On 7 February 2025 consultation commenced regarding the TWU Application regulating food and beverage delivery under the new laws introduced by the Government in 2024 to regulate contractor delivery ‘drivers’ in Australia.
ABLA provided an insight to these applications back in August 2024 and is now involved in a sub-committee to assist in guiding the agreement on these matters.
Implications for business
This TWU application has implications for:
- Restaurants, liquor outlets and fast-food outlets
- Supermarkets, grocery retailer and grocery delivery services
- Operators of gig-platforms facilitating transactions between food and liquor outlets and consumers.
Obviously, introducing regulation to a previously unregulated work activity will likely have implications for the cost of the work activity and therefore the service delivery.
This has implications for gig-platform operator business models and consumer demand for delivered food and beverages and accordingly revenues for restaurants, cafes, fast food outlets and any other business utilising these delivery options.
TWU Application
The TWU Application is seeking enforceable minimum conditions for gig-platform delivery workers including:
- Comprehensive conditions concerning the provision of assets
- Comprehensive conditions concerning the performance of the work
- Conditions allowing forms of leave
- Superannuation
- Safety training
- Paid fatigue breaks
- Minimum payments based on a cost recovery model
- Surcharges for things like waiting time
- A 7-day payment/reconciliation period
Insights
The Government introduced the new laws to specifically allow for the ‘gig’ sector to be regulated setting minimum standards for workers – targeting delivery workers.
For those from the transport sector who are familiar with regulated systems (such as Chapter 6 in NSW), this is a well-trodden path.
For the ‘gig platforms’ these changes will presumably challenge the current structure of some parts of their business model (low cost and flexible delivery) while food and beverage companies (restaurants, take away, liquor stores etc) may have quite mixed views on this.
It seems highly likely that any new regulation will increase the cost of delivery for orders placed on gig platforms and whether this ultimately makes consumers less inclined to use them and what this means for the platforms and the food and beverage companies is an open question.
Process
The TWU Application is not technically being considered by the FWC as yet but rather sits in a sub-committee of the Road Transport Advisory Committee which is a new body established to guide the FWC on these matters.
The ‘food delivery’ sub-committee is chaired by Mr Richard Olsen, TWU NSW Secretary, with the subcommittee being facilitated by FWC Commissioner Tran. The sub-committee is working to see if any agreement can be reached, and it is likely to function for some months.
Nigel Ward and Julian Arndt of Australian Business Lawyers & Advisors are members of the sub-committee and will be participating in all further sub-committee meetings.
Your Input
As Nigel Ward and Julian Arndt are involved in the sub-committee, if you wish to provide comments on how this Application will impact your business, please send them to info@abawyers.com.au.
TWU Application
If you wish to read more details you can access the TWU application here.
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