Rider, all the news of the Assodelivery-Ugl agreement
The goal of reaching the first contract in the food delivery sector, identified by Di Maio in 2018, is achieved due to a sort of heterogenesis of purposes outside the rooms of the Ministry of Labor and on the one hand, annoying the confederal unions, without the other to the ministry can hold the credit. The in-depth analysis by Francesco Nespoli for the Adapt Bulletin
The fact that the protection of the riders' work was also, if not above all, part of a targeted political communication strategy of the 5 Star Movement, the then Minister of Labor Luigi di Maio had said, not so much between the lines, starting to the "Government of Change". On June 4, 2018, the news on the Ministry of Labor website informed us that the new minister wanted to "dedicate his first day of activity to the workers of the food delivery platforms" […]. Symbol of an abandoned generation, which has no protections and, at times, not even a contract “. The story of the Italian riders, then still numbered around 10,000 units, is therefore configured immediately as a symbolic action, even before an institutional initiative with the government in the role of director of industrial relations (already in that first meeting with the riders from Rome and Bologna, Di Maio declared his intention to involve all forms of representation, even the traditional ones).
The attempt by the Minister of Labor had been to use the law as a pickpick to lead companies to recognize minimum safeguards for bicycle messengers. The first solution attempted was that of a dedicated rule to be included in the Dignity Decree. A draft of the decree stipulated that the riders should be classified as "subordinate workers" with the right to a "monthly availability allowance," and that their "piecework" pay was prohibited. A muscular initiative that, if it had warmed the souls of the Italians much less than the issues that were being agitated in the meantime by the other vice-premier Matteo Salvini, had aroused the reaction of the CEO of Foodora Italia, who in an interview with Corriere della Sera of 17 June 2018 had warned that the German multinational, if approved, would be forced to leave Italy. Almost an involuntary assist for the minister, who on Facebook and through the Blog of the Stars had defined it "a beautiful and good blackmail", but who the following day, at the table with the companies, had been able to put forward an alternative hypothesis to the law : that of bringing together the representatives of the platforms and riders, with the “hope” that the first national collective agreement of the 'gig economy' would be reached ”.
The initiative had earned not only the headlines, but also the services of the evening editions of national news. As had already happened a few weeks earlier, on 11 April 2018, on the occasion of the so-called Foodora ruling with which the Turin court had rejected the appeal of six former messengers of the German company, stating that they were not qualified as employees, but as autonomous. Judgment whose media hype had probably had repercussions also on the level of industrial relations, where the actors began to move. On 18 July 2018 the trade unions Filt-Cgil, Fit-Cisl, Uiltrasporti and the employers' associations (which had already included the institution of the rider figure in the renewal of the national Logistics, Freight Transport contract of December 2017) signed an "supplementary ”, Also welcomed by Di Maio, for the discipline of the figure. This implied affirming that the riders were, contrary to what was established by the first ruling on the matter, subordinate workers. However, Assodelivery did not appear among the signatory logistics employers' associations, which would have been formed only five days later, on 23 July 2018 (a novelty also greeted by the Minister as an "important signal"), gathering the main companies operating in the Italian market of food delivery. However, they did not have (and still do not have) an interest in applying the national collective bargaining agreement for logistics and in framing the rider collaborators as subordinate workers.
At this point on the political level the tables begin to follow one another, punctuated by the punctual announcements of the Ministry until November 2018. But the results are slow to arrive. Meanwhile, justice takes its course, and on 11 January 2019 the Court of Appeal of Turin accepts the appeal of the five ex-riders of Foodora (in the meantime acquired by Deliveroo) sanctioning their right to an economic treatment calculated on the salary established precisely in the logistics-freight transport collective agreement.
Three days later, the Ministry of Labor publishes a laconic communication which, significantly, does not contain any statements by the Minister, and announces again that "the rule that will regulate the employment contract of modern cycle-messengers" is ready and will arrive by March. But March passes without the law being able to find a home in a provision (in the citizenship income decree the law is declared inadmissible by both chambers for extraneousness of the matter). So Minister Di Maio is forced to return to the topic three months later, on April 28, 2019, that is almost a year after the first announcement, letting Facebook know that the rider regulation is (again) ready and that it will be included in the law. on the minimum wage under discussion in those days in the Senate. According to the Minister, the road to concertation has failed: “some unbridgeable differences […] did not allow for the signing of an agreement”.
