Digitalization of work, platform work and the platform work directive – a move from the informal to the formal?

The initially cautionary introduction and establishment of computer controls in industry, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, initially outlined in the seminal Second Industrial Divide (Piore and Sabel, 1984), has been superseded by an exponential expansion in the introduction of such systems. The employment of digital technology on the Internet or other Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and their applications has heavily impacted work and work organization. They also provide the ground for new inequalities and divides, such as that of digital illiteracy (Gilster, 1997) or the digital divide (Norris, 2001; Warschauer, 2003), or old practices under a new cloth, as in computer crime or cybercrime.

Digitalization which underlines the shift, carries broad and wide changes that, while reformulating work skills, work content and work experience, also alter the relationships of work to the non-work, as well as the social and political environments. ^[1] In this sense, and at the risk of overgeneralization, one could refer to it as an “episode of change” (Carneiro, 1970) or perceive it in terms of a Kuhnian paradigm shift (Kuhn, 1970) (see also Wolf et al., 2019).

It should be noted that the train of digitalization may and does coexist with unnoticed or informal work practices, which is the specific area of concern here. The implication is that technical advantage and the rationalization it requires do not automatically extend onto social arrangements at work; far from it. The informal economy and informal work are understood here in the way M. Castells and A. Portes use the notion, i.e. as an income generation process distinguished by a lack of regulation by the institutions of society in a social context in which such activities are regulated (1991: 12). ^[2] Accordingly, the formalization process is seen as the introduction of relevant regulation.

This paper is organized as follows. At the outset the basic notions of platform (gig) economy, of cloud work and of gig work are specified. This is followed by a note on the expansion of the platform economy in Europe, worker grievances and the informality dimension linked to it. These are necessary for contextualization purposes.

The focus then turns on the more essential aspects of work digitalization. Two key issues are taken up, i.e. that of the legal categorization of platform workers alongside the issue of the bogus status as independent contractors/self-employed and of the algorithmic surveillance of work, a management control strategy organized via work platforms. Subsequently, given that the locus of our concern is Europe, the attempt by the EU authorities to regulate platform work in its 27 member countries through the platform work directive (PWD) is examined. In terms of methodology, this entails going over the PWD and determining its salient characteristics. The PWD has been an EU attempt to address informal and bogus work practices and set a framework on work surveillance issues; overall, it is an attempt to regulate some aspects of platform work, essentially formalizing it. The anticipated measures do not disturb the already established lines of work organization in the platform economy and in the provisioning of labour, and any corrective impact that they may have on them is circumscribed by the thrust and focus of the anticipated interventions. The PWD's effectiveness is still unsettled, as the directive has only recently been approved but not applied yet. Overall, this paper's goal is to explore how, in the particular setting, the PWD may govern platform work and whether regulating it means reducing workplace informality.

The platform economy refers to the use of digital platforms. Such platforms are marked by the pervasiveness of connectivity among a variety of devices and data, which makes both possible and available interlinkages among their handlers and/or users, who may access a variety of services. It is also possible to build up business models based on online outsourcing via a platform.

The platform economy is also known as the gig economy. This refers to telework, working via internet platforms and performing certain individual pieces of a larger project, which are called “gigs”. A “gig,” which is a slang word, stands for a job that lasts a specified period of time ^[3]. By extension, it refers to a section or part of a complete piece or project.

It is available in diverse fields such as software development, book translation, architectural design, delivery of lessons or courses, graphics of a video game, “image tagging” on social media, and provision of services, as in the preparation, packing, or delivery of specific items, e.g. food, all of which may be compartmentalized to form part of the gig economy, and more.

A basic distinction may be drawn between cloud work, which is web-based and may be performed irrespective of the location in which the cloud worker is, and gig work, which is location-based digital labour (Schmidt, 2017). The distinction between cloud and gig work allows for several types of digital labour platforms for web-based services, namely freelance marketplaces, micro-tasking crowd work and contest-based creative crowd work. Besides, these various hybrid variants have also appeared (for a compendium of gig work types of jobs, see de Groen et al., 2018).

