Gross. Wolt was in my mind one of the less amoral delivery services. It's delivery staff are (soon to be were I'm sure) actual employees.
Wait do you mean that someone like a janitor has all these benefits?
It of course depends on the country how things are implemented, but here there is a central insurance fund that all employees pay into. Then when an employee needs to take time off for parental leave the company applies to the fund and the fund covers the expenses. The company can then choose to pay out more than the fund does, or not. As is normal for benefits. This means though that every employee has a right to at least 16 weeks of leave at somewhere between 70-100% of pay. Details change the specifics.
Healthcare has little to nothing to do with companies. Technically you can sometimes get a discount by applying to a group scheme through your work, but mostly it is done independently. It costs about €170 a month a person. Depending upon how much you earn you can get a subsidy from the government for up to 100% of your monthly expense. That €170 covers most things you could need healthcare wise, although somethings aren't covered unless you buy addons, for example eyeglasses. Everyone is required to have health insurance.
I guess this is why lots of startups use 'contractor' services because things like cleaning are not their core competency but what you describe could apply to many early stage startups. In that stage many companies are in a vulnerable position and death is likely. What you describe would only further reduce the chances of the company surviving. If all we have are entrenched businesses that can afford these additional expenses we end up in stagnation over time. Maybe thats one part of the reason why we don't see many big shot companies coming out of Europe today? I don't know.
On the other hand, €170 a month seems very reasonable. From a quick search it seems like in the US the average monthly healthcare cost covered by an employer is around $1,100 or around $13,200 per year. This is in additional to the portion that employees may have to pay. This varies depending on employer and plan.
How would pensions work? That is actually what I really wanted to know about. Pensions would be an additional added cost and it seems like only the big established companies can afford to offer it.
As for pensions it depends a lot on the specifics of the company. There are state run pensions here in the NL. Additionally you have some that unions, or the government have negotiated industry wide. So if you are involved in hospitality, restaurants, and similar then there is a special pension that automatically gets paid into every month. I don't really know the specifics because I'm not part of said pension.
The state pension is somewhere between 700 (each if in a couple) or 1100 (if single) a month. This is then supplemented by private pensions which are afaik basically required to be offered by all companies, even if they aren't created equally, and as mentioned above there are special industry or union pensions. Then add in things like socialized housing (which is much nicer than in the US or UK), and the lack of need for a car here and you can get by much more easily.
If they are doing necessary labor, by what basis should they be excluded from social benefits?
Instead, all Wolt couriers in Finland have been "independent contractors" and had to have their own business name or do other paperwork, that because of how Finnish law works for small business owners, means they get cut off from any public health insurance, unemployment insurance, etc.
Courier work doesn't pay nearly enough to afford private insurance here, and since they aren't unionized (because after all they're not "workers" but business owners), they can't join a union unemployment benefit either.
There has been an ongoing attempt at unionization but it has been difficult to push through; the apps are fighting against it tooth and nail because they already run at a loss and underpay the drivers as it is. Wolt deliberately obfuscates how much couriers are making an hour in the driver app, runs propaganda articles on the customer app, and both it and Foodora have continued to fight against employee or union recognition in the courts.
It's become apparent for a while they are running scared, and running out of money. Quality of service has massively degraded over the last two years, as they've stripped support staff to the bone, manipulated delivery fees and ranges to nickle-and-dime customers, massive order delays and fudged estimates, started manipulating algorithms to push certain restaurants and promotions, rushed couriers causing constant order failures, which then mean more cost in customer refunds. It's god bad enough I stopped using it completely, because I just could no longer trust that I'd even get what I ordered, or that it wouldn't be left a sodden mess leaking all over my entryway.
It's an app that was probably going to implode if they didn't get a buyout and soon, so this move is incredibly predictable. My only surprise is just how greedy they went with the bogus valuation here.
This is not true. Finnish public health insurance is residency based: Every resident has it [1]. What you are probably thinking of, is the extra occupational private health insurance, that most Finnish employers provide for their employees (so that during work days, the employees don't need to wait in line in the public health services, but can get back to work sooner after seeing a private doctor).
[1] https://www.kela.fi/ulkomailta-suomeen-sairaanhoito-suomessa
It's possible to buy private insurance of course, a common solution for tech freelancers here is to make your own business and then hire yourself as an employee, so at least you can get an occupational health care plan.
But private health insurance here is a joke anyway, they don't cover a ton of things because they assume they can just refer you to the public care for any of the complicated stuff. Mine wouldn't even cover a CPAP machine, I had to get on a public waiting list and borrow one from the state, and it took months.
This is not true, for Finland. Residence permit for an entrepreneur [1] is still a residence permit. You get residency, home municipality, and everything that goes with it.
In he meantime it seems that their executive + lead level salaries took quite a hike between 2019 and 2020. At the sametime there were stories about how cost conscious they are. Funny.
(Just stating facts here, don't have an opinion myself on this)
[1] https://blog.wolt.com/fin/2021/06/23/taloustutkimus-majority...
This is why this model is very frowned upon by European societies as it inevitably leaves taxpayers to pick up the tab in the form of basic social security.
There's a reason most of their couriers are immigrants: anyone else can get paid more stocking a supermarket or driving a cab.
Certainly the freeing could have been done better, but the system before wasn't exactly healthy either. There was a fixed number of taxi licenses, and taxi companies were of course heavily lobbying against increasing the number. Since there were so few of them, good luck getting a taxi on a weekend night. Then again, if you were lucky and got a taxi, it was a shiny clean Mercedes (which perhaps tells something about the profit margins they were running at).
I think licensing system we had made sense, prices were capped, service was at least controlled and availability during all times was guaranteed. Ofc, this lead to some issues when there was extreme demand...
It would be ridiculously easy to just copy the US and do away with the social welfare system. See how many will actually save for their retirement lol.
It only really starts to become reasonable if you can bill yourself as consultant in fields like IT.