It’s 8 pm and Madrid is broiling under a heat wave. The sun has dropped below the horizon, but it’s still 34 degrees Celsius (93 Fahrenheit). Fernando García has just finished a long day cycling the streets, carrying groceries for Glovo, a Barcelona-headquartered delivery platform. García says he’s one of the lucky ones. He’s a contracted employee of the company, which means he gets to go into the warehouse he delivers from to escape the heat.
“For the restaurant delivery riders, they are out there all day, and many restaurants won’t even let them inside to use the toilet. The worst is those who work on motorcycles. When they are on the road and get stuck behind a bus, the heat is unbearable,” he says. “You can die out there, seriously. This is why riders need rights.”
The question of what rights riders have in Spain has been at the center of a rolling dispute between workers, unions, lawmakers, and big tech companies for the past four years. Companies have contorted themselves to try to meet—or skirt—rules that demand they treat workers as employees. Glovo, which is owned by the German multinational Delivery Hero, has accrued over €200 million ($225 million) in fines for allegedly breaking the law, and more could be on the way.
In Spain’s highly polarized political environment, platform workers have found themselves at the center of an ideological struggle. For the left, the riders symbolize the need for strong labor rights to prevent work from becoming ever more precarious. For the right, food delivery is a case study in the freedom that technology can bring for workers to be their own boss, as long as government bureaucrats and old-fashioned labor unions keep out the way.
Elections on July 23 will pit the ruling coalition of center-left and radical left parties, supported by Basque and Catalan nationalists, against a potential alliance between the country’s conservative and far-right parties. If the right-wing parties win power, the rights that platform workers have campaigned for are likely to be taken away in Spain. But the election could also have ramifications for gig workers across Europe, as the EU negotiates a regional law governing platform work.
“What we want is to have work that is secure, safe, and dignified, with rights that are contained in a contract, like any other employee,” says Felipe Corredor Álvarez, a former Deliveroo rider in Barcelona and member of the RidersXDerechos (“Riders for Rights”) campaign group. “I think if the right and the far-right get into power, a lot of the work that has been done to take us in that direction will be reversed.”
Just as in California, where Uber and Lyft spent big to support Prop 22, which classifies gig workers as contractors, Spain’s platform work debate has centered around whether riders and drivers for companies like Glovo, Uber Eats, or Just Eat are employees. In September 2020, the Spanish Supreme Court ruled that they were. The government’s labor minister, Yolanda Díaz, swiftly backed this up with legislation that became known as “the Riders Law.”
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