their vehicles. It then said that accounts of those suspected would be deactivated. This was a particularly malicious move, there were zero examples of protesting riders preventing other riders from collecting orders in any part of the Republic of Ireland. The subtext of this email was, if a worker dares stop work for one day to protest payments dropping by over 50%, then Deliveroo could deactivate that account, an account that is normally rented from someone else, so there is double the pressure on the worker to put up or shut up.

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This is the sort of gas-lighting and coercive control that Deliveroo tried to exert on the riders who stood up for workers’ rights here in Ireland on Valentine’s Day. These companies need to be fined by the billions for this sort of verbal, emotional and economic abuse of our non-native English speakers and this is where we need legislators and unions to apply pressure, for a start. It is the equivalent of a slave that tried to escape the plantation, upon being recaptured, having their hamstrings or Achilles’ tendons cut in full view of other slaves to ensure their obedience. This is the type of platform economy we are allowing these Bermuda and Cayman Island-registered Hedge Fund controlled Platform Giants to build here in the Republic of Ireland and across Europe if we fail to regulate them as soon as possible. The other form of coercive control, is reminding these platform workers how replaceable they are, in the past couple of weeks, delivery drones have been trialled in Dublin 15. Our feedback from the Irish public is that there is not consent nor appetite for a dystopian urban landscape where the same inanimate forms that are threatening and taking lives in the Gaza Strip be welcomed to our streets to replace the only type of work that is available to thousands of our society’s members. From our experience and feedback, the Irish Public support dignity and proper pay for all kinds of work here and value the human interactions that are essential to social cohesion and our collective emotional and mental well-being. We call on Oireachtas members to support the right of any member of the Irish public to disable and safely remove any drone that replaces anybody’s job, infringes in any way on our livelihood or peace of mind, from our skies just as farmers are entitled to do. No consent has ever been given for such technology to be allowed to be given free reign in any part of our Republic and such automation must be rejected, resisted and placed in the recycle bin. We have a number of capital infrastructure projects that could benefit from the transitioning of those currently under the yoke of abusive platform work into the training and employment associated with achieving our national housing and other such objectives. We need to be offering training courses and contracts to those who want to be part of our national revitalisation, I know elected members of both Fine Gael and Sinn Féin who agree strongly with this, it only makes sense. Let’s please get something done. After our March 2021 meeting with the current Taoiseach, one of the delivery riders who personally spoke with Leo was very soon afterwards physically attacked, and threatened to such an extent that he was forced to disavow his activism and flee Dublin in fear of his life. Leo has yet to respond to this, but no matter what our political views are, it is unacceptable that someone can meet the Minister of Enterprise, Trade and Employment to discuss how payments were in free fall and within days be beaten up and mortally threatened. This cannot be permitted and must be pro-actively punished. It is known that Uber actively recruit from CIA and other intelligence community veterans and Deliveroo’s shareholders have explicitly called for financial inducements to be paid to parties and politicians that do their bidding. In this regard, Platform Work, in its current form represents a threat to our democratic institutions as well as a quantum leap backwards in terms of the labour conditions of millions of workers in Europe. The current behaviour of Uber and Deliveroo represents an attempted Coup D’état in the EU and the member states, an assault on all citizens and workers. Again, this is, unfortunately, no exaggeration. Platform companies that behave as described above must be treated like the anti-democratic slavers they are. They must be treated like political pariahs and the only engagement between them and ourselves should be when workers, legislators and unions demand their regulation, accountability and replacement by alternatives that better suit both workers and restaurants alike.

