2023-07-20 19:16:38
He Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) has condemned the now extinct platform Joyners for employing 104 workers as false freelancers. The magistrates endorse the actions of Work inspectionwhich in 2018 confirmed that this ‘startup‘, specialized in offering services of home care to people in a situation of dependency, they should have had their employees as wage earners and pay them their social contributions. And, according to the recently published ruling and to which EL PERIÓDICO has had access, they ratify the fraud due to unpaid quotas to the General Treasury of Social Security (TGSS) for a value of about 100.000 eurosas recognized by the company.
“I am very disappointed, it hurts me that an entrepreneur who looks for people to get out of the underground economy and have some rights is persecuted by the State. They have been very short-sighted,” says Oriol de Pablo, one of its founders, in conversation with EL PERIÓDICO.
Founded in 2014Joyners was in its day one of the promising ‘startups’ of the Catalan ecosystem, with headquarters in the district 22@ from Barcelona. from the same generation as Globo -they were both born just a month apart-, if the firm with the yellow backpacks developed an algorithm to triangulate autonomous delivery drivers with restaurants and clients waiting for food at home, Joyners did the same but between caregivers, also autonomous, and families, hospitals, residences or insurers with a person in need of assistance.
Commercially branded as Joyners, but formally registered as Ageing Well S.L., this platform came to employ 104 caregivers in Barcelona between 2016 and 2017, as the ‘labor police’ have been able to prove. Which would be the tip of the iceberg, since Joyners was also active in Madrid, Valencia y Zaragoza and publicly claimed to have more than 1,000 ‘collaborators’. That society defended ‘social entrepreneurship’ and offering these professionals -most of them women- a way to practice without having to go through ‘B’ charges and with the support of a platform if they went too far with them from their homes.
All of its services were managed by a staff that was formally limited to eight office workers. Its founders were Paul’s Oriole, Mireia Llort y Xavier Esteve. How did Joyners ensure that they had enough caregivers to serve a business that exceeded 4,000 users? Recruiting “freelancers” and working partners from Factoo, which used this cooperative to bill as self-employed.
Quoting Glovo and the Supreme
Although the relationship between Joyners and the caregivers was formally one of partners and equals, the former required of the latter a series of obligations more typical of an employee relationship. For example, if a caregiver does not show up for a scheduled appointment, Joyners reserves the right to withhold payments and penalize him in the future when assigning the following services.
It also forced all payments for services provided to be made through its platform, under threat of expelling the caregiver from it and withholding the accumulated money. As well as fixing where and when the caregivers should go to provide the services, being the portfolio of clients of Joyners, not of those who provided the care.
Joyners forced the ‘self-employed’ to give two weeks notice if they were going to take some vacation -and specify for how long-, as well as prohibited, unless expressly authorized, the self-employed person to subcontract the activity to a third party. All of them signs that the inspectors considered probative of a labor and non-commercial relationship.
The magistrates cite the judgment of the supreme court which condemned Glovo for using false freelancers to prop up its ruling. “For this, it uses distributors who do not have their own autonomous business organization, who provide their service inserted in the employer’s work organization, subject to the direction and organization of the platform,” it reads. And it is that, replacing the word ‘deliverers’ with ‘caretakers’, the magistrates see a clear coincidence in the two ‘modus operandi’.
Closed after covid broke out
On January 11, 2021 Joyners entered into bankruptcyas published in its day by Official State Gazette (BOE). Its founders argue the impact of covid, and its associated mobility restrictions, as the reason for the failure of the company. Apart from the contest, the founders of Joyners have continued to challenge the Inspection minutes.
Related news
Six months after declaring bankruptcy, Barcelona’s employment court number nine endorsed the work of the Labor Inspectorate. Joyners did not accept said ruling and filed an appeal, which has once again led to the endorsement of the TSJC magistrates that this company used a network of false self-employed workers to operate at a lower cost. Now, after a new appeal, he is on the way to reaching the Supreme Court.
Joyners was not the last entrepreneurial project of two of its founders. Oriol de Pablo is currently known for being the founder and CEO of Vice, a chain of hamburger restaurants that has as a shareholder, among others, Lionel Messi. Xavier Esteve, another of the former Joyners, is its director of technology, according to what he exhibits on his Linkedin. These hamburgers, known mainly for their intense commercial deployment, reach their diners in most cases through delivery men. AND Globowith several pending macro trials for using its ‘riders’ as false self-employed workers and owing hundreds of millions to Social Security for this, is its main distribution channel.
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