The latest agreement on the platform work directive brings less legal clarity than the status quo and fails to give platforms, and workers alike harmonised rules and protections across the EU’s single market, Tomas Prouza writes for Euractiv.

• Tomas Prouza is the vice-president of the Czech Chamber of Commerce and former Czech state secretary for EU Affairs.

For the last two years, there has been a raging debate in Brussels about whether taxi drivers, couriers delivering food or translators getting their work from online platforms are independent contractors or traditional employees.

Despite emotions on all sides, we all, in the end, wanted well-defined rules to set up a clear and understandable EU-wide system, which could ensure a harmonised approach for both workers and companies.

Instead, the Belgian Presidency has come up with a nonsensical proposal which fails to bring legal certainty and can be summed up as: ‘Let’s have an EU directive that tells everyone to make up their own mind on how to apply the content of the directive’.

As it stands, the legal presumption of employment, a novel mechanism introduced in the directive through which self-employed platform workers who deserve to become full-time employees could be reclassified as such, has been watered down to no more than a show of intent.

Criteria which hinted at subordination and could be used in a harmonised way across the EU to help trigger the legal presumption have all but gone. Now, the directive only requires of every member state that it creates a legal presumption in their national systems – without giving much of an indication as to how it should work in practice.

The point of the European regulatory framework should be to give people the same protection, whether couriers carrying people or food in Portugal, the Netherlands or the Czech Republic. Only in that case would the new European regulation would make sense.

But, the Belgians could not find the necessary majority for common European rules. Instead of knocking the proposal off the table, they came up with the idea that nothing would change (because it would continue to be up to each country to set its own rules), but it would look as though the Presidency secured a political win, just months ahead of EU elections.

Is the platform work directive dead?

The EU’s Platform Workers Directive is on life-support and might be split in two after European governments voted down a provisional agreement found in December. “Better no deal than a bad deal,” sources told Euractiv.

And what does it matter if they just clutter up the legal system with unnecessary regulation and worsen the already stifling bureaucracy for European companies?

Governments in most EU countries are under pressure from businesses because of the increasingly complex bureaucracy and because the basic premise of the single market – where the same rules apply to all equally – is not being delivered.

The promise of identical rules across the board is the key reason businesses and trade unions supported the creation of a single rulebook for platform workers. And both sides wanted it to be easy to determine who is genuinely self-employed, enjoying the freedom to drive, deliver, translate or create graphics for different platforms, and who is an employee deserving of a full-time contract.

Yes, we have had tough debates about what exactly the legal presumption criteria should look like. But we wanted them to make business operations predictable for both sides.

In the end, the Belgian Presidency delivered a proposal that did not address anything at all.

On Friday (16 February), member states will have the chance to show whether they are serious about supporting the EU single market at all. The meeting of EU ambassadors, due to vote on the directive, will decide whether to accept this failed text, which has already been opposed by both trade unions and platforms alike.

I sincerely hope that the message the ambassadors will send is that we need to get the rules right to protect workers and give businesses clear guidance. And that these rules must be the same across Europe so that the protection of basic rights is not dependent in whether you live in one country or another.

Platform work rulebook hangs by thread ahead of member states’ final nod

Negotiators from the European Commission, Council and Parliament struck a deal on the Platform Work Directive – for the second time – on Thursday (8 February), with all eyes now on member states, who have been asked to rubberstamp it on Friday.