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We call on Irish and European legislators and unions to support all efforts to claw-back and fight for a Platform Work Directive that places the well-being of workers before the private interests of Platform Giants and their hedge-fund backers in Brussels next Monday, the 11th of March. Macron has made himself vulnerable by his continued support for these companies despite what was uncovered by the Uber Files, as have the other members of the German coalition by hiding behind the failing FDP, as have the Estonian government exposed themselves as being extremely compromised by their position vis-à-vis the EU Platform Work Directive, constituting a “blocking minority”. This must all be thoroughly investigated, and it will be. A failure to reach an agreement on the directive next Monday will result in ethics investigations at European and national level as it becomes increasingly obvious to more and more voters across Europe that Uber and Deliveroo have been every bit as manipulative as Qatar was found out to have been just before the last World Cup. Senior heads may well roll and criminal investigations into the illegal lobbying practices of Uber and Deliveroo will have to be conducted by Europol and national police services if indeed we allow private interests keep millions of our workers in such dystopian precarity instead of proper regulation of Platforms, which is so obviously in the public interest. It is guaranteed to become a much hotter political topic between now and the European elections as parties from both left and right are becoming increasingly vexed and outspoken about the negative effect we are allowing these faceless companies to have on our societies. They are explicitly attempting to replace the traditional and well-establish norms associated by the relationship between worker and employer or business owner. Until now there has always been some sort of accountability, something they want to destroy forever as more and more sections of our society are actively enslaved by AI and algorithms as we have seen here with delivery riders. ELSU recommends that Irish parties, politicians and candidates of all political persuasions ensure that they are recorded as being on the right side of history, without delay. The silver-lining, from the Irish perspective, is that our current Government has finally got off the fence and supported the draft EU Directive, this is welcome and we ask all Oireachtas members to make sure that regardless of the outcome of next Monday’s last ditch attempt to reach an agreement on the EU Directive, that there will be absolutely zero delay in legislating nationally on the basis of that provisional agreement. We ask for your support for a national €5 minimum payment per delivery. We thank SIPTU, Social Justice Ireland and Eurofound for their submissions and thank the Oireachtas members who have engaged with riders through us since 2020. We strongly encourage everyone to get around a table soon to discuss what the challenges are and how do we overcome them together. The essence of our Irish Republic and European Union is at stake and minimising the threat currently being posed must become yesterday’s game. Oireachtas members, unions, workers and others who want to request any further information are welcome to get in contact via email on [email protected] Here is a link to the agreed statement from the hundreds of platform workers representatives who met in the European Parliament on the 21st and 22nd of February, we encourage others to email [email protected] so they can add their organisations’ names to those in support and adopt this as our common position ahead of future negotiations: https://braveneweurope.com/the-brussels-appeal-proposal-from-the-forum-on-alternatives-to- uberisation-21-22-february-2024

Fiachra Ó Luain

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P latform work is work organised through an app, such as UberEats, Deliveroo and Just Eat.

In December 2022, the Employment (EMPL) Committee of

the European Parliament considered the Terms of Reference for the new EU Platform Work Directive, passing the most progressive version of the amendments on offer. A plenary vote on February 2 reaffirmed this decision.

Sweden, currently holding the Presidency of the EU Council, is under pressure to reopen debate on consensus-agreed definitions of worker status. This means that the final Terms of Reference for the Directive may not be

finalised, and transposed into national law of Member states, until after the EU Council presidencies of Sweden’s Right-wing coalition and then Spain’s Pedro Sanchez-led Left-wing coalition.

Despite intense and sustained lobbying from platform-dependent companies aimed particularly at European People’s Party (EPP) MEPs, the key Article 4 pertaining to the “presumption of employment” was passed by the European Parliament and it is on this there is most focus. As it stands, the burden of proof will be on such companies to prove that any workers they want to regard as self-employed are genuinely self-employed. Otherwise they are by default to be considered employees.

Wexford-native James Farrar, whose legal case secured employment rights for 70,000+ workers in 2021 after vanquishing Uber in the

In 2021 members from both of Ireland’s main coalition parties supported the introduction of a ‘third category’ of worker, neither employee nor self-employed, but this was dropped by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael after workers expressed their opinion that this was not what was needed

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael reveal prejudices on labour contracts Some party representatives ran for cover on EU directive laying down presumption worker is an “employee”, while campaigners against the likes of Uber and Amazon faced untold abuse

By Fiachra Ó Luain UK Supreme Court, expressed concern right up until the December 12 vote that the Fine Gael MEP for Midlands-North-West, Maria Walsh, the only Irish MEP on the EMPL Committee, would join her EPP colleagues in abstaining or voting against the definitions of Article 4. This, in his opinion, would have neutered the eventual Directive. Walsh’s Swedish EPP colleague, Sara Skyttedal MEP appears now to be leading efforts to reject the mandate and reopen the Directive for amendments, to further water down an already compromised agreement.

