ETUC welcomes draft directive on platform work

The European Parliament (EP) has backed proposals to prevent platform companies from forcing workers into false self-employment and denying them rights to minimum wages, holiday and sick pay, and a secure employment contract. In recent years platform companies have lost a string of court cases over false self-employment, with the latest in the Netherlands where judges ruled “the legal relationship between Uber and these drivers meets all the characteristics of an employment contract.” The EP report supports a rebuttable presumption of an employment relationship for platform companies and

The ETUC has welcomed the vote in the European Parliament’s Employment Committee to support legislation on workers in digital labour platforms. The ETUC says that delivery riders, cab drivers, content creators, programmers, click-workers, engineers and carers are among 28 million workers who would benefit from the provisions in the Employment Committee’s report. If passed as a directive it would mean an end to the system of false self-employment used by platform companies to cut costs at the detriment of workers’ pay and conditions, giving workers the right to a proper employment contract. It

At its Executive Committee meeting in June, the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) agreed a resolution setting out progress with the draft directive on improving conditions in digital labour platforms. While the directive goes some way towards meeting key ETUC demands, the Confederation is concerned to ensure that there will a presumption of employment that digital platforms will have to rebut rather than a presumption that will have to be asserted by individual workers. The first draft report in the European Parliament, published in May, supports the ETUC in this but a range of