Spain has been a litmus test for platform work regulation for at least half a decade. It was in 2020 when the Spanish Supreme Court found that a Glovo rider was an employee. That same year, a left-wing coalition government came to power, with firebrand labour lawyer Yolanda Díaz becoming Labour Minister. Díaz remains at the head of the labour ministry and has brought all the powers of her position to bear, even adding some new ones, to enforce her 'Rider Law', which codified the Spanish Supreme Court ruling, in face of the determined resistance of Spain's most famous tech start-up, that flat-out refused to comply with the law.
After imposing fines and back-dated social security contributions which could total €1 billion and pursuing criminal sanctions against the company's CEO, Oscar Pierre, the Labour Minister finally succeeded in bringing Glovo to heel in July, when the company began to employ all of its riders for the first time. Díaz is not finished there. Her Labour Inspectorate is now pursuing cases against Uber Eats, the last food delivery company to still hire riders on a bogus self-employed basis, to bring the whole sector into line.
Furthermore, Díaz announced last week that the Labour Inspectorate had already begun a special investigation into the algorithms used to manage workers in big companies like Amazon and Uber. The Spanish Government had introduced a law in 2021 requiring companies to share information on algorithmic management with unions, but Amazon has refused to share information with workers on how its algorithm measures productivity, so Díaz is taking matters into her own hands.
"We are going to remind the tech magnates around the world that in Spain, labour rights are respected and upheld," she said.
On Wednesday [12 November], an event in Madrid lauching Fairwork's 2025 platform work ratings for Spain provided evidence about the extent to which labour rights are really being upheld in Spain's platform economy. You can re-watch the event here (in Spanish).
Before we get onto the details of Fairwork's findings, it's worth noting the contribution to the Madrid meeting made by Lucila Finkel, director-general of new forms of employment in the Spanish Labour Ministry. Finkel spoke about the EU Platform Work Directive, reiterating the position of the Spanish Government that the final compromise text showed "little ambition".
Nonetheless, Finkel said that the Spanish Government had established a working group to transpose the Directive which has plans to go well beyond what is required of member-states. Remember, the Platform Work Directive is a set of minimum standards: member-states can introduce measures which build on top of this if they so choose.
Finkel said that the Spanish Government wanted the algorithmic management section of the Directive to be transposed in a way where the new rights contained within it apply to all workers, not only platform workers. This is something which the trade union movement has been calling for. Secondly, the Labour Ministry is looking at applying an audit of company algorithms (again, not only in platform work) before they enter into use. In effect, companies seeking to introduce algorithmic management systems would have to have them signed-off by the Labour Inspectorate first.
These are the most ambitious transposition proposals on algorithmic management that we are aware of so far. We will be paying close attention as to whether they make it through the polarised Spanish parliament in 2026, as the left-wing coalition government no longer commands a majority.
As for the Fairwork analysis, the first Spanish ratings were published last year and the results in this year's edition share much in common with 2024, summed up by the sub-title of the study: "insufficient progress". Glovo, Spain's largest food delivery platform, achieved zero out of 10 again, although the authors were keen to stress that the research was carried out before Glovo's shift to an employment model in July. Just Eat also merited the same result as in 2024, seven out of 10: unlike in Austria and Germany, Just Eat has not yet torn-up its collective agreement in Spain, although the agreement does not apply to the riders that Just Eat hires via sub-contracting.
In the ridehail sector, where all drivers are hired via intermediaries, Uber scored two out of 10 again, while Cabify achieved one more than in 2024: three out of 10. "The recognition
of employee status allows drivers to access protective mechanisms and employees’ collective rights," the authors write. "However, the outsourcing of vehicle and driver management to VTC companies weakens the effectiveness of these advances".
The novelties of this year's study include analyses of Cuideo, a home care platform, and Livo, a nursing platform. Operating since 2016, Cuideo carers are employed by the households they work for, not the platform. This makes it very hard to access their rights, with significant amounts of unpaid work and requests for work often not clearly defined. One carer, Patricia, told Fairwork that she left Cuideo recently because the platform's support and communication system for carers had "deterioriated significantly", leaving her on her own when facing problems with clients. Fairwork scored Cuideo zero out of ten.
Livo was set-up in 2023 and already has "55,000 registered healthcare professionals" which operate "in 115 healthcare centres across several Spanish provinces", with plans to expand internationally. Livo's main offer is short-term shifts for nurses at mostly private hospitals. The hospitals employ Livo nurses for the time they are working there, but sometimes this is just one or two days. In practice, this amounts "to a de facto absence of collective labour rights", a major concern in an industry where decent working conditions can make the difference between life and death for patients.
Livo may well be a pioneer in the nursing gig economy (something we have seen in the US before but not really in Europe) but for the time-being at least Spain will remain much better known internationally for it's pioneering attempts to regulate platform work, having consistently been at the frontiers of efforts by governments to rein-in algorithmic exploitation. The question is: will this regulatory push eventually translate into real improvements to workers' lives?
As Alberto Riesco, Complutenese University of Madrid professor and one of the authors of the Fairwork study, said at the launch, there are some signs that regulations are "bearing fruit", with most of the platforms under-study now operating employment models, which was not the case until very recently. However, Riesco was clear that employment contracts were merely "a starting point [for workers' rights], not a point of arrival". Employment "opens the door for improvements", he said, nothing more. It's up to the labour movement to walk through the open door.
Ben Wray, Gig Economy Project co-ordinator
