Precarious crowd

The platform economy is considered to be a cornerstone of the new digital world of work. Companies like Uber, Airbnb, MyHammer or Clickworker are transforming the global organisation of work already. Their guiding principles of flexibility, effective selection through rating mechanisms and also global competition between well-qualified free-lancers are foreshadowing a new world of work. Under these principles however, the quality of employment is being lost of sight, fostering the erosion of labour standards and growing precariousness of flexibly working service providers.

With increasing growth rates of the digital labour market (more than 25 per cent in 2017 alone) government regulation of the platform economy is urgently needed in order to avoid deterioration of the quality of employment.

In a study commissioned by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung titled "Fair Working Conditions for Platform Workers", Professor Martin Risak (Institute for Labour and Social Law at the University of Vienna) explains why regulation at the European level is needed and what the basic principles of such a regulation should be in order to strengthen the quality of employment.