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Magazine

10 April 2025

The tertium genus of “€œheterogeneously organized”€ work: on the border between self-employment and subordinate work

The ruling which the Court of Appeal of Turin n. 26/2019, published on 04.02.2019, expressed itself on the well-known case of the riders (otherwise called, “bicycle-delivery men””), is emblematic of the friction subsisting between the modern organization of work and the contractual schemes into which the working reality is forced.
In the specific case dealt with by the judgment of the Court of Appeal, the riders had been hired with coordinated and continuous time-limited collaboration contracts, to carry out the delivery of meals at home, with the use of their own bicycle, managing the organization of shifts and orders with the use of a smartphone.
It was precisely the organization of the shifts, which took place essentially independently of the riders, which was the premise that allowed the Turin court to reject the workers’ requests and not recognize the subordination of the employment relationship.
In fact, the delivery men were directly to communicate to the employer in which time slots would have been available to make deliveries and, even, after having declared their availability, they could in any case decide to communicate not to return the service and to do not show up for the round already established.
Therefore, the loss of the obligatory nature of the service, an element that characterizes the employment relationship pursuant to art. 2094 of the Civil Code, determined the Court’s decision not to consider the subordination obligation to exist.
The same Court, however, could not fail to consider that work performance, when actually rendered, was organized according to the employer’s directives, in relation to the time and place of execution of the work activity.
It was the employer who indicated to the riders when and where to deliver, elements which, according to the art. 2 of Legislative Decree 81/2015, entail the application of the “”discipline of the employment relationship subordinated also to the collaboration relationships that are realized in exclusively personal, continuous work performances”