New open front of Glovo. This time in Italy, by automatically firing a courier who died the day before while delivering orders in the city of Florence.
As in Spain, Glovo's distributors are self-employed and their communications with the company are channeled only through mobile phones. The worker assistance service is automated and, on this occasion, the algorithm automatically sent a dismissal message to the courier the day after his death.
Sources from the Catalan company assure that the sending of the message was a mistake: "By suspending the account to protect his identity, an automatic message was mistakenly sent to his family. We regret what happened and reiterate our full support for the family."
The deceased delivery man was the young Sebastian Galassi, a 26-year-old design student. According to the newspaper La Repubblica, he died on Saturday night around 9:30 p.m. when he crashed into a Land Rover car.
The case has caused a stir among the group of messengers. Not only because the sending of the automatic message highlights the coldness of the treatment between workers and platforms of the gig economy. The Galassi case has also brought back to the table the lack of protection for self-employed riders at the workplace.
Faced with this situation, the Italian union CGIL has called a 24-hour strike for the group of messengers in Florence today, Wednesday. In a statement, he maintains that the case of Sebastian Galassi represents "another unacceptable death, in a sector where job security is still too often a right to conquer, just as living wages and rights are often a chimera, within of a system that pushes productivity to the detriment of safeguards".
In Spain, the company accumulates two deaths of delivery men, the first of them in Barcelona, in 2019, and the second in Madrid, in 2021.
