Rider, here are the EU criteria for being considered employees
(Teleborsa) – The governments ofEuropean Union they reached an agreement on one draft directive to regulate the gig economy, the one that includes home deliveries, rental with driver and other jobs carried out under the employ of algorithms. The text will be discussed with the European Parliament with a view to final approval.
The regulation provides that in the presence of at least three of the seven criteria identified platform workers are to be considered employees and no longer autonomous, with the application of all the related legal, social security and salary protections. The regulatory proposal also contains obligations to transparency e monitoring charged to the platforms regarding the use of artificial intelligence and other automated systems in the management of employment relationships.
The platform boom
The growth of platforms such as Deliveroo, Uber, Globo e JustEat led to the consequent growth of employment in the gig economy. In five years the business volume has almost quintupled going from 3 to 14 billion. Today digital platforms employ 28.3 million people in Europe and according to EU estimates this number will rise to 43 million by 2025. Such a sudden growth has ended up overwhelming regulation, or at least anticipating it.
With the proposal for a directive, the EU governments expect to make up for the delay in the regulation which concerns in particular thecontractual status of the workers. Currently, 90% of European platform staff are self-employed who earn less than the minimum wage in one out of two cases and who are not paid for the hours spent waiting for a job (41% of total hours).
A directive to track down false self-employed people
The European Union suspects that one in five workers is misclassified: in fact, for Brussels 5 million workers in the gig economy would actually be employees. For this reason, the draft directive establishes seven criteria for identifying i “false autonomous”: three are enough to activate a legal presumption of subordination which it will be up to the platform to refute. Otherwise, the worker will be considered an employee in all respects, with all the necessary protections and cost increases.
Among the seven clues are the platform’s determination of the maximum pay limitsthe imposition of a specific clothingthe work supervisionthe limitation of the right to choose working hours and days of absence, the restriction on the possibility of refusing assignments, of building one’s own clientele or of carrying out services for the competition.
The economic impact for platforms
The reclassification from self-employed to employees risks having a impact economic significant on the balance sheets of the gig economy. Also for this reason, the announcement of the agreement reached at European level aroused the reaction of the platforms concerned. “The text voted today does not provide the necessary legal certainty to ensure that truly self-employed people are not forced into becoming employees,” he said in a statement. Uber.
The reaction is different Just Eat. “We welcome the news of the agreement reached by EU labor ministers on the digital platform workers directive,” he said. Daniel Contini, country manager of the Dutch-based food delivery app. “The path we started over 2 years ago, with the hiring of all our riders, is based on common objectives such as guaranteeing rights e safeguards for digital platform workers. We believe that this is an important step towards achieving a level playing field in our sector, therefore for a fair and competitive market, and we also hope that we can reach the final approval soon ”, she added.