PARIS — Jean-Daniel Zamor wants to add a new option to your late-night food order: unionized labor.

The French law student, who works occasionally as a delivery rider for platforms Uber Eats and Stuart, is leading one of Europe’s foremost campaigns to improve working conditions for an estimated 200,000 “gig economy” workers in France.

At the head of the Paris-based Collective of independent Deliverymen (CLAP), the 24-year-old argues that bike couriers — who can earn as little as €2 to deliver a pizza kilometers away — and other gig economy workers belong to a new working class that is largely overlooked by trade unions, and vulnerable to exploitation.

It's time for that to change, said Zamor.

With the backing of 34 courier collectives in 12 countries, he is bringing his struggle from France — where a recently passed transportation law proved disappointing to couriers — to the European Union, where they hope to convince Ursula von der Leyen's European Commission to propose new rules to protect gig workers’ rights.

Zamor’s solution: joining forces with gig economy workers in the rest of Europe to build pressure for pan-European labor-protection rules.

“We have standards that are so low that everything has to be build from scratch," he said.

Commission President von der Leyen, who took office this month, should be an ally for Zamor as she has asked colleagues to “look at ways to improve the labor conditions of platform workers.” And Margrethe Vestager, executive vice president for digital in the Commission, has said she backs the idea of granting app workers collective-bargaining rights.

Yet such proposals are not currently at the top of the Commission's agenda. Zamor and others like him have struggled to get heard in Brussels, partly because many of them do not belong to well-established unions.

“I think that couriers are now stuck between platforms ... and unions, whose priority has often been to use their resources to protect their members, rather than to take on risks by working to protect new people,” he said.

Zamor’s solution: joining forces with gig economy workers in the rest of Europe to build pressure for pan-European labor-protection rules.

Man in a hurry

When he met with POLITICO in Paris, Zamor came dressed in loafers and a slick coat — not the signature box-shaped backpack of a delivery rider. While he still works a few hours per week as a rider for delivery apps, he now divides his time between labor organizing, his law studies and writing a book about his experience.

That non-stop lifestyle stems from his upbringing in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-la-Garenne, he said. Born to a Haitian family that fled the island before his birth, he started working at a young age.

During his first year in law school he was working 11-hour shifts at his father's traditional delivery company. Over the next two years, he would work from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. in a warehouse before hopping on a train to the city center, where he would work a second job as a bike-ride food courier until 10 p.m.

“I think I can talk about work because I know what it looks like,” he said, adding that he hoped to complete his law degree in the coming months after a few delays.

During his teenage years, Zamor’s up-by-the-bootstraps personal attitude drew him to former President Nicolas Sarkozy, who had campaigned in 2007 on the idea of allowing people to "work more to earn more." But Zamor became disillusioned with the conservative president after he took a rightward lurch.

CLAP’s most successful protest happened last summer in Paris, after Deliveroo said it would no longer guarantee a minimum of €4.70 per delivery in Paris.

Disappointment with politics led Zamor to think about change in his own life — namely in the bike courier job he started working a few years later. After a few grueling nights in 2017, he decided to focus on the question of labor rights for other riders like himself.

But he wanted to be part of a new type of labor group — one that did most of its organizing online. Thanks to a campaign conducted on Twitter and Facebook, CLAP managed to stir up media attention around workers' dangerous conditions, particularly after a delivery rider was seriously injured in an accident.

Zamor's type of social media-driven organizing is "something that traditional unions are very uncomfortable with because it’s all about reacting fast, creating a huge dialogue online," said Jérôme Pimot, one of his mentors and a co-founder of CLAP.

With his help, Zamor has organized several protests via two prominent Facebook groups for which he is the administrator.

“One of the characteristics of uberization is that there is no longer a workspace where we can all meet, so social networks and platforms like Telegram and Whatsapp have become the only way to get to talk to each other,” added Pimot.

Paris to Brussels

CLAP’s most successful protest happened last summer in Paris, after Deliveroo said it would no longer guarantee a minimum of €4.70 per delivery in Paris.

The company also wanted to cut pay for shorter trips while increasing it for longer routes, which many of the riders have shunned as being not worth the effort. Deliveroo claimed at the time the changes were made at drivers' requests — a claim Zamor and his peers rejected.

The protests triggered calls for a boycott of food delivery applications, prompting the companies to band together as part of an "Association of Independent Platforms" (API) in October 2019.

The lobby group, which includes Deliveroo and Uber, wants to tackle the negative public perception against such companies by organizing debates and discussions on a new regulatory framework.

"We believe that whether you like it or not, platforms are reinventing work for many people who did not necessarily have the opportunities to succeed in professional world as employees,” said Hervé Novelli, a former conservative French politician who invented the "auto-entrepreneur" (freelance) status in France and is now president of API.

Uber and Stuart declined to comment. A spokesperson for Deliveroo said the company met frequently with riders, and had rolled out free sick-pay insurance as well as free accident insurance.

In November, the firm announced the launch of an initiative to promote dialogue with riders, the so-called "Rider Forum" made up of Deliveroo representatives.

While Zamor wants to start a new kind of labor movement, he has been getting attention from some of the big entrenched players in France.

The CGT, among the biggest and most hardline of France's trade unions, provided logistical help to Zamor when he joined his first meetings and demonstrations, while left-wing and communist groups are now rallying behind a bill to include gig workers in France's existing labor laws.

The legislative proposal was put together after Zamor and other CLAP members collected thoughts from some of the 20,000 couriers throughout the country. But those proposals were barely taken into account in the mobility law passed in November, disappointing gig workers because it failed to support their efforts to be recognized as employees in court.

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