Deliveroo, Uber and Amazon accused of exploiting workers with 'unintelligible' contracts

Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inbox Get our free View from Westminster email Get our free View from Westminster email SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy Deliveroo, Uber and Amazon have been getting gig-economy workers to sign “unintelligible” contracts that seem designed to stop them asserting their rights, a committee of MPs has ruled. The committee concludes: “Whether any of these clauses are legally enforceable is perhaps not the point: the intention appears to be to put people off challenging their status, including going to court, and trying to obtain employment rights that may be due to them.” In a highly critical statement, Labour MP Frank Field, the committee chairman, said: “It does seem a marvellous business model if you can get away with it. Turning to cab services company Uber, Mr Field – who in December had declared himself “troubled to note that practices described by drivers would appear to fit the Victorians’ definition of ‘sweated labour’” – said: “Quite frankly the Uber contract is gibberish.” The US-owned company, said to be worth billions of pounds globally, with 40,000 Uber drivers in England and Wales, was, said Mr Field: “Well aware that many, if not most, of their drivers speak English as a second language – they recently lost a court case trying to escape Transport for London’s new English testing rules for private hire drivers – yet their contract is almost unintelligible.” The Amazon Flex contract for couriers, published by the MPs, contains clauses stating: “Nothing in this agreement will create any worker or employment relationship between you and Amazon. “You will not make any representation that you have any authority to bind Amazon as an employee, worker agent, partner, or otherwise.” The Uber and Amazon contracts, Mr Field acknowledged, did not go as far as Deliveroo and did not explicitly demand that drivers never go to court to challenge their self-employed status.