The Classification of Crowdwork and Work by Platforms: Alternatives and Implications

The paper examines the challenge that the organisational models adopted by the gig economy platforms represent for labour law. Starting from the premise that platforms providing “crowdwork” and “work by platform” risk to undermine the founding idea of labour law that “labour is not a commodity”, the contribution aims to analyse the different paths pursued by case law and legal literature in order to avoid platform workers to fall into an “empty space of law”. To this end, the contribution focuses on the attempts made to pursue the reclassification of platform workers as subordinate employees, in order to provide them with full employment rights, and, in the second instance, it tries to verify whether it is useful and possible to search for some protective provisions even outside the field of statutory employment law.