Related Articles
A Royal Mail delivery company is still wrongly classifying employees as independent contractors, years after admitting to the practice.
60 delivery drivers at eCourier – a same-day delivery subsidiary owned by Royal Mail – are balloting for strike action in a dispute over their misclassification.
The strike ballot at the majority migrant workforce opened on Tuesday – as new Labour government prepares to unveil its employment rights bill in the coming days. Labour’s new deal for working people – a package of workers’ rights reforms – contains a commitment to “move towards a single status of worker.” This is a watering down on its earlier position to “clamp down on bogus self-employment” by “creating a simple, single status for all.”
A promise broken
In 2017, eCourier admitted it had incorrectly classified Demille Flanore as a self-employed independent contractor, thereby wrongly denying him the benefits he’d be entitled to as a worker, such as the right to a minimum wage and holiday pay.
The delivery company responded by making Flanore and a handful of other couriers “workers.” The then CEO Ian Oliver also announced an immediate review into the worker status of the hundreds of other delivery riders engaged on the same terms as Flanore. Yet despite the public promise, no review was conducted, and the company has still refused to guarantee worker status to almost all of its couriers
In 2019 eCourier drivers launched an employment tribunal over their misclassification. Five years after the initial complaint was lodged, workers are still waiting for their day in court. The tribunal has yet to schedule a preliminary hearing date, and the IWGB legal officer told Novara Media that the union had not heard from the tribunal for over a year.
Matheus Malaspini da Silva, 34, is a Brazilian motorbike driver who has been at eCourier for five years. He said that the stress of the job impacts “every aspect of my life. Financially, I’m always tired, and there’s tension while riding. Debts, depression, anxiety, insomnia.”
Couriers are now balloting for strike action. They are asking to be classified as workers rather than independent contractors, the option to be paid £20 per hour plus mileage, and for the introduction of yearly pay negotiations.
Having been denied holiday pay as a result of misclassification, drivers are now asking for eCourier to backdate the tens of thousands they say they are owed in unpaid holiday pay. Drivers are also asking for paid overtime, an additional 25% pay for work undertaken during anti-social hours, and for eCourier to recognise the IWGB union.
“This is not a life”
Currently, drivers have to pay £125 a week to rent branded eCourier vans from the company and pay for their own petrol and insurance, leaving them often earning below the minimum wage once they have deducted their costs. Workers are calling on the company to end the vehicle rental system and move instead to a deposit model.
Ane Lima, a 44-year-old Brazilian eCourier, said: “I don’t have a life. I don’t have time for my family, I don’t have time for myself. The more time I work, the more expenses I have. My mum says, ‘you never have time to talk to me.’”
A motorbike driver at the company for two years, she works six days a week: “I can’t use the money to do something for myself, I just pay bills, bills, bills. I don’t have time to enjoy my family. This is not a life.”
Couriers – who ride pushbikes, motorbikes, and drive vans – are responsible for same-day deliveries, often of highly sensitive material and urgent samples that require special training to transport, including blood for emergency transfusions. The company’s clients include private healthcare giant HCA, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and hospitals including London Bridge Hospital, Princess Grace Hospital and the Royal London Hospital.
Although drivers are classed as self-employed, eCourier determines the jobs that they are allocated, the prices that clients pay, with drivers instructed on what work to do by a “controller.”
The controller exercises a high degree of control over how drivers work, with workers fearing retaliation by the company if they question an assigned route or reject a job. Lima said: “The controller would ask me ‘Where are you? You cannot stop to eat yet? I’ll let you know when you can stop to eat.’ It’s a toxic environment.”
“The controller doesn’t know what happens outside the office,” she said. “It can rain a lot, or the lift in the hospital doesn’t work. One time the [the controller] said, ‘you ride a motorbike or a horse?’” This results in couriers driving dangerously and rushing in traffic, which leads to a fear of accidents. “Every day I leave my house, I don’t know if I’ll come back,” said Lima.
da Silva said that controllers “threaten us and encourage us to break traffic rules to deliver faster. For example, they’ll ask how long a delivery will take, and when we respond 30 minutes, they’ll say, ‘I need you to do it in 20.’ There is always a lot of pressure.”
Although the minimum fee for a motorbike job is £5, motorbike drivers report being sent jobs by the controller that are intended for pushbike couriers, which have lower fees of £3.75 or £3.25.
Drivers also report feeling unable to take time off work if they are sick or injured, meaning that they work while unwell.
Paying dividends
Royal Mail acquired eCourier back in 2016, as part of an attempt by the company to “enhance its parcel offering” and expand into the same day delivery market. In an annual report from 2017, directors said eCourier was “reliant on its immediate parent company [Royal Mail] to provide the majority of its client contracts and the associated demand for business services.
eCourier’s website states that it is “proudly” owned by Royal Mail, with the brand having the “resources, professionalism and reliability of one the most trusted brands in the UK” standing behind it.
While couriers report having to work long hours and up to six days a week to make ends meet, eCourier turned over £25m in 2023, and paid out a dividend of £20m to Royal Mail.
In the company’s most recent annual report, it notes that the “principal risk” to the company was the “question mark” that continues to “exist surrounding the employment status of the company’s couriers.” It notes that a “change in the law and/or a finding of worker status against the company could have an impact on the cost base of the company.”
Alex Marshall, president of the IWGB, said: “eCourier, who are wholly owned by Royal Mail, are brazenly breaking the law by misclassifying workers and denying them basic rights like holiday pay and pensions. Despite admitting guilt, due to weaknesses in legislation and a lack of enforcement of existing laws they have continued to illegally exploit their predominantly migrant workforce.”
An eCourier spokesperson said: “eCourier offers new couriers the choice of being engaged either as workers (with entitlement to rights such as holiday pay and sick pay) or as self-employed contractors. Most couriers have preferred to engage via the self-employed contractor arrangement. We are currently in the process of reminding eligible couriers of the option to engage as workers.”
Source link
