Platform workers: Council confirms agreement on new rules to improve their working conditions

EU employment and social affairs ministers confirmed the provisional agreement reached on 8 February 2024 between the Council’s presidency and the European Parliament’s negotiators on the platform work directive. This EU legal act aims to improve working conditions and regulate the use of algorithms by digital labour platforms.

The directive will make the use of algorithms in human resources management more transparent, ensuring that automated systems are monitored by qualified staff and that workers have the right to contest automated decisions. It will also help correctly determine the employment status of persons working for platforms, enabling them to benefit from any labour rights they are entitled to.

Addressing false self-employment in platform work

The agreed text strikes a balance between respecting national labour systems and ensuring minimum standards of protection for the more than 28 million persons working in digital labour platforms across the EU.

The main compromise elements revolve around a legal presumption which will help determine the correct employment status of persons working in digital platforms:

• member states will establish a legal presumption of employment in their legal systems, to be triggered when facts indicating control and direction are found
• those facts will be determined according to national law and collective agreements, while taking into account EU case-law
• persons working in digital platforms, their representatives or national authorities may invoke this legal presumption and claim they are misclassified
• it is up to the digital platform to prove that there is no employment relationship

Moreover, member states will provide guidance to digital platforms and national authorities when the new measures are being put in place.

Europe improves working conditions on digital platforms

Regulating algorithmic management

The agreement reached with the Parliament ensures that workers are duly informed about the use of automated monitoring and decision-making systems regarding their recruitment, their working conditions and their earnings, among other things.

It also bans the use of automated monitoring or decision-making systems for the processing of certain types of personal data of persons performing platform work, such as biometric data or their emotional or psychological state.

Human oversight and evaluation are also guaranteed as regards automated decisions, including the right to have those decisions explained and reviewed.

Next steps

The text of the agreement will now be finalised in all the official languages and formally adopted by both institutions.

After the formal steps of the adoption have been completed, member states will have two years to incorporate the provisions of the directive into their national legislation.

More information: Council of the EU