The Politics of Social Policies for Platform Workers

In recent decades, several European economies have implemented policies to enhance social protection for platform workers. This paper explains why governments adopt such reforms, distinguishing different policy approaches, including: - Labour law extension, i.e., reclassifying platform workers as employees, a protective approach exemplified by Spain's 2021 reform; - Social protection extension, i.e., maintaining self-employment status while granting exclusive access to social schemes, a moderately protective approach adopted by Italy in 2019; - Refraining from regulatory action, as observed in France. I argue that the interplay between the proliferation of judicial precedents reclassifying platform workers as employees and the fragmentation of employer interest representation shaped both governments’ decisions to regulate platform work and the content of these policies in Spain, Italy, and France. Using a most-similar systems design, I find evidence that France's lack of reform and Italy and Spain’s protective policies reflect varying levels of labor court judicial activism. The multiplication of labor court rulings reclassifying platforms workers into employees created legal uncertainty and strengthened unions’ moral arguments for protecting platform workers in Italy and Spain, ultimately motivating Conte and Sánchez governments to regulate platform work. Conversely, France’s limited number of labor court rulings deprived unions of such leverage. The content of these regulations in Italy and Spain, however, diverges due to differences in the institutional coordination between large firms and SME employer interests. SMEs, especially in sectors like logistics and transport, are directly affected by platform companies’ low-cost services. This competitive pressure drove SMEs in both countries to advocate platform work regulation, a stance less common among large firms. The same divergence in employer preferences led to different policy outcomes in the two countries. In Italy, fragmented employer interest representation across multiple associations hindered alignment between SMEs and large firms, limiting the broad support needed for a radical policy such as labor law extension and contributing to the government's decision to pursue social protection extension instead. By contrast, Spain's lower level of employer interest fragmentation facilitated coordination, which eventually resulted in a collective agreement signed by the two main employer associations urging labor law extension. These findings carry important implications for future research as they introduce the role of employers in the platform-related policy-making process. Furthermore, they highlight the influential but underexamined role of labor courts in the political economy of labor market.