Walsh has still not clarified how she voted on December 12 but, before the vote, committee members were warned that any MEP who voted against or abstained on measures designed to protect the welfare of workers, would be plied with Freedom of Information requests pertaining to any lobbying directed at them and their parties. All eyes are on such matters following exposure last year of the ‘Uber files’ in which Uber Chief-lobbyist in Europe turned whistle- blower, Mark MacGann exposed the extent to which Fine Gael and other EPP members had been lobbied by companies in favour of ‘light- touch’ regulation.

International recognition of the rights of oppressed app workers to date has been largely down to recent landmark legal cases and organisation by workers, activists and unions through the likes of the European Transport Workers Federation and Worker Info Exchange that study and challenge the algorithmic exploitation of workers.

In March 2020 Stamp Two (student) visa- holding delivery workers had a meeting through English and Portuguese with then Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise Leo Varadkar, supported by SIPTU and others familiar with the issues faced by non-EU workers and students in Ireland. In the months preceding, a series of well-attended meetings took place where workers expressed their concerns to Fianna Fáil Senator Mary Fitzpatrick, members of An Garda Siochána, Sinn Féin, Labour, People Before Profit and the Socialist Party.

POLITICS

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who for a number of years have been receiving passive income from the many non-European workers who need to rent these accounts at up to €100/week in order to make ends meet here.

They characterised efforts to improve worker safety, pay and conditions in emotive McCarthyite terms, more relevant to the fault lines of recent Lula/Bolsonaro divisions in Brazil than the domestic situation here in Ireland, in an attempt to inhibit the involvement of the exploited workers here who may have arrived to Ireland from diverse political backgrounds but are all facing the same problems here.

Sinn Féin’s Louise O’Reilly, who helped the workers prepare for the Varadkar meeting, outlines the problems arising from the practice of bogus self-employment as being the creation of ‘winners’ in the form of employers who fail to classify their workers as employees. They win because they have “no PRSI to pay, no pension contributions to make, no sick, paternity or maternity leave to pay, no redundancy payments, no annual leave or public holiday pay”.

Meanwhile those losing out are the workers who have “less entitlement to social welfare supports if and when they need them, no access

to an occupational pension, no paid sick, paternity or maternity leave, no redundancy pay, no fixed breaks or rest periods, no paid annual leave or public holidays”.

Revenue is the other “big loser” as “huge losses in PRSI contributions mean serious consequences for the public finances and the Exchequer”.

Responding to the passage of the amendments through the EMPL Committee, former MEP and PBP spokesperson for workers’ rights, Paul Murphy TD, welcomed the news as the “result of workers and trade unions at a national and European level pushing for such legislation...It will also need to be matched with on the ground organising - ultimately the best defence of a worker’s rights is to be organised in a union”.

Labour Senator Marie Sherlock focused on another key element of the amendments that were passed, human oversight of artificial intelligence or algorithmic management of workers: “We need to recognise that it is a growing part of the labour market and ensure that the algorithms managing workers are transparent and regulated”. Sherlock launched the ‘Protection of Employment (Platform Workers and Bogus Self- Employment) Bill 2021’, in the same month as our meeting with the current Taoiseach.

Leo Varadkar, who in March 2020 quoted Terminator’s “There is no fate but what we make for ourselves”, has yet to say if he will accept and support the version of the amendments already

Increasing violence and decreasing pay were the main issues raised by workers present at these meetings though the problematic issue of worker misclassification was kicked down the road by the Department as an issue that would need to be legislated for at European level before it could be dealt with here, nationally.

Leo Varadkar stated that before this meeting he had not had any contact with Deliveroo and did not know the extent of the exploitation that occurs through the apps. He suggested Workplace Relations Commission scrutiny of Deliveroo practices. He held a subsequent meeting with Deliveroo and was to get back to us, as was his Assistant Secretary Clare Dunne who said she would send on a relevant contact in the Department of Social Protection regarding the status of workers. Over two years later and we are still waiting for both.

After the meeting with Leo Varadkar, workers and organisers who had been present were subjected to a series of concerted attacks based on anti-solidarity disinformation and smears, violence and bike-theft, leading to at least one worker being coerced into disavowing their activism and moving out of Dublin. Those behind this were, among others, individuals

Platform workers’ rights

Varadkar held a subsequent meeting with Deliveroo and was to get back to us, as was his Assistant Secretary; but over two years later we are still waiting for both

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agreed by consensus twice in the European Parliament.

Nor has any member of Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil responded to requests for a statement on these recent developments from a party perspective.

