Just Eat Cuts 373 Swiss Jobs After Couriers Strike for Permanent Work
Just Eat confirmed on Monday that it is eliminating 373 delivery jobs in Switzerland, one day after couriers in Zurich and the Glatt Valley struck against the company’s plan to replace scheduled employment with a more precarious platform model.
The cuts include 193 couriers employed directly by Just Eat and 180 workers supplied through staffing agencies in Zurich, Winterthur, Bern, Biel, Fribourg and St. Gallen. SRF reported that the company’s statutory consultation had ended and talks over a social plan were continuing. Just Eat described the change as a move to a “hybrid” logistics system that could respond more quickly to changing demand.
The workers’ action exposed what that flexibility means from below. Couriers walked out during Sunday’s lunch and evening shifts, the busiest ordering day of the week. Swissinfo and Keystone-SDA reported that Syndicom said more than half of scheduled shifts were cancelled. “We are striking because we want to negotiate,” a union spokesperson told Keystone-SDA.
The union figure is its own assessment; Just Eat has not published an equivalent operational count. But the company’s confirmed job total is larger than a routine adjustment: it removes more than half of roughly 700 Swiss courier positions reported by local media.
Permanent jobs become the target
Just Eat argues that schedules fixed two weeks in advance make it difficult to cover demand spread across more hours of the day. Its proposed system would rely more heavily on self-employed couriers and outside delivery firms in German-speaking Switzerland. The company says the change is necessary for competitiveness rather than a cost-cutting exercise.
Unia and Syndicom reject that framing. They say the company still needs the same labor but intends to transfer business risk to couriers by stripping away employment protections. Unlike employees, nominally independent riders do not automatically receive paid holidays, continued wages during illness or employer social-insurance contributions.
The unions have called on cantonal authorities and Switzerland’s economic-affairs secretariat to intervene. Unia says more than 100 affected workers have authorized it to represent them. Workers are demanding that the redundancies be withdrawn, permanent employment retained and consultation extended through November 30.
The dispute is also legally uneven. Couriers in western Switzerland are expected to remain employees because of court decisions that restrict the contractor model there. Swiss law looks beyond the label written into a contract and examines the real working relationship. A platform cannot necessarily turn an employee into an independent business simply by changing the paperwork.
A strike against platform labor arbitrage
Sunday’s stoppage did not stop Monday’s announcement, but it demonstrated the collective power hidden inside an industry designed to isolate workers through apps. The couriers chose the company’s highest-volume day and disrupted the work precisely where the platform claims it needs maximum flexibility.
That conflict extends beyond one Swiss company. Delivery platforms compete by treating labor protections as an operating cost to be minimized, while marketing the result as freedom for workers. The promise of choosing when to log in can conceal a transfer of unpaid waiting time, equipment costs, accident risk and income volatility from the corporation to the rider.
Pamphlets has reported similar fights over wages and control, from German metalworkers’ warning strikes to South Korea’s penalties against delivery platforms accused of squeezing restaurants. The Swiss couriers’ demand is more fundamental than a better per-delivery rate: they are defending the status of worker itself.
Just Eat has confirmed the dismissals, but the confrontation is not over. Social-plan negotiations continue, unions are pressing regulators, and workers at other delivery centers have signaled readiness to join further action. The question now is whether Swiss authorities will allow a profitable delivery network to keep the labor while discarding the obligations that come with employing it.
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