The Mexican delivery law has to do the opposite of what was done in Spain, said Gustavo Gaviria, a delivery man in that country who led protests to demand the protection of independent work during the process of approving the law.
Gustavo Gaviria denounces that the Spanish model destroyed the jobs that the reform promised to protect.
In 2021, the Spanish government approved a reform that forced food delivery companies, such as Uber Eats, Glovo or Deliveroo, to hire all their delivery people as employees.
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The idea was to eliminate a figure that in that country is known as a “false self-employed”, that is, a worker who registers as independent but who actually maintains a traditional employment relationship with a company.
In that year, it was estimated that there were around 25,000 delivery workers in Spain, but the legislation, instead of protecting these workers by making them salaried, ended with the closure of operations of several of these companies and, with it, thousands of jobs eliminated.
As will be recalled, the Mexican legislation, approved in December and expected to come into force in the coming months, contemplates the affiliation with the IMSS of those delivery workers who comply with net incomes higher than a minimum wage, but does not oblige companies to register them on the payroll, in a scheme more similar to that approved at the time by the United Kingdom and France.
These countries sought to give protection to delivery workers without prohibiting the independent work model, something similar to what is being done in Mexico.
However, the Mexican law still requires articulations that detail how some things will be done. For example, what happens if a worker was already registered with the IMSS as an employee of another company.
For Gaviria, the key to an effective reform is to guarantee the right of those who want to continue working independently.
In his organization, Repartidores Unidos, he explains, they have “at least one person who was with another organization that supported the government reform, now he regrets it.”
Gaviria presents his experience as a lesson: “The Spanish government did not want to listen to us and the unions did not support us either, because they defended the government model,” he explained.
The clash between his organization and the unions was so strong that a union representative went so far as to accuse him on television of being a Glovo manager disguised as a delivery man, he said.
Gaviria explained that he defended himself against this accusation and the union downplayed its accusations.
In an interview, he explained that only at the end of February 2025 did he obtain the support of a public defender to file a lawsuit against said union representative: “I would like to be a manager myself,” he concluded.
Source: oem
