About two years of talking about gig workers’ rights later and European Union lawmakers have finally reached an agreement on the final form of the Platform Workers Directive.
The development could provide a major boost for millions of gig workers who work on digital platforms without workers’ rights. The EU estimates that around 5.5 million people currently working for such platforms in the region may be misclassified as self-employed (aka “false self-employment”), meaning they miss out on important employment and social protection rights.
The Commission presented its initial plan to reform labor laws to strengthen protections for platform workers in December 2021, introducing a presumption of employment for workers in a bid to reverse the chances of gig economy exploitation. However, the proposal has proved controversial, with heavy industry pressure from tech platforms such as Uber pushing for gig workers to be removed from employment protection in Europe.
There were also divisions among member states over which worker protection versus platform shielding they were willing to commit to. But after a final tripartite dialogue, which lasted more than 12 hours, a provisional agreement was reached.
The rapporteur and MEP, Elisabetta Gualmini, described the deal as “historic”, arguing that the directive would advance workers’ rights for millions of gig workers across Europe.
“It is a historic agreement because, essentially for the first time, we are building a framework of social rights for millions of workers in Europe who are among the most precarious,” he said during a press conference this morning to announce the interim agreement. . “This is the first act to deal with the labor market of the future.”
The tentatively agreed deal means that a presumption of employment between a gig worker and a platform will be triggered when two of a list of five “indicators of control or direction are present”, such as parliament Press release he puts it on.
“This list can be extended by the Member States. The presumption can be activated by the employee, by his representatives and by the competent authorities on their own initiative. This presumption can be overturned if the platform proves that the contractual relationship is not an employment relationship,” he adds.
The agreement also contains transparency provisions that require platforms to provide information to individuals who perform platform tasks (and their representatives) about how the algorithms that manage them work. and how their behavior affects decisions made by automated systems.
This seems important because, while the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) already provides certain rights to data subjects subject to automated decision-making to be provided with information about the logic used by such algorithms, it is fair to let’s say that workers who have tried to use GDPR to extract meaningful knowledge about the algorithms used to manage (and even fire) them have had to resort to long and frustrating court battles to try to extract useful data.
Advocates for employee data access rights will hope that the new directive makes it much harder for platforms to find excuses not to hand over employee data.
The provisionally agreed new rules will also prohibit platforms from making “certain important decisions”, such as dismissals or account suspension decisions, without human supervision.
Likewise, the GDPR contains the right to human review of legal or material decisions made through automation — but, again, gig workers have had to resort to court platforms to challenge them over so-called “robot dismissals.” Therefore, having an express law prohibiting such practices should force platforms to reform their practices.
According to the parliament, the agreed text also ensures “more human oversight on systems decisions that directly affect people performing platform work”. and obliges platforms to “assess the impact of decisions taken or supported by automated monitoring and decision-making systems on working conditions, health and safety and fundamental rights”. Therefore, conducting data protection impact assessments appears to be a difficult requirement to comply with the new law.
Another ban agreed is a ban on platforms processing certain types of workers’ personal data, including personal beliefs, private exchanges with colleagues or when a worker is not working — with the directive billed as strengthening data protection rights for platform workers.
During the press conference, Gwalmini also suggested that the agreed text in the sector on data protection consent goes beyond the GDPR, calling this part of the agreement “extremely innovative”.
Other provisions of the interim agreement include requiring platforms to share information about self-employed workers at work with relevant national authorities and representatives of those performing platform work, such as trade unions.
Measures to prevent platforms from circumventing the rules by using intermediaries have also been agreed – a practice that has been significantly strengthened in Spain since the country introduced its own labor reform in 2021, aimed at forcing platforms to hire distribution workers .
“Member States should ensure that persons performing platform work working through intermediaries enjoy the same level of protection as those with a direct contractual relationship,” the parliament said.
Some key details of what exactly has been agreed remain under wraps – and full visibility and impact analysis will likely have to wait for a consolidated text to emerge in the coming weeks/months.
Case in point: Dragoş Pîslaru, chairman of the Employment and Social Affairs committee, dismissed a journalist’s question asking which of the five “indicators” agreed by co-legislators can be used to trigger a process that could lead to the reclassification of platform workers as workers — saying they could not go into the “exact details” of what was in the text of the provision agreed last night on that point. So how easy (or otherwise) it might be to trigger platform worker reclassifications is still unclear.
Since the law is a directive, not a regulation, there will also be room for some variation between member states, depending on how they choose to implement it — but the idea for the EU-wide law is to set a minimum standard, leaving the countries free to adopt rules that further increase worker protection.
The final text still needs to be voted on by the Council and Parliament before it can be adopted as EU-wide law. The implementation period that has been agreed is also not yet clear. But today’s political deal signals that the train has left the station.
“This is truly a historic deal,” Gwalmini added. “Doubtful we could have reached such a good compromise. Because now we have the ability to look at what’s going on in that labor market, to shift the burden of proof, to make sure that we don’t falsely count these people as self-employed, and we don’t let these people prove that they’re not self-employed but, rather, it is the platform responsible for proving that this worker is truly self-employed.
“And so this is a real improvement for the social and labor rights of millions of workers. This is the kind of step we have never seen before in Europe. Reviewing algorithms, improving transparency. Our text is incredibly ambitious. And I’m really incredibly happy that we’re now able to provide protection [for gig workers]. Now of course we want there to be competition — fair competition — between multinationals, but we also want to protect workers who in this labor market should have the support they deserve, not be abused by these companies as was often the case in the past. “
