Online Platforms and "Depending Work" After Uber

Abstract

Digitalization is bringing new challenges, including the way how people used to work. The future of work is uncertain. Technology driven innovations are changing the way, how society react to such development by creating different types of jobs and workplaces. What is important today can be redundant tomorrow. Having said that the labour law and civil law will most probably need to react in certain way. The main aim of this paper is to focus on the specific types of activities – such as virtual work or crowd work as well as on relationships between digital platforms, workers, employers and clients while offering and providing services via online platforms. Further the paper will outline the responsibility of online platforms if considered to be in a position of an employer. Due to the lack of compliance with labour laws related duties the online platforms are gaining the unfair competition advantage comparing with "traditional" employer. When it comes to the virtual workers, they can potentially suffer from inadequate or limited access to the certain kind of protection (when compared to the "traditional" employees).