The Spanish home delivery platform Glovo announced on Monday the dismissal of 250 employees, mainly at the company’s headquarters in Barcelona, due to the difficulties the sector is going through in a context of great “economic uncertainty”. These layoffs will lead to a “6.5% reduction” in the number of employees on the platform, Glovo co-founder and CEO Oscar Pierre said in a message to employees.
They will affect “mainly the company’s headquarters in Barcelona”, in areas related to “recruitment”, “data” analysis and “commercial” activity, the message details. “No messenger, order picker or front-line employee” will, however, be “affected”, specifies the CEO of Glovo, who explains these layoffs by “the current macroeconomic situation, with extremely high interest rates and inflation”, which ” reduces the purchasing power of consumers.
205 million euros in fines
This announcement comes less than a week after a new fine to the delivery group, accused by the Labor Inspectorate of having violated the labor code by employing delivery drivers as self-employed workers when they should have been considered as employees. However, according to a company spokesperson, the dismissals “are not linked” to this sanction.
The latter, for an amount of 57 million euros, brings to 205 million the total fines imposed on Glovo, which became the property of the German group Delivery Hero last summer, since the entry into force in August 2021 of a reform of the labour code. called “Rider’s Law”. This emblematic text of the Spanish leftist government introduced a “presumption of employment” for all couriers who use delivery applications such as Uber Eats or Glovo. It caused the hiring of thousands of messengers, but was met with the reluctance of some platforms, including Glovo.
After the approval of this reform, the Barcelona group agreed to pay the distributors of its online supermarkets, but kept the food distributors as self-employed, based on a new statute aimed at reinforcing their autonomy. This decision led the two main Spanish unions, UGT and CCOO, to take over the labor inspectorate and the government to speak out. “No company, large or small, should remain outside the law in Spain,” Labor Minister Yolanda Díaz said on Tuesday.
Source: BFM TV
