The specificity of the Polish market of Platforms with delivery services is the existence of “Fleet Partners”. This is a company that acts as an intermediary between suppliers and the Platform. Officially, it is the Fleet Partner who employs suppliers, for which he receives a commission from them. This solution is very convenient for Platforms, which have thus eliminated all the bureaucracy associated with hiring employees. At the same time, they avoid responsibility – after all, in this situation, the Platforms are not the employer. But they are the real employers: they (and only they!) organize work, award orders, and determine remuneration. Partners simply take advantage of the Suppliers’ situation and offer them their alleged support (e.g. in opening a supplier account in the Platform’s application) and equipment necessary for work. They often operate in a gray zone, on the one hand enabling desperate people to find work, and on the other hand, financially parasitizing on their ignorance and hard and dangerous work.
A very common form of employment offered by Partners is a “rental contract”. The Supplier declares that he subleases his vehicle to the Partner (the one he uses for work), and in return the Partner pays him the remuneration received on his behalf from the Platform. Of course, less commissions, interest and other “costs”: e.g. activation fee.
For reasons of tax optimization and the need to disperse responsibility, Fleet Partners often operate as a network of companies.
Because there is fierce competition between Partners on the market, and in order to attract more employees, they can even go as far as manipulating information about working conditions and remuneration. They often use empty accounts in online groups to present earnings and working conditions in a better light, and to recommend the services of this particular Partner. And in the real world, they organize various events and picnics to attract young people to work for Platforms.
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