1. The platform economy Impact on employment and social security in the EU Prof. Martin Risak Department for Labour Law and Law of Social Security, University of Vienna, Austria
Crowdworking platforms (and often crowdworkers themselves) stress the advantages of this way of working: High autonomy as it regards the amount of work, the place to work and the way of working
– I do not want to get into the discussion now that this is often an illusion and that it massively shifts risks that have to be borne by the employer in a „regular“ employment relationship to the worker. Not to mention the alienation from the work process as well as from the co-workers.

2. “Precarity is not an innovative business model“
The starting point
“Precarity is not an innovative business model“
Different forms of organizing work
Autonomous self employment
Subordinated employees
Trend towards flexibilisation and atypical work
Crowdwork and crowdsourcing of labour as a further development
Why does the platform economy work?
Large and active crowd
Digital reputation

3. “Before the Internet, it would be really difficult to find someone, sit them down for ten minutes and get them to work for you, and then fire them after those ten minutes. But with technology, you can actually find them, pay them the tiny amount of money, and then get rid of them when you don’t need them anymore.”
Thomas Biewald, CEO of the Crowdwork-Plattform Crowdflower, as cited in Marvit, How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine, The Nation

4. Labour Law and the platform economy
Are crowdworkers/platform-workers employees?
Uber – ET Aslam, Farrar & others, AG Spunar in ECJ Elite Taxi
Virtual crowdwork (e.g. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Clickworker, Upwork)
Household workers e.g. cleaners
Who is the employer?
Three-party contractual relationships similar to temporary agency work
Functional concept of the employer (J. Prassl 2015)

5. Strategies in the labour law arena
Introduction of an intermediary category of ‘dependent self-employed’ or ‘employee-like persons’
Re-definition of the notion of the employee taking into account also economic elements
Specific legislation like a Crowdwork-Directive
(Rebuttable) presumption of an employment relationship with the platform
Information obligations
Forbidden terms and conditions
Applicable law and forum
Collective agreements in the platform economy -> conflict with competition law (ECJ FNV Kunsten)?

6. Social Security in the platform economy
Who is included in the scope of protection? Also the self-employed?
How to organise and administer social security for fragmented work histories with unsecure incomes?
General effects on the system of social security
Shift form employment relationships to self employment
Cross-border delivery of services
Financing in times of digitalisation and automatisation

7. „Although there is a general impression, which is fostered by official academic and journalistic opinion, that all of this is happening because of the rise of scientific technology and development of machinery, this process of degradation of work is not really dependent upon technology at all.“
Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital – The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974, 1998) 319

9. Assoc.-Prof. Dr. Martin Risak Department of Labour Law and Law of Social Security University of Vienna Schenkenstrasse 8 – 10, 1010 Wien, Austria