Digital platform work has increased five-fold in the last decade, with around 11% of the EU workforce saying that they have already provided services through a platform.

The rapid growth of the platform economy demonstrated the value it brings to both clients and workers, but also attracted considerable controversy, notably over workers’ employment status, their right to the minimum wage, holiday and sick pay, and a secure employment contract. Policymakers now need to address the complex question of how to redefine labour models for the digital age, including those for instant delivery work.

In this interesting article, Menno Bart and Marine Marty from Adecco Group suggest that agency work can be a leading model for the platform work economy: it facilitates the flexibility of and access to a diverse jobs market, enabling individuals to enjoy genuine independent or self-employed status without compromising their social rights and employment protections.

Compared with online platforms, agencies are heavily regulated, setting specific conditions under which the agencies should operate and how they should treat their workers. 

However, the article highlights that the two models do share some similarities, creating an overlap between agencies and platforms, as also emerges from the research project conducted in 2018 by the World Employment Confederation (WEC), in collaboration with UNI Europa, the European services workers union.

In the same direction, the report by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission’s science and knowledge service “European legal framework for digital labour platforms”, aims to contribute to the comprehensive research on digital labour platforms by investigating the existing legal frameworks and understanding related challenges for policy- makers.  The report points out that the European Parliament has recommended “to examine how far the Directive on Temporary Agency Work (2008/104/EC1) is applicable to specific online platforms”, explaining that “many intermediating online platforms [as] structurally similar to temporary work agencies (triangular contractual relationship between: temporary agency worker/platform worker; temporary work agency/online platform; user undertaking/client)”. The concept of “temporary agency worker” can be “applie[d] not only to workers who have concluded a contract of employment with a temporary-work agency, but also to those who have an ‘employment relationship’ with such an undertaking”. Such employment relationship is characterised by the fact that a person performs services for, and under the direction of, another person for a certain period of time in exchange for remuneration. Some experts have proposed the application of the temporary work agency scheme also to platform-mediated labour, when the requester (i.e. the client) is a commercial business.

It concludes that current European attitude is perceived as a fair balance between supporting entrepreneurs’ confidence and implementing workers’ protections, but considerable efforts need to be done in order to ensure a stable and sustainable future.

The Adecco paper “Delivery pending: How to drive a better instant delivery platforms world of work” analyses the delivery platforms’ business  with the aim to identify and provide recommendations and solutions to promote a responsible and flexible model, that creates a fairer relationship between delivery platforms and affiliated workers. The paper also includes a market-by-market analysis of the policy conversation around delivery platform workers’ conditions, based on a research conducted also through expert interviews, and on the Adecco Group’s expertise in offering flexible work via the agency work model. It offers a global highlight on the issue and collects the views of policymakers, labour unions, platform workers, platforms and workforce solutions providers.

The paper considers that there are many opportunities for decent flexibility, either in employment — including agency work — or in self-employment, suggesting three main recommendation and guiding principle that best meets the need of all parties:

• Social protection as the baseline for all forms of (platform) work
• Clear criteria are needed to define worker status
• The price for platform services should reflect the cost of social protection.

It remains to be seen whether the European and national legislative proposals currently in the making will take an approach in line with these considerations and which model will actually be adopted.