Platform economy: findings on the risks of forced labour for workers

The platform economy, a business model centred on the use of digital platforms, is attracting growing attention from human rights and civil society organisations, trade unions, international organisations and governments. This business model is reshaping ways of working, which evolve with technological advancements. It allows businesses to cut operating costs and expand quickly. Consumers, in turn, should enjoy greater convenience, more choice and simplified transactions.

Despite the many possible benefits for platforms and consumers, emerging evidence has shown how this business model is also leading to platform workers experiencing human and labour rights violations. These are exacerbated by the limited legal protections in this non-traditional sector, where workers are mostly (mis-)classified as independent contractors, which denies them the enjoyment of basic labour rights.

In this paper, we support the argument that the platform economy is structurally exploitative, with risks of labour rights violations and potential risks to forced labour rooted in its core business model, particularly due to the nature of the relationship between platforms and workers and the use of algorithmic management to allocate work. Yet, we also acknowledge that these same elements make it difficult to capture the concrete manifestations in this sector of the concepts underpinning the definition of forced labour, i.e. involuntariness and coercion, making more research crucial to further unpack the findings and analysis this paper offers.

By having in-depth conversations with a small select group of workers in two jurisdictions, this paper hopes to contribute to the evolving discussions on decent work in the platform economy, to improve labour protections for workers by addressing the complexity of the risks to which they are exposed. It also hopes to encourage further research and analysis on how international forced labour indicators frameworks can be applied to this growing business model, including how to make sure that relevant frameworks can be contextualised and adapted to respond to the evolving and emerging business models and employer-employee relationships of the future.