However, yet another announcement was rejected. On 29 June 2019 the riders from Bologna will meet in the square to contest "Di Maio-Pinocchio". A disappointment reiterated first by the riders from Rome on August 2, when Di Maio returns to announce the imminent approval of a decree (because "there is no time to wait") and again by the riders from Bologna on August 4, when we learn that Lega and Movimento 5 Stelle have reached an agreement on a decree-law of which a draft is beginning to circulate. In a video on Facebook, the minister of Maio acknowledges: "It took us a while".
The rules that intervene in the food delivery sector are included in the decree-law n.101 containing "Urgent provisions for the protection of work and for the resolution of corporate crises" which is published in the Official Gazette on 4 September 2019, that is the day before Di Maio cedes the leadership of the dicastery to Nunzia Catalfo (the first Conte government fell in the meantime on 20 August). It will therefore be up to the new Minister to give notice of the new agreement reached by the majority PD-Movimento 5 Stelle for the conversion, with amendments, of the so-called “rider decree” into Law no. 128 of 2 November 2019.
However, it is not a question, as recent reports show, of a decisive intervention. Not only because the dispute over the qualification of the riders as autonomous or subordinate remains open, but above all because it is the norm itself that sets itself the “main objective” of relaunching the action of collective bargaining. That is, postponing the entry into force of the law by one year and thus leaving (more) time for the collective agreements stipulated by the comparatively most representative trade unions and employers at national level to define criteria for determining the overall remuneration.
However, the confrontation between the parties is restarted by the Ministry only in August 2020, i.e. with the approach of the effective entry into force of the law. And it is the first meeting of a new game. At the table convened by the Minister of Labor are Assodelivery, Cgil Cisl Uil, Rider for Rights and Union. The unions themselves speak of an interlocutory meeting, but record the availability of Assodelivery "for a debate on the merits in line with the provisions of the law".
As part of this reconstruction of the facts, the agreement signed last September 15 by Assodelivery and Ugl-riders was born in parallel with the latter ministerial table where, moreover, Ugl was not even invited.
The goal of reaching the first contract in the food delivery sector, identified by Luigi Di Maio in June 2018, is thus achieved for a sort of heterogenesis of purposes, outside the rooms of the Ministry of Labor and on the one hand, annoying the confederal unions , who had relied on that institutional table, and without the Ministry being able to hold the credit for it. To the point of suggesting, in a completely irrational way, a timely (and perhaps little mediated) technical note from the Legislative Office of the Via Flavia department, functional to delegitimize the contents and actors of the agreement.
Until that moment the story of the riders had not taken on such an evident ideological color, the pivot of which remains the affirmation of subordination as an interpretative criterion of the relationship between riders and companies. A relationship that the Assodelivery-Ugl agreement qualifies as self-employment. A message that in a political key is completed with the denunciation of a piecework remuneration (a much more complicated aspect as described by Giovanni Piglialarmi) which allows the detractors of the agreement to present the riders again as the symbol of the new exploitation.
Although most commentators and newspapers immediately joined this narrative, it is not absurd to think that the affair could quickly lose its share of interest in the general public. Of course, the Ministry and the confederal trade unions could agree to bet everything on the possible banning of the Assodelivery-Ugl Rider agreement by the judges and wait for the consequent entry into force of the law. But it would be an achievement more on the level of political communication than on the level of the capacity to represent and manage the sustainability of the sector. The specific public in fact, that of the riders, although distinguished by different groups within it, is able to understand the issues faced by the contract, including compensation. This could complicate the unions' attempt to denounce worse treatment conditions than those of the logistics system, especially if attracting food delivery companies to this system would then have the result of pushing them out of the Italian market.
In other words, by expiring the time available for bargaining to "defuse" the effects of the law, the confederal unions and the Ministry could achieve the only result of having treated a symbol only as a symbol: that is, without sufficiently taking into account the concrete content of the dispute and, above all, the real needs of workers in a sector that still struggles to shape itself around a peaceful and sustainable production model for both the actors involved (workers and also companies).
Perhaps also for this reason, and once the weakness of the technical note of the Legislative Office of the Ministry of Labor has been acknowledged (as argued by experts and academics from different backgrounds and legal policy orientations), the new table convened by the Ministry on 24 September (to which Ugl and Assodelivery had not been invited) was postponed until a later date.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/rider-assodelivery-ugl/ on Sun, 04 Oct 2020 06:00:04 +0000.