Just Eat: delivery men demonstrate against a layoff plan

Europe 1 with AFP 5:21 p.m., October 22, 2022

Several dozen employees of the Just Eat meal delivery platform in France gathered on Saturday in several cities including Paris to protest against an ongoing social plan and degraded working conditions.

About "forty" delivery men participated in the afternoon in rallies spread across France, including a dozen in Paris, thus responding to the call for a strike launched Thursday by FO and the CGT, the two representative trade union organizations. within Just Eat, told AFP Jérémy Graça, FO union representative.

A job protection plan since the summer

The Anglo-Dutch giant Just Eat Takeaway, which currently serves 2,500 municipalities in France, has experienced strong growth with the development of home deliveries favored by the Covid-19 pandemic, but the phenomenon has since subsided.

Since the summer, the group has been carrying out a job protection plan (PSE) after which just under 400 employees could be made redundant in France.

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In 27 of the French municipalities where it is present, the model has so far been based on the wage earning of delivery people.

Eventually, the group plans to stop exercising with its own troops in 26 provincial towns.

Only the Paris region would keep deliverers on permanent contracts.

"If they want to lay off employees then they need social measures commensurate with the means of the group", claims Jérémy Graça, present at the rally organized in front of the Parisian headquarters of the group alongside a handful of delivery men dressed in the jacket and orange cap with the company logo, who came with their bikes.

"Put pressure on the company"

Among the Parisian deliverers, Alassane Sy, came as a sign of "solidarity" with his colleagues and "to put pressure on the company to improve the social measures linked to the PSE" ahead of negotiations scheduled for October 24.

"We are afraid of being affected in our turn in the future", he explains to AFP, deploring "a continuous deterioration of working conditions".

They want to replace delivery people with self-employed delivery people who work for Stuart", a delivery platform launched in 2015 then bought by La Poste in 2017 and recently accused of concealed work between 2015 and 2016, says Ludovic Rioux, CGT union representative at Lyons.

"They just want to pay people less to do the job!"

he storms.

Just Eat Takeaway assured in a statement sent this week to AFP to be "very careful about the impact of this social plan on (its) employees" and that the group wanted to "provide individual support" to everyone.

For the moment, "nine positions" have been offered for internal reclassification in France, according to Jérémy Graça.