The Socialists and Democrats are extremely proud of today’s historic deal on the protection of platform workers, reached by negotiators from the European Parliament led by the S&Ds and EU member states.

Elisabetta Gualmini, S&D vice-president and European Parliament’s rapporteur on the new EU legislation on platform work, said:

“We delivered! Today, we wrote history again by brokering a deal on protecting platform workers. Our team in the European Parliament has found an agreement with the Belgian Presidency to ensure an effective European legislation that will give dignity, protection, and rights to platform workers. We are confident that this historic deal will now be confirmed by member states. After the agreement reached in December failed to get support, and with this new text on the table, we believe that member states now cannot even think of turning their back to the dozens of millions of workers, the true self-employed, and to the good employers.

“30 million platform workers have been watching us. All of Europe, and many beyond our borders, have been watching us. It is our duty to protect all workers in the digital era. Today, we demonstrated again that we can be the pioneers in global labour law.

“This deal is historic because it will protect workers, preserve true self-employment, provide a level playing field benefitting good employers, and include innovative and incredibly important rules on algorithm management. All this will safeguard the European social model and set a global standard in labour law. A big thank you to Commissioner Nicolas Schmit, who put a forward-looking legislative proposal on the table.”

Note to editors:

Platform workers use an app or a website to offer services in exchange for payment. Many platforms hire them as bogus self-employed, depriving them from decent wages and labour rights, defrauding public tax systems and creating unfair competition towards genuinely self-employed, SMEs, traditional companies and platforms abiding by the law.