Digitalisation and social security in the EU. The case of platform work: from work protection to income protection?
| Author | Paul Schoukens |
| DOI | 10.1177/1388262720971300 |
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
EJSS
Article
European Journal of Social Security
2020, Vol. 22(4) 434–451
Digitalisation and social
ª The Author(s) 2020
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security in the EU. The case
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DOI: 10.1177/1388262720971300
of platform work: from work
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protection to income
protection?
Paul Schoukens
KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
Abstract
Platform workers face problems in accessing effective social protection schemes. Furthermore,
these workers are not always in a position to build up robust social protection rights even in case
they can participate in the schemes. Compared to standard workers, they work in a precarious
situation. The small tasks they perform, their geographical mobility and their low earnings are
issues that create problems for social security systems’ ability to accommodate these workers. In
this contribution, attention to the specific working conditions of platform workers is given; starting
from the concept of standard work and a discussion of the way platform work deviates from that
performed by standard workers (the original basis used to design traditional social protection
schemes). In a second part of this paper, the various challenges that platform work create for social
protection schemes are enunciated. In the third part of the contribution, the recent EU Recom-
mendation on access to social protection is used as a yardstick to discuss what kind of answers
should be given to accommodate platform workers in social protection schemes. In the final part,
conclusions around three elements that are characteristic of platform work, yet not sufficiently
addressed in national social protection schemes, nor in the EU Recommendation, are developed.
These observations help to establish findings on the future outlook of social protection schemes,
which should be inclusive and accommodative for all (new) types of work.
Keywords
Social security, platform work, digitalisation, EU Recommendation access social protection,
income protection
Corresponding author:
Paul Schoukens, KU Leuven, Oude Markt 13, 3000 Leuven, Belgium.
E-mail: paul.schoukens@kuleuven.be
Schoukens
435
1. Introduction
New types of work, such as the recent phenomenon of platform work, can challenge social
protection schemes in their original design. If we do not pay attention, we risk excluding new
work forms, such as platform work, from the personal scope and, hence, from decent pro-
tection. Social protection schemes should thus be open to accommodate new work forms if
policymakers want these schemes to be inclusive. By the 1960s, traditional social protection
insurance that was originally designed around the default situation of standard work(ers) faced
problems accommodating the emerging groups of self-employed workers. In some countries,
the inclusion of self-employment into social protection still is considered to be problematic,
leading to some and/or basic coverage for this group of workers.1 More recently, platform
work is challenging social protection scheme to accommodate workers active on/for digital
platforms. Platform work is considered as one of the major outcomes of an ongoing digita-
lisation in our societies; this new type of work has a significant impact on traditional ways of
organising labour.2 Platform work refers to the organization of professional activities through
the mediation of a (digital) platform where the supply of work and demand for work can be
exchanged (against remuneration). The facilitation of work through the means of an inter-
mediary agent is not new; there is now a vast industry related to agency work. The novelty
lies more in the digitalisation of these intermediary platforms. The fact that they are now
internet based and/or driven by an IT-app(lication) has created a fair number of opportunities
for a faster and more global work organization. Labour and services can thus easily be
exchanged at a global level through the ‘world wide web’; work can be performed remotely
and is not necessarily bound to the premises of the employer. It can be performed at home,
and depending upon the complexity of the job, can be done without too many instructions.
That the job can be done almost instantly is considered as yet another asset, avoiding the
restrictions that stem from regular work time patterns. Platform work can be done on a free-
lance basis (by self-employed workers), making cost reductions possible.
In order to facilitate this global approach to labour exchange, work activities are increasingly
decomposed into a series of sub-tasks which can be easily contracted out to an endless number of
platform workers. Platform work is indeed often related to ‘gigs’ or ‘small tasks’ which do not
always require major skills and, hence, there is a large pool of candidates who can perform the
work. Platform work challenges the more traditional organization of work and its underlying
regulatory frameworks, in particular social security.
This contribution focuses on the European Union and how the EU institutions address the
challenge of organizing social security for platform workers. Knowing that the main competence
to organize social security remains at the level of the Member States, it may seem awkward to raise
this question from the outset. The EU can, however, intervene to provide support.3 This is
1. Barrio and Schoukens (2017) 306-332; Spasova, Bouget, Ghaliani and Vanhercke (2017: 97).
2. Giving exact figures on the size of platform work is difficult. The available statistics on the number of platform workers
are considered to be overall unreliable; See Z. Kilhoffer, et al. Study to gather evidence on the working conditions of
platform workers, (2020: 45). For a reliable indication in the EU, reference is often made to the study of Pesole where it
is estimated that 7.7% of the adult population used platforms for service provision at least once a month, 5.6% did it for
at least 10 hours per week and 2.3% received at least 25% of their income from platform work. Pesole (2018: 18) figures
refer to the 14 countries in the EU.
3. Social policy is even one of the fields in the EU where shared competence is granted to the EU (article 4 TFEU), unless
deviating provisions are foreseen. one of these restrictions can be found in article 153 TFEU, where the legal action in
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European Journal of Social Security 22(4)
especially so when the states are confronted with similar problems for which a solution is hard to
find. With the European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR) (2017), the EU set itself a common
framework to monitor the social policies of its Member States in terms of their social outcomes.
One of the major goals of this EPSR is to safeguard (enough) access to social protection for all
workers and self-employed workers (principle 12). To that purpose, the Recommendation was
launched, inviting all Member States to provide to all professionally active persons access to an
adequate level of social protection.4 The Recommendation is considered to be an answer to the
growing groups of non-standard work and self-employment that face exclusion from social secu-
rity because of their irregular work pattern, low levels of income or autonomous way of working.
For this contribution, we address the question of the extent to which the Recommendation
responds to the challenges that platform work generates for the organization of social security.
Platform work is not addressed as such by the EPSR and the Recommendation, probably because
not enough relevant data were available on this new type of work when both of the EU docu-
ments were prepared. Here, in essence, we are trying to figure out whether the Recommendation
is still relevant for the latest evolutions in work organization. In order to do so, we will first
define the concept of platform work and will subsequently indicate where it deviates from
standard work forms. After this definition, the major typical features of platform work that pose
challenges to our traditional social security will be assessed based on the provisions set out in the
Recommendation. Finally, we try to indicate where the Recommendation (and its underlying EU
vision on access to social protection) may fall short and what kind of action is (still) to be
expected.
2. Platform work defined from the perspective of non-standard work
2.1. Defining platform work
Platform workers can be defined5 as persons selected online from a pool of workers through the
intermediation of a platform to perform personally6 on-demand short-term tasks for different
persons or companies in exchange for income. It is evident that we restrict ourselves to platform
activities that have a (potential) relation to professional work, leaving out platforms that are based
exclusively in the non-profit sharing of property or knowledge. The online character of platforms is
one of the major defining features, facilitating access and reducing transaction costs.7 Furthermore,
the fact that the platform acts as an intermediary between the person who receives the service and
the person who performs, it means that, in this role, the platform typically:
the field of social security law is very much narrowed down to a mere supportive nature. See more in this special
publication about the competence division in the contribution of A. Fernandez de Aranguiz.
4. Council Recommendation (EU) 8 November 2019 on access to social protection for workers and the self-employed
(Recommendation access social protection) [2019] OJ C 387/1.
5. As defined by us in: Barrio, Montebovi and...
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