We do know that in 2021 members from both of the main coalition parties supported the introduction of a “third category” of worker, neither employee nor self- employed, but this was dropped by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael after workers made clear that this was not what was needed nor was it something that had been asked for by workers.

The only coalition members who responded to our requests for comment are the Greens, with Dublin MEP Ciarán Cuffe stating that he is “very happy with the agreement” as it will help stop “the race to the bottom whereby companies that treat their workers fairly are crowded out of the market by their less scrupulous competitors. The freedom to work whenever and wherever you want has become a dystopian future for many. We must ensure that platform working is regulated and produces decent pay and conditions for all”.

A spokesperson for the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment stated: “Ireland has mechanisms for the determination of employment status and supports the ambition behind this EU proposal on improving working conditions in Platform Work”.

To square this circle the national governments are going to have to solve the interdepartmental Rubik’s cube of work permissions for non-EU migrants. In Ireland the bulk of this work is done by those on Stamp Two visas trying to provide for their education and survival in Irish cities. Stamp 2 workers are prohibited by the terms of their visas from being self-employed and therefore cannot legally be platform workers even if companies such as Deliveroo insist on purporting to designate them as such. Such companies are of course aware that their business models flout such basic employment rules.

They often earn less than the minimum wage doing deliveries, and are currently prohibited from owning their own accounts on platforms such as Deliveroo and UberEats, forcing them to ‘rent’ these accounts from Europeans or Stamp 4 visa holders who, unlike Stamp 2 visa holders, can legally work full-time and can be legally “self-employed”.

This results in a passive income for the official account owners from the labour of more vulnerable Stamp Two workers who have to risk life-and-limb, uninsured. From what can be observed, these companies have built their business model on such “grey-area” dynamics.

Whenever they make a rare appearance to distribute their branded bags and clothing to workers here in Ireland, those working on behalf of management, at least in the case of Deliveroo, conspicuously refuse to identify themselves nor

do they make any attempt to identify the workers who seek this equipment from them. From 2019 the estimated number of Deliveroo accounts in Ireland has jumped from 2500 to 5000, while the basic payment per delivery for a Deliveroo worker in Ireland has dropped by 30%, from €4.39 to €2.90.

At a mouse-click in London, significant drops in pay often come without warning, and always with zero consent from workers here. Moreover the company closed its Dublin office during the same period and now operates everything in Ireland, including the gathering of metadata from workers here, remotely from London. It is unclear as to what extent they have been paying any corporation tax here, despite Deliveroo having vastly expanded its business here. Irish Amazon Prime members are now being offered free deliveries via ‘Deliveroo Plus’ following a deal with Amazon, as pay and conditions continue to deteriorate. ‘The Invisible Ones’ is a short YouTube documentary on the plight of Dublin delivery workers by Jesús Tiscareño and fellow Griffith College Stamp Two students.

Minds have again focused since February 28 when Revenue sent out tax demands to delivery account holders, after over five years, on the very same day that the European Court of Justice ruled against Only Fans’ attempt to avoid paying similar taxes, by passing them on to account holders.

The interdepartmental Rubik’s cube of work permissions for migrants yields a passive income for the official account owners from the labour of vulnerable non-European workers who have to risk life-and-limb while working without insurance, leading the basic payment per delivery for a Deliveroo worker in Ireland to drop from €4.39 to €2.90.

Success to date has only been possible through meaningful multi-lingual engagement between migrant workers of all backgrounds, the International Transport Workers Federation and others, with the welcome support of parties across the Irish political spectrum.

Workers appreciate when parties and politicians listen to their concerns without trying to impose their own ideological or party agendas, respecting the space in which an interlingual consensus is sustainably built within this emerging demographic of precarious workers in Ireland.

Platform workers will remain at risk from evolving technology for the forseeable future for example the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy was recently launched by Robert Troy and Tánaiste Micheál Martin who pushed for the use of artificial-intelligence technologies in the workplace. Unsurprisingly, there was no mention of safeguards.

In the era of plutocracy and technocracy, workers are always at least one step behind. Notwithstanding this, meaningful engagement and international organisation is bearing fruit, proving that passivity to algorithmic management and exploitation by Platforms Giants is not the fate that we are choosing for ourselves.

Fiachra Ó Luain is Co-Founder of ELSU.ie, the English Language Students’ Union of Ireland