ZURICH. Just Eat couriers in Zurich and the Glatt Valley walked out on Sunday, the busiest day of the week for food orders, after the company moved to cut about 500 jobs. More than half of the lunchtime and evening shifts were cancelled, a spokesperson for the Syndicom union told the Keystone-SDA news agency. Staff at other delivery centres have said they are willing to join. The strike was called for one day, through the evening service until 10pm.
The demand is not a one-off bonus. The couriers want the redundancies stopped, a model built on permanent jobs, and the consultation extended to 30 November. “We are striking because we want to negotiate,” the spokesperson said. On Sunday there was no sign that the employer was ready to. The workforce took the decision on Thursday, after a protest at the end of October failed to move the company. The trigger was the mass redundancy Just Eat announced a few days earlier.
What Just Eat says it is changing, and where
In October the company justified the reorganisation by a change in when people order. Demand, it said, is spread through the day and runs later into the night. Couriers on permanent contracts, with rotas fixed two weeks ahead, cannot be moved around fast enough to match that pattern. In Zurich, Bern, Basel and Winterthur the plan is to use self-employed couriers instead. In western Switzerland the couriers stay on permanent contracts, because a court ruling stands in the way of the same switch.
That split is the part of the story that will outlast Sunday’s cancelled shifts. A courier in Lausanne and a courier in Zurich will be doing the same job under different contracts, because a judgment applies on one side of the language border and not the other. The union’s ask is to close that gap in the direction of the permanent job, not to extend the self-employed model west. Just Eat has not, in the reporting so far, offered a date for talks.
A one-day strike is a message, not a settlement
A strike that ends at 10pm on a Sunday does not, by itself, stop a redundancy programme. It does two narrower things. It shows that the centres can take a lunch and a dinner off the road, which is the only leverage a delivery workforce has. And it puts a deadline on the table: 30 November, the date the couriers want the consultation to run to. Consultations in Swiss employment law are not a vote. They are a duty to inform, to hear, and to look at alternatives before the dismissals are signed. Extending one is a real concession. It is not the same thing as withdrawing the cuts.
About 500 people are the figure the workforce and the union are using. It is a large number in a business that, in the cities named, is about to be rebuilt around people who are not employees at all. Self-employed couriers do not have the same claim on a rota, a notice period or a consultation. That is the point of the model, from the company’s side, and it is the reason the people who still have contracts chose the busiest day to stop riding.
What to watch this week
Three facts will tell you whether Sunday was a protest or the start of a dispute. Whether Just Eat agrees to talk before 30 November. Whether any other city actually walks out, after centres outside Zurich said they were willing. And whether the western Swiss contracts stay permanent in practice, or become the next file a court is asked to read. The orders that did not go out on Sunday are already cold. The contracts are not.