If the home delivery drivers are mostly false self-employed, as dictated by a growing number of sentences throughout the Spanish geography, it seems logical that they join together and create cooperatives to carry out their work in decent conditions, thus increasing the economic performance they obtain from their services. With this premise, CoopCycle was born, the federation of cooperatives in whose heat a couple of Basque initiatives have emerged: Eraman in Vitoria-Gasteiz and Botxo Riders in Bilbao. With the same objective, but in the form of a limited company, the platform for the digitization of local commerce Blokal joins them in Mondragón.
“The intention is for us to expand throughout the territory through small cooperatives – with up to 10 members – that use CoopCycle technology to promote a transformation of the sector at all levels, because sustainability is not just delivering packages by bicycle”, explains Juan Latorre, one of the three founding partners of Eraman. “On the one hand, we want to dignify the work of the ‘rider’, who has been mistreated by the big platforms. On the other, we seek to offer fair prices to the businesses that work with us. And, finally, we want to promote a substantial change in the mobility of cities ”, he lists.
Unlike what the large platforms with which they compete, cooperatives establish conditions such as salary, schedules – they pedal about 4 hours a day – or insurance by vote. “We don’t understand why the big ones pay so badly, because you can live well from this,” says Latorre. And that they do not charge commissions of up to 40% of the value of the food they transport.
The objective is to charge 1,500 euros per month with working weeks that do not exceed 36 hours pedaling
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Eraman works with a flat rate for its clients, so that the price is not calculated as a percentage of each order but by its volume and the distance to which it must be carried, as has always been done in the logistics sector. «If a restaurant sends an order of up to 15 euros, our service costs similar to Glovo. But from there, the higher the cost of the meal, the more you save. With 30 euros it already costs him half, and many times we bring family meals of more than 200 euros, ”explains Latorre. “The added value is in the transport, not in what it costs what we transport”, sentence.
Gipuzkoan trade
Blokal proposes something similar, which emerged to facilitate the digitization of commerce in the towns of Gipuzkoa and which is fine-tuning its leap into hospitality with a system that also bets on fixed prices. “Our goal is to avoid drowning both the restaurants and the delivery men, so we ask that the orders be made a little more in advance and the delivery is carried out in a certain time slot”, explains Itziar Artamendi, one of the founders.
“We have to flee from the immediacy model imposed on us by the Internet giants, but we are aware that many times food is ordered impulsively and that this model makes us less attractive to the user,” he adds. At the moment, its distributors are on the payroll, but the objective is to collaborate with the cooperatives so that they become part of them.
Ihering Delirraje, founding partner of Botxo Riders, has for the moment opted for a commission model –25% to the restaurant and a fixed fee of 3.95 euros paid by the customer– more similar to Deliveroo and Glovo, two companies that he knows well because worked on both. «I was the first Deliveroo delivery person in Bilbao. The backpack hadn’t even arrived when I started working for them. At the beginning, the conditions were very good. They even supported us with false orders to pay us better, ”he recalls. Then the number of ‘riders’ grew and conditions deteriorated.
Delirious hates the algorithms of the big platforms. He believes that they only serve to enslave the delivery men: “If you reject orders, they give you negative points and, in the end, they penalize you until you are left out.” For this reason, he did not hesitate to follow in the footsteps of the cooperatives that have emerged in other European countries. “Our goal is to pay 1,500 euros net for a 36-hour day. What we consider worthy for a family that has a mortgage, for example.
Among the characteristic elements of all these services is your bicycle. “We have chosen a cargo one that allows us to carry up to 120 kilos. This makes it easier for us to make several coordinated deliveries in a single trip, ”explains Latorre. They attract so much attention that the cooperative has also decided to become an official bicycle distributor.
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