The “Study to gather evidence on the working conditions of platform workers” funded by the Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion of the European Commission aims to investigate working conditions and social protection for platform workers in the EU-28, Norway and Iceland between 2013 and 2018. The overarching objective of the study is to provide a comprehensive, evidence-based analysis of the challenges faced by platform workers with regard to their working conditions and social protection, as well as policy and legal tools and responses to those challenges at national and EU level. Based on this analysis, the study examines the potential need for further EU legislative or non-legislative action, and what form such action may take. It follows a mixed methods approach and special attention is paid to vulnerable groups and issues related to discrimination and inequality. The study is organised into four main tasks which build on a combination of research methods and data sources, and is carried out by a multidisciplinary team:
1) To identify and map, in a structured way, the specific challenges regarding working conditions and social protection that arise from the features that characterise platform work, as well as possible attempts to address them;
2) To provide a complete overview of national developments, notably policies, legislation, collective agreements and case-law, related to the regulation of working conditions and social protection of platform work and to develop a typology of these national developments;
3) To analyse the relevance and possible application of a selected number of EU pieces or areas of legislation to platform work ;
4) To address the question whether there are challenges regarding platform work that would call for EU action, how significant those challenges would be and how they would develop in the absence of EU action.
This project was awarded under the Framework Contract for the provision of services related to the implementation of Better Regulation Guidelines (VC/2017/0393) with the European Commission, DG EMPL. The full list of CEPS’ Framework Contracts is available here.
