Just Eat outsources 6,000 of its riders and drivers working across six UK cities to Dutch staffing agency Randstad, to comply with stricter UK employment rules
Morgan Meaker / Wired : Tweets: @wired and @tashabernal Tweets: @wired : As delivery apps struggle with staffing shortages and a new wave of legislation that is forcing them to assume more costs for their workforce, an entire sub-industry of staffing agencies is rushing to help. https://www.wired.com/... Natasha Bernal / @tashabernal : NEW: Gig workers were promised more rights to deflect potential EU regulation... but companies don't want to employ them. So in the UK a sub-industry of staffing agencies is stepping in to do it for them... (short thread) https://www.wired.co.uk/...
Context & Ripple Effects
When UK and EU regulators began pushing delivery platforms toward worker rights, Deliveroo, Uber, and peers responded by seeking labor agreements that offer benefits without full employment. Just Eat has now gone a step further: rather than employ its 6,000 UK riders and drivers directly, it hands them to Dutch staffing giant Randstad, which becomes the legal employer across six cities.
The Wired reporting frames this as the birth of a sub-industry — staffing agencies rushing to absorb the employment costs that new legislation pushes onto apps already squeezed by staffing shortages. It matters because it tests whether gig-work rights survive being intermediated through a third party.
First-order effects
- Six thousand riders and drivers in six UK cities become Randstad employees overnight, gaining whatever employment protections the stricter UK rules require while Just Eat sheds direct employer liability and cost.
- Randstad instantly becomes one of the largest food-delivery employers in the UK without operating an app, positioning it as the compliance layer for the whole sector.
Second-order effects
- Rival platforms facing the same legislation — Deliveroo, Uber Eats — must either replicate the staffing-agency structure or absorb employment costs directly, feeding demand for the emerging agency middleman market the article describes.
- Delivery pricing and rider supply tighten around whoever controls the employment relationship: agencies can pool workers across platforms, echoing the last-mile finding that carriers should coordinate so drivers can move between meals and parcels (UK last-mile job allocation study).
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform work stratifies into three layers — app owns demand, agency owns employment, worker owns neither — which can hollow out the very rights the legislation was meant to deliver.
- The economics proved fragile: Just Eat later laid off 1,700 UK couriers and returned to a gig model, reversing a stance CEO Jitse Groen had framed as coming at the expense of society and workers — evidence that intermediated employment did not hold up under cost pressure.
The trend: Gig platforms are responding to employment legislation not by hiring workers but by inserting staffing agencies as a legal buffer, converting regulatory compliance into a new outsourcing market.