EU institutions reach deal on conditions for platform workers

The political deal agreed on Wednesday fixes what the criteria are for Uber drivers or Deliveroo delivery workers, for example, to be considered employees of the companies they work for.

“There cannot be false self-employed workers hanging around among riders, among the categories of work that are among the most exploited, among the least paid and among the most precarious,” Elisabetta Gualmini, an Italian socialist MEP said in an interview with Euronews.

“If you are a real self-employed person or you are an employee, you deserve those social protections.”

The agreement establishes five key indicators, which include whether the company fixes upper limits to the employee’s remuneration, supervises their performance through an app, controls the distribution of their tasks, chooses their working hours and makes them wear corporate clothing.

If two of these criteria are fulfilled, then workers should be made employees and benefit from social rights, including paid holidays.

For Leila Chaibi, a French MEP from The Left Group, one of the difficulties has been dealing with the platform companies.

“Platform lobbies have succeeded in finding allies within the Parliament, but especially within the Council of the European Union, who represent the member states and until the last moment, they did everything they could to unravel, to sabotage the directive,” she told Euronews.

“We have come very close to having a directive that is not favourable for workers, but one that is a favourable directive for platforms, which is a prohibited directive.”

Representatives from the platforms have not replied to Euronews’ request for comment.

According to data from the European Parliament, around 5.5 workers are now wrongly misclassified as freelance.

The new law will also make algorithms more transparent and clarify for workers how they are used to allocate work, as well as how their personal data is treated.