The collective agreement of the Riders: an Italian experiment that has also become a model overseas
The riders , that is the cyclists who collaborate with online platforms to bring goods and meals to end customers, have taken on an important role in the daily life of large cities, also thanks to the advent of restrictive rules for the movement of citizens.
These workers, qualified as self-employed collaborators, are at the center of a strong institutional and doctrinal debate, in which the Ministry of Labor and the main national trade unions also took part.
The Collective Agreement signed by Assodelivery (the main trade association of Food Delivery platforms) and Ugl was inserted in the above framework, through which the aforementioned parties intended to regulate the employment relationship of the riders , maintaining the current autonomy and operational flexibility of the messengers, but establishing a package of minimum and mandatory protections recognized to them.
The CCNL signed in Italy, due to the innovative scope and the originality of the solution made, is carving out a pioneering role in Europe and in the world. The Assodelivery / Ugl CCNL, in fact, is unique because it is the first example of collective bargaining regulating a sector of the so-called gig economy in Europe and in the world. This is a perfectly successful experiment in which union bargaining took place for the first time in sectors that are so to speak "new" and connected to the digital economy . Another new element consists in the fact that the National Collective Labor Agreement has intervened in the context of independent employment relationships, a sector historically not covered by union bargaining. On the other hand, the boundary between subordinate and self-employed work is increasingly blurred in the experiences connected to the gig economy ; it is therefore consistent that forms of self-protection and pact regulation are also hypothesized for parasubordinates or self-employed persons.
The goodness of the work carried out by Assodelivery and Ugl is also demonstrated by the fact that this “Italian experiment” is now also taken as a model abroad. The regulation of the new professions at the collective bargaining level, in fact, guarantees customized and timely protection in sectors which, conversely, if they saw a generalized intervention by the national legislator, could be suffocated or buried in the bud. It is true, in fact, that many European states are trying to rigidly regulate the performance of riders (often tracing them back to a relationship of a subordinate or similar nature), however there is no doubt as a level of direct regulation between the parties involved (trade unions and trade associations) can achieve a more optimal and appropriate result in this case.
On the other hand, in legal systems such as the Italian one, in which a clear distinction between autonomy and subordination is still in force, with a rigid division of the protections due to the two forms of work, the only intervention that could carry out a rule of law in the matter of riders it is the equation of the same to subordinate workers. However, this would entail not only the loss of one of the main characteristics of this type of work, namely flexibility, but this would also be detrimental to the entrepreneurial activity of the client platforms. The same can be said for all those countries that share the same legislative and cultural basis with Italy in terms of labor law. In all these cases, the preferable solution is the formal maintenance of the service in the context of autonomy, with the inclusion at the agreement level of a series of "corrective" and "safeguards" capable of guaranteeing good working conditions for all rider . In short, exactly what has been done in Italy with the CCNL Rider .
Also overseas it seems that the Italian contractual model can take root and that, therefore, collective agreements for private contractors , ie self-employed workers, can be hypothesized in the future. The issue is, for example, at the center of attention in California, where it is intertwined with the claims of drivers who collaborate with Uber , and was placed on the agenda by President-elect Biden.
Finally, as regards the near future, it is not only possible, but also desirable that a proliferation of collective agreements for homogeneous groups of self-employed workers will be reached relatively quickly. Many modern autonomous professions, in fact, require flexibility both on the part of the company and for the employee. Added to this is the need for these figures to be recognized at certain levels of protection given their different "contractual strength" towards the client compared to a classic self-employed worker. As already mentioned above, the perfect meeting point between these two needs can easily be found within a serious and mature collective bargaining also for these sectors.
The post The Rider's collective agreement: an Italian experiment that has become a model overseas too appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/il-contratto-collettivo-dei-rider-esperimento-italiano-diventato-un-modello-anche-oltreoceano/ on Wed, 06 Jan 2021 04:53:00 +0000.