Europe inches closer to insisting gig workers are treated as employees
theregister.comWhat is the difference between a gig worker versus a freelancer? Is this going to hurt your ability to be freelance? I would love to understand this better in the proposal as it wasn't clear to me how they define this difference.
I think the subtitle summarises it pretty good: "If it looks like a job, and is supervised like a job, it'll be classified as a job". The bullet points down the article make it even clearer.
Freelancing implies some independence/freedom which most uber or deliveroo drivers don't have in practice.
For example in France you can't declare yourself as a freelancer if you have a single client which dictates your working hours and employs you for very loosely defined missions, because for all intent and purpose you'd be an employee.
>Freelancing implies some independence/freedom which most uber or deliveroo drivers don't have in practice.
>For example in France you can't declare yourself as a freelancer if you have a single client which dictates your working hours and employs you for very loosely defined missions, because for all intent and purpose you'd be an employee.
Is this some European thing I'm no aware of? Gig workers can accept jobs from multiple apps and log on anytime they want.
>Is this some European thing I'm no aware of? Gig workers can accept jobs from multiple apps and log on anytime they want.
Don't know about it only being a euro-thang, but what you describe is almost the very definition of gig-working. Except, they often can't do 'anytime they want'.
> Gig workers can accept jobs from multiple apps and log on anytime they want.
That's what I'm saying, not only you can but you're obligated to in most cases. Otherwise it's most likely a scheme for you and/or the employer to get out of various legal processes
If you do 9 to 5 everyday for the same company for long uninterrupted periods it's not a gig anymore
Going back to gig workers, it sounds like you agree that they're actually contractors and shouldn't be classed as employees? All the stuff you described isn't very applicable to gig workers.
Some are some aren't. The uber driver with 10k trips per year isn't, the student delivering food on saturday is.
What about a gig worker who works whenever they feel like, get up to 150 hours per month overall, but also use 3 different Uber like companies to constantly compare which one has better offering at the time?
The law will apply on a case by case basis, it's not a decision to force all gig workers to be treated as employees. TFA gives the criteria by which each case will be evaluated.
Are they penalized for turning down trips that don't meet their standards? Are they given the agency to set their rates?
But they don't dictate the working hours. Also many of the gig workers around my area work for multiple competing companies. We have multiple different Uber's and many are using multiple of those.
Gotcha, so what is preventing these companies from forcing the uber/delieroo drivers to be freelance solo classification?
IE, where are the teeth?
The problem with saying "like x" is it requires court cases and means enforcement is impossible. Because the gov has to challenge and challenge and challenge because it is so vague as "like x".
Could they not just tax gig workers on an hourly basis and then comp the workers with "employment" like services?
> so what is preventing these companies from forcing the uber/delieroo drivers to be freelance solo classification?
Right now nothing, that's why they want to change it.
You just have to set the rules. For example when I get an uber I often check the driver profile, someone with 27 000 trips in 3 years isn't a gig worker. When you have a student delivering food 3 hours a week to pay his friday night bar trip it's completely different. Right now both are in the same category
So it's only gig working if you work full time? What about other freelancers that work full time? Should they be classed as employees too, or are we singling out gig workers here?
> So it's only gig working if you work full time?
Nope
> What about other freelancers that work full time? Should they be classed as employees too, or are we singling out gig workers here?
These questions are answered in the article
The article says
>It also sets rules that mean digital platform workers will be considered employees if at least two of the following five conditions are met:
>* If the employer caps worker payments;
>* If the employer supervises worker performance, directly or electronically;
>* If the employer has control over the distribution or allocation of tasks;
>* If the employer has control over working conditions and working hours;
>* If the employer limits discretion about how work is done, appearance, or conduct.
None of these are valid reasons to differentiate between "someone with 27 000 trips in 3 years" and "a student delivering food 3 hours a week to pay his friday night bar trip"
Also all of those rules are so vague, it could be argued in any case someone is doing some of that in any sort of deal.
