To Be or Not to Be an Employee: How Governments Categorize Platform Workers

• In Event: A Classification in Itself: The Role of Worker Identity in Global Labor Politics

Abstract

Most platforms characterize themselves as technology firms that enable transactions between independent workers and their clients. This characterization enables platforms to avoid responsibilities associated with employment such as social insurance, health and safety protection or paid holiday. The strategy subverts fair competition by enabling platforms to lower their operating costs below those of legacy businesses. It also has detrimental effects for platform workers, by depriving them of a basic social safety net. As the relevance of platform increases, their approach could significantly decrease government revenues, curtailing countries’ ability to provide the high-quality public goods and social services that are the hallmark of an advanced economy. This raises the question of how to categorize these workers. Our paper develops a conceptual framework to think through potential policy options and evaluate their impact for platform firms, workers, and governments. To do so, we build on Garcia Calvo, Kenney, and Zysman’s (2022) taxonomy of platform work which identifies three perspectives on how platforms reorganize work: narrow, broad, and systemic. We adopt the broad perspective, develop a menu of potential policy options to categorize these workers and examine three factors that may determine governments’ choices: the presence of absence of local platform firms that conform to these business models, the competition/antitrust regime, and pre-existing levels of social protection for non-permanent workers. We provide suggestive evidence of the utility of our framework through case studies of California’s Proposition 22, Spain’s Rider’s Law, and Denmark’s agreement between Hilfr and the United Federation of Danish Workers (3F).

Authors

• Angela Garcia Calvo

• Jimena Valdez, King's College London