MEPs of the European Parliament’s Committee on Employment and Social Affairs (EMPL) gave a mixed reception, on Thursday 19 May, to the report by the Italian MEP, Elisabetta Gualmini (S&D), on digital platform workers, with some fearing that the directive would indiscriminately cover all platform workers and reclassify them as ‘salaried workers’ from the outset.
This was the Socialist MEP’s first presentation of her report (see EUROPE 12949/23), which has three main objectives, she explained. On the rebuttable presumption of salaried employment, “it is important to eliminate the idea that there is a separate status, a model without social protection” for these platform workers. “Either you are self-employed or you are employed”, she began by commenting.
On the management of work by algorithms, “human supervision” is required in all cases, as well as strengthened arrangements for the transmission of information to workers, the third major objective being precisely to extend the scope of the directive to all those working with an algorithm, with the report adding “automated or semi-automated monitoring and decision-making systems that operate by means of algorithms”.
The MEP also chose to extend the list of criteria for presuming the employee relationship of the worker with only one criterion necessary, not two as proposed by the Commission. But these criteria were placed in a recital, which worried some MEPs who felt that the directive would no longer allow, in this form, to distinguish between workers and to protect in particular those who want to remain self-employed.
For the Slovak Renew Europe MEP, Lucia Ďuriš Nicholsonová, the report contains “excellent chapters on management by algorithm, transparency”. All this will “improve things”, she said, but the Parliament has always said, until now, that there should not necessarily be “an automatic classification of all platform workers, who should be able to remain self-employed, if they so choose”. “The Commission’s proposal allows for this; that is why we have some problems with the report that wants to delete it”.
Fearing the effect of the enlarged fields for semi-automated professions, Anna Zalewska (ECR, Poland) said: “we are going too far, we are not respecting the way employment is organised in the Member States and we are going further than the Commission’s proposal”.
The Italian MEP tried to reassure her counterparts and explained that there was no “general presumption of salaried status; the presumption remains a relative principle” and the fact that more criteria have been placed in a recital serves “to reflect all the situations” that exist, but not to “say that everyone is covered” by the directive.
Leïla Chaibi (The Left, France) said it should be borne in mind that 5 million people, according to the Commission’s figures, are in “disguised employment”, and it is this problem that the directive seeks to address.
Given that platforms will not have an interest in reclassifying workers, “we cannot leave this responsibility to the workers; we need this general presumption” which will be more practical than “having 5 million court cases”, she said.
Several platform representatives were present at the exchange of views and pointed out the risks that this directive would pose to competitiveness and innovation, but also to the individual freedom of workers and those who want to continue to work “in this flexibility”, said Samuel Laurinkari, from the Wolt platform, who believes that the report, by removing the criteria, will force people to accept more rigid contracts, making them no longer able to live as they want.
This representative of the platforms favoured the route of collective agreements to improve workers’ conditions.
The deadline for the tabling of amendments is 1 June. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)