Working for an Internet Platform: New Challenges for Courts

The digital era has been changing employment relationships dramatically, causing a considerable degree of legal uncertainty as to which rules can apply in the so-called platform economy. A certain inadequacy is manifesting in the same founding categories of labour law, i.e. the bipartite - and in some legal frameworks, tripartite - taxonomy of employment/self-employment. For the Courts, it is a matter famously described as being faced with “a square peg and asked to choose between two round holes”. The Chapter aims to analyse the already available case law in a comparative perspective, which will draw similarities (and obstacles) on the more general need to respond to the gig economy workers’ protection.