Labor Day last week was a day of happiness for Michiel Muller. Not only did Picnic open a new, much larger facility in Amsterdam-Zuidoost on Wednesday – with which it can in principle serve more than 200,000 families in the capital region with three other delivery centers – a letter from outgoing Minister Karien van Gennip of Social Affairs was also received. mat.
It grants web supermarkets such as Picnic an exception to the supermarket collective labor agreement on the condition that they sit down with regular supermarket companies, trade unions and a mediator to agree on a collective labor agreement in which justice is done to all parties.
According to Muller, this means so much more than just a boost for the business operations of the Amsterdam web supermarket. According to him, falling under the supermarket collective labor agreement means much higher costs and therefore higher prices. And a perpetuation of some ‘abuses’: the underpayment of supermarket staff. massive deployment of minors, and the deployment of migrant workers by regular supermarkets.
Pushing out of the market
Muller has been fighting about this for seven years with established supermarkets – especially those run by independent retailers – and the FNV trade union. They believe that Picnic is unfairly competing with them by evading their collective labor agreement. The web supermarket has been using the e-commerce collective labor agreement set up in part by Picnic since 2020.
According to Muller it is exactly the other way around. “We pay our 15,000 employees an average of 17 euros per hour, the regular supermarkets 14 euros.” This is because working hours and activities are drastically different.
And where supermarkets, he says, wholesale in underage shelf stackers and online distribution centers full of migrant workers, at Picnic all staff over the age of 18 are employed (via a payroll construction, ed.) including social security and pension provision.
“If we fall under the supermarket collective labor agreement, our average wage will increase to 20 euros per hour, while at the supermarkets it will remain 14 euros.” And according to the serial entrepreneur, that is the root of the conflict: “These supermarket entrepreneurs, who hardly do home delivery themselves, want to push us out of the market as a competitor.”
“We’re not wrong, they’re wrong. They pay 80 percent of their staff less than half the minimum wage. By employing minors and removing them when they turn 18. They have to get to those 17 euros.”
Underpaid work
With Picnic’s move to Germany since 2018, the scales fell from Muller’s eyes. “Minimum wage is paid everywhere there. An 18-year-old at Lidl in Aachen earns twice as much as his peer at Lidl Kerkrade.”
“In Germany you see adults working in supermarkets everywhere and people with little education. We hardly know that in the Netherlands. We are the exception in Europe by allowing young people to do underpaid work and then dismissing them because of their age.”
This again brings Muller into conflict with the established supermarket world, especially after Van Gennip’s dispensation. They see delivering groceries, whether by an electric delivery van or by a brick-and-mortar supermarket, as one and the same activity.
Fair wages
He hopes for the unions. “Fair wages, permanent contracts, no temping hassles or migrant workers is what unions are fighting for, right? We have been offering that since 2015.”
And it’s not just about web supers. “The Amazons, Alibabas, Temu’s and Zalando’s enter the Netherlands without a collective labor agreement. Let’s expand our e-commerce collective labor agreement to fill in that blank space.” FNV dismissed this assistance in this newspaper last week as a ‘charm offensive’.
The fight against web supers seems like a rearguard action. Picnic, the largest grocery delivery company after ah.nl, now covers 80 percent of our country. “We will probably add more cities, villages and neighborhoods,” says Muller while the 31 delivery carts are being filled in the brand new Amsterdam delivery hub, “as we are now doing with Weesp and Muiden by opening this hub. But that last 20 percent becomes difficult. These are rural areas where free delivery is often not possible.”
Robot warehouse
But Picnic is not finished. The company is developing into Picnic 2.0 in our country. While the ordered groceries have been collected manually since the early years, Picnic is now investing in robots. “That allows us to pick more orders and faster,” says Muller.
There is little difference in terms of employment. “500 people still work in our first robot warehouse in Utrecht (which was set up two years ago for 100 million.”
A second version will soon open in Oberhausen, Germany, followed by number 3 in Dordrecht. Picnic will then close its less than three-year-old distribution center in Zaandam, which was recently the scene of a mouse plague. The company ultimately wants to cover the country with four or five robot centers.
In Germany, Berlin and Hamburg have now been added, with Hannover and Frankfurt on the nomination, on the way to covering 50 percent of the country. And in France, expansion is taking place around Lille and Paris.
Because of all these investments, Picnic, which will have a turnover of 1.25 billion in 2023, is still making a loss. At the beginning of this year, Picnic raised another 355 million euros in investment money.
Price spoilage: ‘Dutch cats do not eat blue chunks’
Employment conditions are not the only battleground for Picnic CEO Muller. Prices of A-brands are another point of contention – just like with other supermarkets.
“Brand manufacturers often produce in 1 or 2 places in Europe, but then charge different prices for each country.” And that is why they are sky high in the Netherlands, a small market for giants such as Unilever, Nestlé or Procter & Gamble.
Picnic, which purchases together with the German market leader Edeka – an alliance that Jumbo recently joined – can see exactly the price differences there. “The difference is enormous.”
“I then say: I would like to have it for that German price, but I would like to take it to the Netherlands. They do not. Then you get all kinds of nonsense stories. All intended to circumvent the rules for the internal European market.”
Take a jar of Danone. In the Netherlands it contains 125 grams, in Germany 115 grams. “They do not deliver that cheaper jar to the Netherlands. In Germany, the Lays pepper chips are red, natural yellow. Consciously different from ours. Cat food with salmon is green here, blue in France. That producer almost says that Dutch cats do not eat from a blue bag.”
The supermarket sector, this time including Muller, recently raised this issue, supported by reports, in The Hague and Brussels. “These producers, who earn five times more on a product than we do as a supermarket, frustrate the free European market. That’s really becoming a theme. Only that won’t be arranged tomorrow.” Muller is not afraid that A-brands, such as recently Jumbo, will boycott the web supermarket.
He is not only targeting the big brands. “We also want to get rid of the Dutch rules that require us to re-sticker all foreign packaging.”
“The Netherlands is stricter than the European rules. Everything must be explained in detail in Dutch. That encourages these kinds of practices. Those producers put 15 languages on such a bottle, but not Dutch. So that they can charge more for a bottle with Dutch text.”
About the author: Herman Stil is economics editor at Het Parool and writes about Amsterdam business, aviation and Schiphol, shops and the tech sector, among other things.
Tags: War grocery land pays staff Picnic top man wrong wrong
-
