Labor Minister Olivier Dussopt was arrested this Tuesday in the National Assembly by LFI deputy Danielle Simonnet for having appealed a judicial decision that ordered the Labor Inspectorate to carry out an inspection of the Uber company.
“A union of VTC drivers asked the Labor Inspectorate to do its part. Faced with his refusal, this union seized the contentious-administrative process and won last November. But yesterday we found out that the Ministry of Labor appealed this decision”, explained the deputy from Paris during a question session with the government.
“Not in the field of competence of the labor inspection”
On November 30, the Paris administrative court had agreed with Brahim Ben Ali, president of the INV union, who had been demanding control of Uber by the Labor Inspectorate since 2019.
“Colleagues were being disconnected without warning, some were getting sick from the workload, so I contacted the Labor Inspectorate to find out what was happening,” explained Brahim Ben Ali, surprised at “checks on Deliveroo, on Just Eat”, “but not in Uber”.
The labor inspector asked Brahim Ben Ali that “auto-entrepreneurs were not within the scope of the labor inspectorate,” replied Olivier Dussopt.
“We believe that our inspector has fulfilled her duties,” insisted the minister.
Parliamentary inquiry into Uber files
Then he returned to a convention of the International Labor Organization (ILO), “which says that no one can give a nominal control instruction.” “No one can define a nominal target,” he stressed to justify her choice to go against an Uber checkpoint.
“The government defends (the platform workers) by supporting social dialogue,” Olivier Dussopt justified then.
“The ordinances have made it possible to structure a social dialogue, as I have had the opportunity to tell you about the result of the agreement on the minimum price of the race”, he recalled, referring to the minimum rate of 7.65 euros net per trip for a driver, a measure negotiated in January between unions and platforms.
This majority agreement is criticized for its lack of ambition and was signed by only four unions out of seven.
“They will be held accountable, even before the parliamentary inquiry into the Uber files,” which is due to start this Thursday, Danielle Simonnet replied, citing a series of investigations by a consortium of journalists based on thousands of internal documents from the US company.
Source: BFM TV
