This fine is in accordance with the requisitions. Two former leaders of the platform were also sentenced to twelve months of suspended prison.
Le Monde with AFP
The Criminal Court of Paris condemned, Tuesday, April 19, Deliveroo France to a fine of 375,000 euros and two former leaders of the platform at twelve months of prison with reprieve for “concealed work”. The Tribunal followed the parquet’s requisitions in full.
“The concealed labor offense” is established, said the Chairman of the [SUP> E Chamber of the Judicial Tribunal by announcing the decision. A spokesman for Deliveroo said that the platform “planned” to appeal.
Delivero’s company was also sentenced to pay 50,000 euros of damages to each of the five trade union organizations of employees (CGT, Union Solidaires, South businesses and services, South businesses and services Ile-de -France and National Light Transport Trade Union) who had worked civil parties for “moral prejudice”.
The two officers who officiated between 2015 and 2017 were also found guilty of “concealed labor”. A third framework was found guilty of “concealed work complicity” and was inflicted a four-month sentence of suspended prison and € 10,000. This court decision should be posted, especially in front of the premises of Deliveroo, for one month, clarified the Tribunal.
A “Systemic Concealment” of jobs
In March, after a week of hearing – the first trial at the criminalization of uberer in France – the prosecutor had regretted the absence, on the bench of the warned, from the American William Shu, Co-founder and President and CEO of the British company, “undoubtedly” at the origin of the “system” having allowed Deliveroo to benefit from “all the benefits of the employer (…) without the disadvantages”.
Deliveroo is responsible for “an instrumentalization and diversion of the regulation of work”, in order to organize a “systemic concealment” of jobs of deliverymen who should have been salaried and not independent, had affirmed Céline Ducournau. The “fraud” put in place had for the sole purpose of using “less cool” the deliverymen, and no matter if some are “satisfied” of this status or “feel free”, she stressed, with reference to the One of the arguments of Deliveroo to justify the status of microentrepreneur.
“This is not the trial of the bad working conditions” or that of the “modes of consumption of our time”, had retorted in Defense Antonin Lévy, lawyer of Deliveroo France, for which the trial sometimes took tunes of “political forum”.
A hundred civil parts
A dozen bike or scooter deliverymen, many now engaged against the “system”, had scrolled at the bar to tell their arrival at Deliveroo, attracted by the promises of “freedom” and “flexibility” but had Discovered the “war” to get the best “slots” schedules, “pressure”, “surveillance” and the reprimands of Deliveroo. More than a hundred deliverers are civilized at trial.
The company had claimed that it only “put in relation” customers, restaurateurs and deliverymen, and denied “any link of subordination”. Highly disputed, the status of independent of Uber drivers or Deliveroo couriers is challenged in many countries by justice or, more rarely, by laws that have pushed some giants from the sector to offer compromises.