New right to work check regulations for gig economy employers “deliberately leave wide gaps” enough for food delivery apps “to ride a coach and horses through them”, non-profit Worker Info Exchange has claimed.
Earlier this week, the Home Office announced “tough new laws to clamp down on illegal working”, moving to make it a legal requirement for delivery platforms and other businesses to carry out checks on couriers to confirm they are eligible to work in the UK.
Home secretary Yvette Cooper praised Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats as part of the announcement, for being “honest companies who do the right thing”. The aggregator apps last year bowed to pressure from the department to do more to stop their apps “being abused by illegal workers” by introducing “enhanced security checks”.
However, the praise is “beyond absurd” Worker Info Exchange director James Farrar told The Grocer, given the apps “are the real ‘rogue employers’ who have dodged employment and tax obligations for years”.
“The Home Office currently has a backlog of 23,000 victims of modern slavery waiting for justice, yet the home secretary is celebrating firms that are the root cause of much of this misery,” he said. “Instead of appeasing corporate interests and the far right, the government should stand up for all working people, regardless of where they come from.”
The delivery companies make initial checks on those who want to work for them, verifying their age and right to work. Once approved, the rider can subcontract their accounts to others. The apps have only since last year extended the checks to those substitutes.
Worker Info Exchange argues that despite the extended checks, “gig employers to continue to exploit migrant workers”.
Uber, for example, only requires substitutes to be registered 48 hours after they first work, “which leaves plenty of room for plausible deniability” Farrar said. Deliveroo carries out its own right to work checks for substitute workers, but require that workers substituting must also carry them out. Meanwhile, a Worker Info Exchange report on Just Eat in 2023 revealed that 50 workers were paid by the employer into a single bank account, which it called “a recognised red flag for modern slavery”.
“The elephant in the room is why platforms would even want to allow substitutes when people with the right to work could just sign up directly, and why the government is content with platforms delegating right to work and background checks to precarious workers subletting access to their accounts,” Farrar said.
“The answer to that is simple, the platforms want to maintain fictitious substitution arrangements to defeat employment status claims,” he added. “The government, in an overzealous effort to demonise migrant workers, seems all too happy to facilitate platforms to bend and break employment law, so long as they support the government’s war on migrant workers.”
Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats all welcomed the new regulations, and pointed to their actions against illegal working.
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