1. Company A has a max budget for contractor B or project B.
2. In most cases performance is supervised at least to some extent?
3. Not sure what that exactly means. What are tasks? What is control of distribution or allocation?
4. What does control mean? What if they have a dynamic pricing rate which yields higher payment on certain times and less on other times?
5. When a contractor hires a subcontractor or any sort of contracting is done, in most cases there's also expectation of such things.
By the way if you make those rules, people will 100% start to play around them in order to be categorised in A or B way.
> Also all of those rules are so vague,
Still less vague than the current regulation, and it'll allow thousands of people to get social benefits/vacations/retirement/&c.
Aren't they just trading their income for those benefits though?
> None of these are valid reasons
Nothing is naturally valid, that's why we make laws, and then things become valid or not. Some countries have laws regarding what is contracting and what isn't contracting, in the case of Uber drivers working solely for uber, making 100% of their income from Uber, &c. it's clear cut, and that's going to be the majority of cases
This applies only if the firm is present in France. If you contract for a firm in say Germany, afaik the rule no longer applies
Europe != EU.
More reasons for Europe to get less investments
The real question is: is that the type of investment and investors you want in the EU?
This isn't just about investors, it's also about getting access to systems that people with employment contracts have, that gig workers don't have.
Why should they be treated as second-class citizens?
So not only do companies save on employment expenses, and offload them to the gig workers (who are underpaid generally), but they also have limited access to the market for things like credit.
Poor investors, right?
If investment means worker exploitation, all the better.
If the "investment" is just another scheme to provide downward mobility to middle-income households, Europe is probably better off.
This is probably bad news on aggregate
The positive intent to give citizens greater protections is laudable but gig working is not always a straight forward 'capitalism bad' exploitation as it is often characterised.
For many, it is the only type of job / income they can secure (i.e recent immigrant) and otherwise would be locked out of the legal economy altogether and will transition into the _illegal_ economy for want of options. For others, gig work provides the sort of flexibility not available in many traditional blue collar FTE (i.e they are primary carers, maybe can't commit to rigid schedule). For yet others it is an opportunity to _escape_ the obligations of badly paid, physically challenging FTE - last Uber I took was in Eindhoven, driver was a long time resident in Netherlands. Left Phillips factory line job to Uber - better hours, sees his kid, doesn't break his back.
All types of workers need better protections all round, but legislating to eliminate a category which is self evidently popular with _some_ workers is not the way to do it
Why should we as a society, or even worse, poor immigrats, subsidise a company's bad business model.
If you want to compete for labour and customers in a society, you should follow the rules.
If you cannot provide food deliveries whilst paying your employees fairly, then you should not be in business.
Even worse if you are skimming minimum-wage worker's pay to produce a 10X VC return.
>If you cannot provide food deliveries whilst paying your employees fairly, then you should not be in business.
This doesn't address the parent poster's point:
>For many, it is the only type of job / income they can secure (i.e recent immigrant) and otherwise would be locked out of the legal economy altogether and will transition into the _illegal_ economy for want of options.
Changes like these aren't a free lunch. If they're too onerous companies reduce their workforce, which would leave their workers worse off. Presumably the reason why they were working there in the first place was that it was their best option.
I don't think you can make the argument — in good faith — that the current requirements are too onerous.
Facilitating the exploitation of vulnerable people in order to provide cheap services for customers with much more price flexibility and increase the profit margin of VCs is a political decision. One that I will not support, and I'm glad our collective government is acting against it. It does not go far enough.
If slavery was legal and about to be made illegal, would you argue the same point?
Slavery is still a thing. Some authorities warn that there are more slaves today than at any time in history (e.g., https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/25/modern-slavery-... ).
This isn't slavery. But good job dismissing the reality of slavery by comparing it to a voluntary paid job.
Except slavery is non-consensual whereas working in a shitty job isn't.
