Employee, Worker or Self-Employed?

When you open the Uber app you can order a ride. When you open the Uber Eats you can order dinner. Both are run by the same company, yet in UK law the people who provide these services may stand in different positions.

To understand why this is the case, it can help to know that UK law sorts people into categories. Firstly, employees receive the full package of protections, including unfair dismissal rights and redundancy pay. Secondly, workers receive a core set of rights, such as the national minimum wage and paid holiday. Thirdly, self-employed contractors receive almost none of these. Uber has previously insisted its drivers belonged in the third group, describing itself as a technology platform connecting independent drivers with passengers rather than a transport company.

The Supreme Court however disagreed. In UBER BV v Aslam (2021) UKSC 5, it maintained that Uber drivers are “workers”. The Court looked past the contract and asked how the relationship operated in reality. Uber set the fare, imposed terms drivers could not negotiate and penalised drivers who decline too many trips. The Court also held that written terms cannot defeat statutory protections designed for vulnerable individuals. In addition, it treated working time as running from when a driver logged in, not just while a passenger was in the car.

Now if, when looking at Uber Eats, Aslam turned on its own facts, and said that the verdict did not relate to couriers who earn on Uber Eats. Couriers often have an ability to send a substitute to do the job, a feature that matters because worker status requires personal service. The Supreme Court gave weight to a substitution right in the Deliveroo case in 2023, where riders were found not to be in an employment relationship for the purposes of collective bargaining rights. A right to substitute can thus undermine a claim to worker status. This argument is however far from settled. Thousands of Just Eat couriers have taken their case to

tribunal, and the tribunal is considering whether couriers meet the legal tests for employee or worker status. The judgement is expected soon and the outcome could shape how every delivery platform is viewed.

For the individuals involved, the difference can determine entitlements to the minimum wage for working time, holiday pay and pension auto-enrolment. Without it, the risks of low earnings and time off, sit with the individual. Imagine cycling through a cold Manchester in winter with no holiday pay and no guaranteed earnings for the hours you spend waiting for an order. In contrast, the stakes for the company are financial and structural. Uber’s model depends on flexibility and low fixed costs. Minimum wage obligations, holiday pay and pension contributions, raise the cost of every job as well as back-claims, stretching over years. Uber has adapted since Aslam, introducing minimum earnings guarantees and holiday pay for UK drivers. Despite this, it has resisted extending the same approach to couriers and for good commercial reasons.

Both sides have serious arguments. Platforms say flexibility is what people value the most, and that reclassification could mean fewer scheduled jobs. Unions however, respond that flexibility cannot justify pay below the legal minimum. Meanwhile, courts are left applying a framework drafted decades ago to a business model that extends further than the model could ever have imagined. Ultimately, the lesson in this case is that in employment law, labels matter less than reality. The question is not merely resolving what the contract says, but how

the relationship actually works. Two apps, governed under one company and notably different legal outcomes evidences just how much hangs on that distinction.