The Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) has upheld an employment tribunal’s decision that a taxi driver working through an online application was not a worker in Johnson v Transopco UK Ltd.
Chris Dobbs looks at a recent case, where a Taxi driver’s status as a ‘worker’ was disputed.
Chris discusses the facts of the case and the wider implications in Employment Law.
When is a person considered a ‘worker’?
One of the requirements for a person to be a worker is that they have to provide personal service, which normally means they do not have the right to provide a substitute.
In this case Mr Johnson, did provide personal service, but there are other factors involved in deciding if someone is a worker.
One is the body being provided the service is not a ‘client or customer’ of the individual. In this case the employment tribunal had decided Transopco was a client or customer of Mr Johnson.
What did the employment tribunal decide?
On deciding this the tribunal had found Mr Johnson could provide his services as little or often as he wanted and could also decide when he did so.
Transopco had no control over him at all in the way he provided his services.
The fact only a small proportion of his work was provided through the application (the rest of the time he was working for himself) was also a factor.
Are taxi drivers considered workers?
In this case, Mr Johnson had been working on his own account as a taxi driver in London from 2014.
He joined the Mytaxi application in February 2017 and between then and April 2018 he earner just over £4,500 from the application.
In comparison he earned over £30,000 during that same period working for himself. Having brought claims in the employment tribunal Mr Johnson had to show he was a worker of Transopco and not self-employed.
When is someone self-employed and not a worker?
The amount of work he did on the application amounted to less than 15% of his overall income.
While he could be penalised if he cancelled too many journeys using the application, the employment tribunal did not think this amounted to enough control for Mr Johnson to be a worker.
The only reason for the penalties was to maintain customer service. Mr Johnson appealed to the EAT.
What did the EAT decide?
The EAT decided that the employment tribunal’s reasoning was sound and upheld their decision.
The employment tribunal was entitled to its view and the EAT would not interfere with the judgment.
As Chris highlights below, this case may be surprising considering the outcome of the Uber Drivers ruling last year.
Read Chris' thoughts on the relevance of both cases below…
A specialist Employment Solicitor’s View
Chris Dobbs says: “Many may be surprised at the outcome of this case, given the Uber decision before it. It does demonstrate that employment status cases are very fact-sensitive.
There are a lot of factors that the employment tribunal will take into account and here they felt the fact Mr Johnson only did a small amount of his total work using the Mytaxi application was significant, as was the lack of control over him by Transopco.”
Read our related articles on worker status
- Frettens advise in key taxi worker status case
- Supreme Court - Uber drivers are workers
- Moped courier a 'worker' and not self-employed despite limited substitution
- TUPE Transfers and 'Workers'
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