Particularly, the crowd, when taken as a whole, is a highly fragmented labour market (Howcroft and Bergvall-Kåreborn, 2019). Thus, there is an oversupply of workers working on simple tasks that require ordinary abilities, which are paid less. Other workers do sophisticate or key duties, forming up the platform-regulated labour market's top tier. The fact remains that those working via digital labour platforms are quite isolated from their physically unseen and unconnected co-workers, and they are individualised too (Schmid, 2016).

The expansion of platform work was already occurring in the course of the first 2 decades of the 21st century, part and parcel of the increasing and expanding applications and use of communication technologies. However, the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic caused, as an incipient precaution to the spread of the ailment, significantly fewer live interactions, which gave various technology-mediated interactions a big push. One that, despite the return to interaction normalcy, has remained.

An indication of the size of the platform economy is the following: at the end of 2023, there were over 10,000 platforms in the EU, catering to a variety of services. Most of them, over 90%, are operating in small and medium-sized enterprises, according to EU estimates (European Commission, 2023a). However, digital services in the EU currently have to deal with 27 different sets of national rules, which means that only the largest platform companies can deal with the resulting compliance costs (European Commission, 2023b). Platforms have been growing incessantly, with the turnover and employment linked to them also growing. The larger platforms, nevertheless, working in several European countries, were calculated at about 600 at the end of 2021 (European Commission, 2021a).

In terms of platform worker numbers involved, these were estimated at over 16 million in 2016 (Eurofound, 2018, p. 10). Their number expanded in 2021 to 26 million and reached 28.3 million by the end of 2022. They are mostly occupied in taxi services, various types of delivery services and home services, and their skill level requirements to carry out such services are, as a rule, low. The projection is for 43 million platform workers in 2025 (European Council, 2025). Platform workers then form an important segment of the EU-27 workforce, which overall stood at 197.5 million employed workers by the end of 2024 (Eurostat, 2025). Currently, 5.5 million active platform workers are considered to be wrongly classified as self-employed instead of employed (Council of the European Union, 2023b).

Then, in relation to informality, the organization of tasks in the platform economy is on the basis of gigs, i.e. pieces of work that are related to an item or a service of a tangible or intangible character, as it may be. These are mediated, organized and coordinated on the basis of one or more digital platforms. Such work is largely compartmentalized relying heavily on temporary, part-time, or project-based contractors and freelancers, who often work informally. In fact, there is a consensus in the literature that platform work is steeped in informality (Lehdonvirta, 2018; Vallas and Schor, 2020).

Besides, an important feature of the platform economy is that a substantial number of platform workers are invisible. Invisible in the sense that their activities go unrecorded by national authorities and/or they do not share the ordinary benefits of regular (and visible) workers, such as job security or access to benefits, nor are they measured/registered as employees; in this sense, these are involved in informal work. This is partly due to the fact that a great many platform workers, such as drivers, delivery personnel, or freelancers, are working part-time or are occasional and temporary workers (Huws et al., 2019). In fact, the European authorities take it for granted that most platform workers have another job or another source of income (OJEU, 2024, p. 2). Such workers, it has been claimed, are often migrants (van Doorn et al., 2023; Katta et al., 2024) or/and of unsettled status and hence tend to evade recording (Evolutyz, 2024).

The growth of the platform economy, entailing the multiplication of the engaged workforce, brought along grievances about various aspects of platform work. Such grievances reflect the different and isolated circumstances of work, are diverse, and are not necessarily linked to one another. Given the heterogeneity of the jobs and the competition often observed among platform workers, the expression of worker interests proved to be a strenuous and checkered affair (Vandaele et al., 2024).

This situation has been coupled with difficulties in unionising and putting forward claims given the extensive informality in platform work (Johnston et al., 2021). Again, this in part has to do with the different modes of operating in the platform economy, which are more individualized (Jin et al., 2021) as well as precarious (Hastie, 2020). Such difficulties are major, particularly with platform outworkers (Wood et al., 2019; Ball, 2021), leading to a situation in which they are organizationally outflanked (Mann, 2012) by the companies they work for, thus the weaker element in any bargaining process between platform companies and those working for them.

