Another Liverpool subcontractor, who declined to be named for fear of losing his job, also had problems. He claims that Randstad does not compensate its remote couriers – who can start work from home instead of from the Just Eat courier hub – if they experience a bike breakdown while they are traveling. Working. “If I have a puncture or something happens to my bike, [Randstad] didn’t give me pause, they shut down my app,” said the courier. “So even if it’s an hour or two, it doesn’t get paid.”
In response to these allegations, Rachael Langton, chief operations officer at Randstad UK, said the company’s “customer agency staffing model in partnership with Just Eat” allows couriers to “make the most of Enjoy a combination of work flexibility and benefits including hourly pay (higher than minimum/living wage), sickness pay, holiday pay, and pension contributions. ” Andrew Kenny, chief executive of Just Eat UK, said the company takes the welfare of its couriers very seriously. He said: “Just Eat is the first UK delivery aggregator to offer a worker model in which transport workers receive hourly pay, sickness pay, holiday pay and pension contributions.
Platform economy scholars worry that the main purpose of outsourcing is to protect well-known gig economy companies — which receive more scrutiny — from being blamed when problems arise. Workforce issues inevitably arise. “Subcontracting allows them to say, ‘We don’t have a relationship with this courier. But he still believes Just Eat’s use of Randstad is a step in the right direction, even if the contracts are temporary, said Matt Cole, a researcher at Fairwork, a research group at the University of Oxford. lasted for six months. “This is a level better than the private, independent contractor standard that existed in the early days of the gig economy,” he said. “But it basically just climbs up a ladder of uncertainty for the standard contract of employment.”
It’s unclear how much Just Eat’s outsourcing will cost, as the company and Randstad declined to share financial details about the contract. But in Randstad’s latest results, published in October 2021, the company reported 57 percent growth in the United Kingdom (although it did not provide revenue numbers), the increase was much stronger than in any other European country for that quarter. Speaking during an earnings call, Jacques van den Broek, the company’s CEO, attributed this growth to logistics, e-commerce, and the gig economy.
The following month, Just Eat CEO, Jitse Groen, spoke at Randstad Capital Market Day—An event designed to share more information about a company with investors and analysts — and says the company’s main challenge is recruiting enough people, especially in markets with unemployment rate is very low. “Obviously, it’s been difficult for us to hire so many people in so many different markets, and so parties like Randstad help us set up those contracts and find those people,” he said. ,” he said.
Outsourcing is not a new activity for Just Eat. In 2017, three years before announcing plans to give couriers more benefits, they signed an agreement with Stuart, which still allows riders to be paid per drop, unlike like the people who work for Randstad. The company operates in general obscurity until it tries to reduce that fee from £4.50 to £3.40, prompting a strike in the British city of Sheffield in December.
