Platform workers’ employment conditions regulated by the European Parliament

“Ensuring that people working via platforms have a correctly defined professional status and correcting 'false self-employment'” : this is the spirit of the directive adopted on April 23 by the European Parliament, by 554 votes for, 56 votes against and 24 abstentions, to regulate the employment conditions of platform workers. All of the new rules were provisionally approved on February 8 by negotiators from the Parliament and the European Council.

A legal presumption of employment

The law thus adopted introduces a presumption of an employment relationship for people working via a digital platform, for those not considered as “officially” independent. This presumption is “triggered as soon as facts indicate the presence of control and direction”. Thus, Member States will have to establish, at their level, a “rebuttable legal presumption of employment”. If the platform in question is convinced that this is not an employment relationship, it is up to them to prove it.

This first measure comes after three intense years of intense lobbying from platforms, such as Bolt, Uber or Deliveroo. In 2021, a European Commission analysis revealed that there were more than 500 digital labor platforms, employing more than 28 million people at the time. The European body had estimated that around 5.5 million of them could be classified as “false self-employed workers”, linked to a platform but without rights in return, neither sick leave nor paid leave.

Mandatory “human supervision” for dismissal decisions

In March, the Labor Ministers of the Member States adopted the new directive on these workers, despite the refusal of Germany and… France. Paris was opposed to the risk of seeing 27 different national presumptions flourish, and above all wanted to avoid massive reclassifications which would cause too much dispute.

The European Parliament also adopted the rule according to which a person working via a platform cannot be dismissed or fired “based on a decision made by an algorithm or automated decision-making system”. For these important decisions, the “human surveillance” will be mandatory. In the United States, delivery drivers from the Amazon Flex service claimed in 2021 to have been fired by robots, via sending an automated email, as reported Bloomberg.

Personal beliefs cannot be collected by the platform

Finally, the directive prohibits digital labor platforms from processing certain personal data, such as those relating to “emotional or psychological state” where the “personal beliefs”. A relatively broad term, Article 9 of the GDPR prohibits, among other things, the processing of data revealing a person's political opinions and religious or philosophical beliefs.

The approved text must now be formally adopted by the Council. Member States will then have two years to transpose the directive at national level, from publication of the text in the Official Journal.