Riders, the ruling: they are collaborators and must be protected as employees

The sentence 28772/2025, filed on 31 October, reaffirms the position of the Court of Cassation with regard to the protections to be recognised to riders and, on this occasion, confirms the decision taken by the Court of Appeal of Turin.

With respect to theseworkers, the particular mechanism introduced by Article 2 of Legislative Decree 81/2015 applies, according to which collaborations that are continuous in nature, predominantly personal ("exclusively", at the time of the facts that are the subject of the ruling, because the rule was amended later), and are organised by the principal are to be subject to the discipline of thesubordinate employment relationship. A mechanism defined as "remedial" by previous rulings, as it implements a "disassociation" between the legal qualification of the (self-employed) employment relationship and the applicable discipline (of subordinate employment).

The Court of Cassation rejected the grounds of appeal presented by the delivery company, which argued, first of all, that the use of bicycles owned by the riders themselves is a distinguishing criterion between self-employment and employment. In this regard, the judges replied that this argument is irrelevant, precisely because the employment relationship remains classifiable as autonomous.

The exclusively personal nature of the work, according to the Supreme Court, only disappears if the deliveryman can make use of other persons to carry out thedeliveries. This condition is not permitted.

With regard to the continuous nature of the service, the Court of Appeal correctly emphasised the non-occasional nature of the activity, repeated over time even if characterised by intervals and, in doing so, it took into account not the average of the shifts performed in a month, but those opted for by the employee, since the company had the possibility of assigning a delivery to a different rider to the one who had given his availability.