Commenting on today’s Employment Tribunal ruling against Bolt, James Farrar, Director of Worker Info Exchange said:
“After years of litigation, the ruling once again confirms what neither the government nor licensing authorities seem to want to acknowledge: a quarter of a million minicab drivers in Britain, most of whom are ethnic minorities, are trapped in an employment relationship where they are systematically denied basic rights. It is a shame that the government balked on addressing worker status in the current employment bill and should now do so in light of this ruling.
The ruling applied the analysis of working time from the Supreme Court judgement against Uber to hold that those working for a single app must be paid for all time spent with the app ‘switched on’. Because app employers have not paid for waiting time, they are optimised for market response but are operationally inefficient with worker utilisation rates as low as 40-60% of logged in time. This generates harmful externalities including excess congestion, emissions and fatigue related road safety risk.
Since Uber now has more than 70% market share, the rational choice for drivers is to concentrate all their working time to just Uber since they would be paid for waiting time and risk losing this by also working for Bolt or any other rideshare platform. This would concentrate further market platform power with Uber, potentially triggering serious competition concerns, but at least Uber drivers would be paid for all working time and Uber would finally have the correct economic incentives not to over supply the market with unpaid labour and vehicles. The absence of regulatory oversight has not only caused serious problems for workers but is now inevitably leading to serious market dysfunction. “
Background
See our recently released Dying for Data report for detail on the high cost of poor utilisation and unpaid working time. https://www.workerinfoexchange.org/public-data-sharing-report