The advent of online platforms signifies one of the most significant economic changes during the last decade. In the context of labour markets, online platforms are used to match the supply and demand of flexible labour. Examples are Uber matching taxi drivers with passengers, Deliveroo connecting restaurants, riders and clients, and Helpling linking domestic cleaners to residents.
While the benefits of platform work for clients are widely recognized, there are serious concerns that platform work leads to lower wages, excessive working hours, and ill-protected workers. Moreover, the data-driven surveillance capabilities of platforms over its users pose new questions regarding privacy, anti-discrimination and cybersecurity. The digital exercise of power that platforms exercise over platforms workers – as independent contractors – has raised the legal conundrum whether their relation should be re-classified as an employer-employee relationship, while a related issue whether the platform should be considered as an e-commerce intermediary or as a sectoral participant. These institutional challenges prompted court cases against Uber, Deliveroo, Helpling and Picnic, but courts left issues unresolved calling for the government to propose new legislation and regulation.
The objectives of the PlatWork-R project are i. to obtain theoretical and empirical insights in platform work and its governance, and ii. to develop regulatory options for the Dutch government and parliament given public values of decent work, social protection, non-discrimination, privacy and cybersecurity. The overarching research question holds: what legislation and regulation for platform work are needed given the public values at stake? As scientific breakthrough, we construct and apply a new multi-level institutional theory of platform work. As societal breakthrough we develop new regulatory options for government and parliament to consider, including templates for Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which function as platform plug-ins to digitally implement standards, regulations and protocols for data transfer with regulatory agencies.
