Algorithmic management and illegal worker transfer: what the Supreme Court's DHL ruling teaches you

You open your phone with your coffee half-finished and there's the headline: the Supreme Court says directing a subcontractor's drivers through software can be illegal transfer of workers. And you, who work with subcontractors and deliver with a routing platform, feel a jolt. Does this affect me?

Let's breathe. This isn't a ruling against software or against subcontracting. It's a ruling about who directs the people. It's worth understanding exactly what the court said, because the line is finer — and more manageable — than the headline suggests.

What happened in the DHL case

DHL delivered with its own staff and with ten contractor companies operating from the same logistics center. Every morning, those contractors' drivers received the packages and a PDA with addresses preloaded, wore a uniform and badge with DHL's logos (set apart only by the word contractor), and followed an identical procedure manual across all of them.

The contractors, for their part, provided the vehicles, the permits, fleet management, holidays, and human resources. On paper, each was an independent company.

What the Supreme Court decided (and why)

The ruling (STS of 27 March 2026) concluded that this was illegal transfer of workers. It rested on three ideas:

• Real-time control. The fact that each delivery was reported directly to the principal was deemed enough to establish direction of those workers.
• Appearance of a single business. The same logos, colors, and brand before the customer weighed more than the marginal mention of partner or contractor.
• Means aren't enough. The contractors providing the vehicles did not rule out the illegality: the court applied the mixed-contract doctrine.

At its core, the message is that real-time algorithmic management —organizing, assigning, and supervising each driver through the principal's technology— is qualitatively different from the supervision of the past, and deserves close scrutiny. It's the same line of reasoning we already saw in the Glovo case on employment status.

Where the line is

Here's what matters for your day-to-day. The problem isn't coordinating work between companies. The problem is directing another company's people as if they were yours.

Put another way: setting what has to be done —which deliveries, by when, at what service level— is one thing; deciding how, minute by minute, each specific subcontractor's driver works is quite another. The first is a normal commercial relationship. The second, according to this ruling, starts to look dangerously like having those drivers on your payroll without saying so.

How to work with subcontractors without crossing the line

There's no universal recipe —that's what your lawyer is for— but there are sensible questions you can ask yourself today:

• Who assigns the work? Let the subcontractor organize and distribute tasks among their own team, not you directly over each person.
• Who resolves the surprises? If the principal decides on every incident, you're directing. Let the contractor run their operation.
• Whose image is it? Uniforms, badges, and branding that blur the line between companies work against you, as the court noted.
• Where does the data go? Reporting every move of every driver to the principal in real time was, precisely, one of the key indicators.

The software isn't the problem; the use is

It's the conclusion we care most about conveying, out of honesty too: a routing platform neither gets you into nor out of this. What matters is whose hands it's in and what it's used for.

A tool like Routal exists so that whoever employs the drivers —you or your subcontractor— can plan well, give their team ordered stops and realistic times, and keep the end customer informed. It's coordination and visibility for whoever runs their own operation.

If you work with subcontractors, the coherent approach is for the subcontractor to run their planning with the tool, and for you to agree on outcomes —deliveries, windows, quality—, not the individual conduct of each driver. Having all your subcontractors' information centralized lets you be more efficient and flag it in time when something isn't going as expected.

Notice: this is general information, not legal advice. Every operation has nuances that only an employment lawyer can weigh on your specific case. If you work with subcontractors, this ruling is a good reason to have that conversation.

The good news is that understanding the line puts you at ease: you can keep coordinating, planning, and giving visibility to your operation. You just have to be clear about who directs whom.

Start with the simplest thing: check who assigns the work and where your data goes, and take those two answers to your employment advisor.

And if you want to see how to protect yourself against litigation with a platform that has specific read-only roles to avoid legal surprises, ask us for a call →