The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs & Inclusion defines the platform work as all labour provided through, on, or mediated by online platforms in a wide range of sectors, where work can be of varied forms, and is provided in exchange for payment[1]. Various studies further specify this as non-standard and contingent work, where services of various nature are produced using preponderantly the labour factor (as opposed to selling goods or renting property or a car) and for exchange of money. Three parties are involved in such transactions: the online platform, the worker and the client. The worker-client matching is digitally mediated and administered.
Within this definition, there are two broad types of platform work based on whether the workers can work online remotely, or must meet the client /go to a specific physical location to implement the task:
- Digital labour markets for remote services: remote delivery of electronically transmittable services (e.g. via freelance marketplaces such as Upwork, Freelancer, FreelanceHunt, PeoplePerHour and many others).
- Digital labour markets for on-location services: delivery of services is physical, although matching and administration of services between costumers and service providers are digital (e.g., driving using Uber, food delivery using Wolt, repair services using Kabanchink and many others).
[1] European Commission (2020). Study to gather evidence on the working conditions of platform workers, March 2020.
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