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37 Comp. Lab. L. & Pol'y J. 619 (2015-2016)
Uber, Taskrabbit, and Co.: Platforms as Employers - Rethinking the Legal Analysis of Crowdwork

handle is hein.journals/cllpj37 and id is 655 raw text is: UBER, TASKRABBIT, AND CO.: PLATFORMS AS EMPLOYERS? RETHINKING THE LEGAL ANALYSIS OF CROWDWORK Jeremias Prassl and Martin Risaktt I. INTRODUCTION Crowdsourced work is on the rise - presenting opportunities and challenges for workers, businesses, and regulators alike, as the wide range of contributions to this special issue demonstrate. From an employment law perspective, the phenomenon of work supplied through digital platforms opens a new chapter in the age-old problem of determining the scope of employee-protective norms: are crowdworkers employees or workers in a technical sense, and thus deserving of legal protection, ranging from minimum wage and working time regulation to unfair dismissal and collective rights, depending on their jurisdiction? Are they independent contractors, operating as small businesses on their own account, and thus rightly exposed to the rough and tumble of the market? Or do they represent a genuinely novel form of work, deserving of its own legal status and regulatory apparatus?1 The answer suggested by the platforms themselves is straightforward: Uber, Mechanical Turk, TaskRabbit and others merely see themselves as digital agents, connecting customers and independent contractors. Individual platforms' terms and conditions vary from country to country according to local conditions, whilst always pursuing identical aims: the denial of worker status. At the same time, however, the level of control exercised by a platform can be significant, from setting wages to specifying - and supervising - how t Jeremias Prassl is an Associate Professor at Magdalen College, Oxford, and an Associate Research Scholar at Yale Law School. tt Martin Risak is an Associate Professor at the Department of Labour Law and Law of Social Security at the University of Vienna, Austria. We are grateful to the organizers and participants at the Wharton workshop for feedback and discussion of earlier stages of this work. The usual disclaimers apply. 1. See, e.g., the recent call by for the introduction of a new independent worker status in the United States. Seth D. Harris & Alan B. Krueger, A Proposal for Modernizing Labor Laws for Twenty- First Century Work: The Independent Worker (Hamilton Project, Discussion Paper 2015-10, 2015), available at http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2015/12/09-modernizing-labor-laws-for-the-inde pendent-worker-krueger-harris.

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