Food delivery platform Just Eat Takeaway on Tuesday revealed plans to cut more than 1,700 courier jobs in Britain.
The company said the job cut is necessary to reduce costs in the wake of huge annual losses, International Business Times said.
The United Kingdom business “is reorganising and simplifying its delivery operation as part of the ongoing goal of improving efficiency”, the statement said in an email.
“As part of this process we have proposed to transition away from the worker model for couriers” in Britain, it added.
Just Eat Takeaway said its UK division will stop retaining its own couriers — and instead will only use self-employed gig economy workers.
Approximately 170 staff in its UK operations team will also be affected by the overhaul, but some could be redeployed.
Just Eat Takeaway revealed earlier this month that acquisition writedowns, the souring economic climate and rising interest rates sparked a massive loss of about 5.7 billion euros ($6.1 billion) last year.
The Amsterdam-based company was created in 2020 after Dutch online service Takeaway.com gobbled up Britain’s Just Eat.
The business afterwards boomed on the back of the COVID pandemic-fuelled surge in-home delivery, which has since subsided.
The group has also put Grubhub up for sale as it seeks to focus on Europe, having already slashed the value of the US subsidiary it bought for $7.3 billion in 2020.
