Platforms: presume employment, finally admit the "independent" takes orders

According to Le Monde Économie, a mission report handed to the government on 2 November proposes better regulation of platform work. The measures cited in the paper's headline are a presumption of employment, a minimum income and transparency of algorithms. France has until 2 December to transpose a European directive on the subject. The details of the measures, their timetable and how they would be written into law do not appear in the dispatch we have, so we will not pretend to know them.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

The presumption of employment has one merit: it reverses the burden of proof. Today, the courier who rides under the orders of an app must prove that he is subordinate, even though it is the platform that sets the price, allocates the jobs and imposes sanctions. With the presumption, it would fall to the company to prove that its "partner" is genuinely free. For an economy that keeps insisting you are your own boss, that demonstration promises to be a workout.

The vocabulary of autonomy has always served to shift risk. The employee sells his capacity to work in exchange for a wage; the "independent", for his part, bears the scooter breakdown, the cut in rates, the sick day and the quiet hours. The work stays, the protection leaves. And the surplus extracted from those hours does not vanish: it flows upwards to the platform, without anyone having to play the cruel boss. The structure is enough.

The minimum income, if it is confirmed, is more ambiguous. One can see in it a welcome floor. One can also see it as a way of setting the hourly price without acknowledging the relationship of subordination: a wage, but without the name or the Code du travail (France's labour code) that goes with it. Everything will depend on what gets counted, from waiting time to log-in time, and that is where the details we do not yet have will decide everything.

Algorithmic transparency finally gets to the heart of the matter. The foreman has become a piece of software that never explains itself. Knowing why an account has been deactivated or a job withdrawn means admitting that there is indeed a power of direction. Marx already described a capital that clings to the letter of the law in order to get round its spirit, like a Shylock demanding his pound of flesh. The platforms have simply replaced the letter of the contract with the letter of the terms of use.

There remains the question that reports tend to avoid: who will enforce all this? Rights won without a balance of power erode quickly. Platform workers are scattered, isolated by the app, and that is precisely the purpose of the architecture. Without collective organisation, the presumption of employment risks remaining a nice phrase. The government has until 2 December: we will see whether it transposes a directive or only its title.