Platform work describes diverse employment arrangements and income-generating activities in which digital platforms act as an intermediary, matching labour with end-users to perform tasks, provide services, or sell goods – either remotely or on location – on an on-demand basis. Examples include ride-hailing and delivery on streets, domestic work in homes, care work in communities, e-commerce and content moderation online. The rapid expansion of platform work represents the latest evolution in trends towards the restructuring of labour markets that favours flexibility, while weakening worker protections and reducing their remuneration. Platform workers share many of the same challenges as other workers in non-standard and informal employment, including precarity, poor working conditions, unstable earnings, and lack of social protection, which perpetuates or deepens inequalities. Additionally, they face distinctive surveillance and algorithmic management practices that heighten subordination and reduce autonomy, as well as particular physical and psychosocial risks. Strengthening protections for platform workers has thus become crucial.
Efforts to extend protections to platform workers to date, most prominently in the Global North, have largely focused on addressing their misclassification as independent contractors rather than employees. While important, this has proven difficult, as digital platforms often operate across borders and constantly adapt their intermediation practices in response to new technologies and business models, often deliberately structuring arrangements to minimise indications of employment. The result has been an uneven playing field across and within jurisdictions, pointing to a clear need for strengthened normative standards at the international level currently under negotiation at the International Labour Conference. In response, this policy profile emphasizes the need to extend protections and entitlements to all platform workers, regardless of their employment status, and elaborates on how they may need to be adapted to meet the realities of different work arrangements. This includes guarantees of their rights to: freedom of association and collective bargaining; fair remuneration; occupational health and safety; protection from discrimination, harassment and violence; data privacy; and social protection. It also calls for regulatory frameworks that ensure that platforms conduct ongoing human rights due diligence, including identifying risks arising from algorithmic management systems and taking action to mitigate discriminatory or exploitative outcomes, including requiring human oversight for decisions with livelihood consequences and establishing effective grievance redressal processes.
