Abstract
The Fairwork Project is an international action-research project that currently operates in over 20 countries. The project focuses on working conditions in the platform economy, in order to develop ‘fairness ratings’ for digital labour platforms. With respect to Germany, the project evaluated the working conditions offered by ten digital labour platforms, by scoring them against the Fairwork principles and producing a national league table. We found that even in a highly regulated labour market context like the German one, platform workers experience precarity and insecurity and have limited access to employment rights. A number of platform workers are classified as employees rather than self-employed, and this guarantees a number of employment rights, including entitlement to minimum wage, health and safety protection and social protection. However, the existence of an employment relationship does not necessarily ensure platform work to be fair as other factors, including the existence of complex networks of subcontracting, erode labour standards and deprive workers of basic employment rights.Practical Relevance: While there are tens of millions of digital platform workers around the world performing functions essential to society—as demonstrated drastically by the Covid-19 pandemic—by supplying food, care and passenger transportation services, many platform workers face low pay, precarity as well as poor and dangerous working conditions. Exposing fracture lines of inequalities affecting particularly women, migrants and minority-ethnic groups who form the core part of the gig workforce, the international Fairwork research project aims not just to understand the gig economy, but to change it.
Highlights
Germany strongly benefits from its embeddedness in the global economy (Jungbluth 2019)
The green ridepooling platform Clevershuttle, which was still operating in Berlin at the time of the investigation, was in the process of establishing a work council in Berlin providing drivers with the possibility to exert their right of codetermination. Despite their recent arrival in Germany, platforms have already become a feature of the German economy, employing a rapidly increasing number of workers in many different sectors, including household services, logistics and transport. Both international and home-grown platforms have found in Germany a fertile ground for growth, but the spread of the platform economy has been seen as contributing to undermining labour standards
Low and piece-rate pay, lack of health and safety protections, limited access to social protection, unclear and unintelligible contracts, lack of transparency in decision making, limited ability to be collectively represented are just some of the main issues platform workers face
Summary
Germany strongly benefits from its embeddedness in the global economy (Jungbluth 2019) Megatrends such as globalisation, digitalisation and demographic change may as well pose serious challenges to people’s employment and income equalities in the country (Petersen and Steiner 2019). Within this context, two recent legislative actions taken by the German government in 2021 are of particular interest for assuring fair work standards in today’s economy, ie. The ‘Law on Modernization of the Passenger Transportation Act (PBefG)’ and the ‘Law on Due Diligence in Supply Chains’ (BMVI 2021; BMZ 2021) Both legislative initiatives can be understood as attempts by German ministries to create fair conditions for business activities spurred by globalisation and digitalisation, which have determined our everyday life for years. We conclude by shedding a light on the policy implications of the Fairwork approach
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