Europe inches closer to insisting gig workers are treated as employees

I think the subtitle summarises it pretty good: "If it looks like a job, and is supervised like a job, it'll be classified as a job". The bullet points down the article make it even clearer.

Freelancing implies some independence/freedom which most uber or deliveroo drivers don't have in practice.

For example in France you can't declare yourself as a freelancer if you have a single client which dictates your working hours and employs you for very loosely defined missions, because for all intent and purpose you'd be an employee.

The real question is: is that the type of investment and investors you want in the EU?

This isn't just about investors, it's also about getting access to systems that people with employment contracts have, that gig workers don't have.

Why should they be treated as second-class citizens?

So not only do companies save on employment expenses, and offload them to the gig workers (who are underpaid generally), but they also have limited access to the market for things like credit.

Poor investors, right?

If investment means worker exploitation, all the better.

If the "investment" is just another scheme to provide downward mobility to middle-income households, Europe is probably better off.

Why should we as a society, or even worse, poor immigrats, subsidise a company's bad business model.

If you want to compete for labour and customers in a society, you should follow the rules.

If you cannot provide food deliveries whilst paying your employees fairly, then you should not be in business.

Even worse if you are skimming minimum-wage worker's pay to produce a 10X VC return.

They aren't eliminating gig work, they are just ensuring that if you want to categorize your workers as contractors, you have to treat them as contractors. Companies are taking advantage of loose definitions to blur the lines, they want the benefits of employees without the liabilities. This forces them to decide, do you actually want contractors, or do you want employees? The workers that stay as contractors will have more freedom and ability to set their own work boundaries. The workers that get converted to employees will get better benefits and stability. On average, workers will be better off. There will be companies going either route so gig workers should be able to find a company that matches their needs.

The problem is that they don't contribute nearly as much to the system and they're in very precarious situations: no contribution to retirement, no paid vacations, no parental leave, no unemployment benefits, &c.

It really depends on how you see the problem, from the individual perspective or from the community perspective. In the short term individual POV gig work is amazing, in the long term community POV it's disastrous

In the vast majority of cases, gig workers are exploited. They have no protections, and don't get the same rights as employees do (no health insurance, no vacation time, etc). This is bad all around and should not be permitted if you want better working conditions. Too many people working the 'gig' economy are working full-time hours with no added benefits.

We're just going backwards with the 'gig' economy by allowing bigco to exploit people in this manner.

It's important to understand though, that most of this work is not sufficient to sustain society. There's a report from the Centraal Planbureau in the Netherlands 'Immigration and the Dutch Economy' (https://www.cpb.nl/sites/default/files/publicaties/download/...).

Take a look at page 61 and the graph 'age profile of net contributions'. As you see, even the average non-Western immigrant, which of course includes highly productive people from places like Japan, India, etc. has a very bad curve.

A gig worker is almost certainly going to have a curve at least that bad, i.e. he has a negative net contribution to the state economy. It might well be better to try to find people something where they can make a net contribution than to have them try to offset the costs by doing what is in effect random work.

> gig working is not always a straight forward 'capitalism bad' exploitation

It's not even about exploitation. Gig work is terrible from a capital formation standpoint. Gig workers are permanently low productivity workers with no breathing room or incentive for anyone to upskill them.

It's bad from a capitalist standpoint. Underdeveloped economies are basically all gig work because there's low levels of corporate organization. One explicit goal of the Nordic welfare model wasn't just alleviating poverty, but literally driving low productivity work out of the economy. Gig working is literally reverting to a sort of pre-capitalist mode of production. Varoufakis comes to mind, who correctly points this out in his recent book on digital platforms.

but the whole point is that they are effectively used as full time workers but not given the benefit, security or basic dignity.

most gig workers don't have the luxury to do this as a part time side job. it's their main source of income as you already said.

and allowing companies to exploit people because they're immigrants is not good for anyone in the labour market.

this is a win. those VC douchebags can get f*ked.