IWGB v RooFoods: Status, Rights and Substitution

Abstract

1. INTRODUCTION
The employment status of those working in the ‘gig economy’ is one of the most pressing questions facing employment lawyers at present. The trend in many recent decisions has been to find that people undertaking gig work have ‘worker’ status, and are therefore entitled to individual rights such as holiday pay, and the protection of working time regulations.1 This note examines Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) v RooFoods (‘Deliveroo’), which bucks this general pattern, both in its outcome and because it concerns access to collective labour rights in the gig economy. After briefly setting out the relevant decisions of the Central Arbitration Committee (‘CAC’) and High Court, we advance three critiques of their reasoning. First, that it is not safe to assume, as the CAC did, that the tests for ‘worker’ status are the same under the Employment Rights Act 1996 (‘ERA’) and the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 (‘TULRCA’). Second, that the High Court was too hasty in dismissing the arguments that Article 11 of the European Convention of Human Rights (‘ECHR’) should influence the personal scope of the statutory recognition procedure. Finally, we question the approach to substitution clauses adopted by the CAC as being out of step with the accepted principles on worker status, and suggest that a more lenient approach to the compatibility of worker status and substitution clauses be adopted.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Joe Atkinson: orcid.org/0000-0001-5207-2231

Catalogue record

Export record

Altmetrics