They aren't eliminating gig work, they are just ensuring that if you want to categorize your workers as contractors, you have to treat them as contractors. Companies are taking advantage of loose definitions to blur the lines, they want the benefits of employees without the liabilities. This forces them to decide, do you actually want contractors, or do you want employees? The workers that stay as contractors will have more freedom and ability to set their own work boundaries. The workers that get converted to employees will get better benefits and stability. On average, workers will be better off. There will be companies going either route so gig workers should be able to find a company that matches their needs.
The problem is that they don't contribute nearly as much to the system and they're in very precarious situations: no contribution to retirement, no paid vacations, no parental leave, no unemployment benefits, &c.
It really depends on how you see the problem, from the individual perspective or from the community perspective. In the short term individual POV gig work is amazing, in the long term community POV it's disastrous
> The problem is that they don't contribute nearly as much to the system and they're in very precarious situations: no contribution to retirement, no paid vacations, no parental leave, no unemployment benefits, &c.
All of this is applicable to contract work in general, not just gig work. Why not fix it for all contractors rather than only gig workers?
Because some people are genuinely contractors while others are disguised employees.
I also don't see the inherent problem with contractors, some jobs require it, some people want the flexibility. The issue with "gig workers" is that a lot of them end up with all the disadvantage of being employe, all the disadvantage of being contractors, and none of the benefits of either.
But "no contribution to retirement, no paid vacations, no parental leave, no unemployment benefits, &c." seem like pretty big concerns for most workers. I don't see how they evaporate for non-gig contract workers.
Non-gig contract workers charge more and so are expected to pay that all by themselves. Often they do not, but usually they are at level where they should be able to do it.
That is why prices for lot of work is so expensive.
Ya agreed, I would think taxing gig work to compensate for those things is a better solution. IE, you pay 7 euros an hour, on the backend you pay the government 7 euros to cover health care, pension, etc.
This seems like a tracking problem and easier to tax it at the source by the company... as if a gig worker has 10 clients and sporadic work, they are not able to manage the complexity, nor should they have too.
Kinda like taxing HFT, you tax it and then comp society for the danger it creates.
In the vast majority of cases, gig workers are exploited. They have no protections, and don't get the same rights as employees do (no health insurance, no vacation time, etc). This is bad all around and should not be permitted if you want better working conditions. Too many people working the 'gig' economy are working full-time hours with no added benefits.
We're just going backwards with the 'gig' economy by allowing bigco to exploit people in this manner.
It's important to understand though, that most of this work is not sufficient to sustain society. There's a report from the Centraal Planbureau in the Netherlands 'Immigration and the Dutch Economy' (https://www.cpb.nl/sites/default/files/publicaties/download/...).
Take a look at page 61 and the graph 'age profile of net contributions'. As you see, even the average non-Western immigrant, which of course includes highly productive people from places like Japan, India, etc. has a very bad curve.
A gig worker is almost certainly going to have a curve at least that bad, i.e. he has a negative net contribution to the state economy. It might well be better to try to find people something where they can make a net contribution than to have them try to offset the costs by doing what is in effect random work.
I guess that assumes wage is proportional to added value to society?
For people other than teachers, physicians and some other things of that sort, I think that's a true assumption.
> gig working is not always a straight forward 'capitalism bad' exploitation
It's not even about exploitation. Gig work is terrible from a capital formation standpoint. Gig workers are permanently low productivity workers with no breathing room or incentive for anyone to upskill them.
It's bad from a capitalist standpoint. Underdeveloped economies are basically all gig work because there's low levels of corporate organization. One explicit goal of the Nordic welfare model wasn't just alleviating poverty, but literally driving low productivity work out of the economy. Gig working is literally reverting to a sort of pre-capitalist mode of production. Varoufakis comes to mind, who correctly points this out in his recent book on digital platforms.
but the whole point is that they are effectively used as full time workers but not given the benefit, security or basic dignity.
most gig workers don't have the luxury to do this as a part time side job. it's their main source of income as you already said.
and allowing companies to exploit people because they're immigrants is not good for anyone in the labour market.
this is a win. those VC douchebags can get f*ked.