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Bolt, Uber’s European ride-hailing rival, has begun offering UK drivers holiday pay and a guarantee of the minimum wage on top of recent access to a company pension scheme, ahead of a court hearing next month on their employment status.
The latest changes, which came into force on August 1, means that drivers for the company will in effect have the rights afforded under UK law to workers, even though Bolt maintains they are self-employed independent contractors.
Estonia-based Bolt, which is currently preparing for an initial public offering, is competing for UK drivers who juggle work through several different platforms — including Uber, which already grants them worker status, as a result of a 2021 Supreme Court ruling.
Uber agreed to recognise UK drivers as “workers” following the ruling, a classification that grants them benefits including holiday pay and in some cases a pension.
Gig economy companies have come under growing pressure to improve pay and conditions for drivers and couriers, facing strike action on both sides of the Atlantic earlier this year.
They have also been fighting a series of legal challenges over workers’ status. California’s Supreme Court ruled last week that app-based ride-hailing and delivery services such as Uber and Lyft could continue treating drivers as independent contractors rather than employees in the state.
Bolt’s chief executive and founder Markus Villig said in May that the company was working towards being “IPO-ready”. In early 2022, a €628mn funding round valued it at €7.4bn.
Its new offer to UK drivers comes just a few weeks before a London employment tribunal is set to hear claims brought in 2022 by the GMB union. The law firm Leigh Day is also involved in the case, representing more than 10,000 Bolt drivers on a “no win, no fee” basis.
Asked why it was offering drivers the same terms as workers, while still calling them self-employed, Bolt said the new supplements were “boosting drivers’ earnings and providing them with additional financial security”.
It is introducing weekly top-ups to ensure drivers earn at least the equivalent to the minimum wage for completed journeys as well as contributions to a holiday fund. This follows the launch of an optional company pension scheme in May.
GMB national secretary Andy Prendergast described the new offer from Bolt as a “cynical, last-ditch attempt to shirk their responsibilities”.
The GMB will continue pressing its claims, he said, in an attempt to win drivers the right to the hourly minimum wage and holiday pay, rather than leaving this to Bolt’s discretion. If the tribunal decides the drivers are workers, they could also qualify for backdated holiday pay.
The GMB and Leigh Day are likely to argue that Bolt’s relationship with drivers is fundamentally similar to Uber’s.
Bolt has highlighted that it offers drivers the option to register multiple people to the same account and to negotiate their own terms. The company says this gives self-employed drivers the opportunity to act as “entrepreneurs”.
“Bolt was founded with the intention of empowering entrepreneurs, and our focus remains on supporting drivers to operate independently,” the company said.
However, the GMB said very few drivers take up this option in practice.
Prendergast said despite expectations that the Uber ruling would lead to industry-wide change, “that hasn’t happened to the extent we had hoped”. Meanwhile, backlogs in employment tribunals have meant it has taken two years for the case to come to a hearing.
“The real concern is the length of time it takes to get justice,” he said.
Additional reporting by Camilla Hodgson
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