Therefore, while issues related to pay, for instance, the setting of a minimum wage or pay rates, are most important for platform workers (Voss and Riede, 2018), related collective bargaining is mostly informal (Bessa et al., 2022), which implies that these issues do not have the potential to bring out a unified reaction/claim on their part; the same applies to other more sectoral work issues. Accordingly, and while related grievances on issues of pay remain, the focus has shifted to concerns that may bridge platform workers variable work circumstances. These have been the true employment status of platform workers and an aspect of their work control environment, namely surveillance.

Bogus employment status refers to workers that are registered as self-employed but whose conditions of employment indicate that they are working for an employer, i.e. they are dependent on an employer who hires them. Such bogus independent self-employed people pay by themselves for social security, medical insurance and suchlike, which means that their actual employer is relieved of any such costs. It also affects worker access to social security, entitlements and coverage by legislation on working conditions.

In many instances an independent self-employed status is imposed upon workers, who, being in a fragile position, reluctantly come to accept it. This condition and the fact that the related monetary burden is often quite heavy for the nominal independents may lead them to get involved in unrecorded and unregulated work practices by evading proper registration, declaring and paying income tax, paying health/pension contributions and so on. In this sense, informal work adversely impacts such workers' health and social security services coverage.

Relevant evidence may be teased out from studies such as the one among platform workers taking part in the large-scale “COLLEEM” survey that took place in 2017 in 14 EU countries. Most platform workers −68.1% − identified themselves as employees, while a mere 7.6% as self-employed (Pesole et al., 2018: 31). The remaining declared themselves as unemployed, students, retired, pensioners, homemakers, people with a migrant background and others. Gig work attracts people that, to a significant extent, work part-time to supplement their income (Pesole et al., 2018). In the subsequent second wave of the “COLLEEM” survey that took place in 2018 in 16 EU countries, those identified as employees remained constant, although those identified as self-employed increased, reaching 10% (Urzì Brancati et al., 2020, p. 50).

The self-identification as an employee implies that such labourers see themselves as under the domain of a single employer and not as independents who are working with another company. However, beyond subjective self-identification, the legal status of most such workers, which was/is that of independent contractors, is considered legally as self-employed. This status also affects the stability of their work and pay, or pay rate, calculated on individual performance, which is reminiscent of the piece rate and akin to 19th-century labour relations.

Algorithmic control, i.e. control via algorithms embedded in digitalised systems that coordinate labour procedures in the absence of direct supervision (Duggan et al., 2020), is mostly an extension of bureaucratic control, which includes monitoring and regulating by bureaucratic means (Edwards and Wajcman, 2005) that have been digitalized. It makes it possible for increasing numbers of labourers to work with digital tools on-site, online, or at a distance from traditional workplaces and to be controlled via various work surveying and monitoring systems. Systems that incorporate electronic monitoring systems, automated algorithmic controls and suchlike (Cascio and Montealegre, 2016).

Given the extreme heterogeneity of employment and working conditions across the different types of crowd work and platform work, algorithmic surveillance nonetheless raises issues that concern the purpose of it and the compliance to it too. Ball presents and analyses an extensive array of surveillance practices in relation to digital platform work and worker responses (2021). Constant monitoring is verified by other researchers too (Urzì Brancati et al., 2020; Aloisi et al., 2023). This is possible since platform organizers/managers are in a position to embed rules, monitoring functions and even sanctions into the digital interfaces of the platform (Ametowobla and Kirchner, 2023), which may be furthered with the use of AI. Ball details the conditions of surveillance and mechanisms utilised to implement it and underlines the importance of “behavioural visibility” that may be seen to be a control tactic pursued by organisations in relation to their workforce. In response, employees have to show “appropriate performance and behaviours that are captured in data, not only to be evaluated but also to be acknowledged and recognised for their efforts” (2021: 41). In such a context, compliance is the outcome of employees responding in fear “of not being seen”. Galière (2020), on her part, on the basis of research she undertook on the Deliveroo platform, holds that worker compliance to algorithmic management rests in that algorithmic control is rational. It is also imperfect, but compliance is aided by techniques of what has been termed subjectification. Several dispositives on the platforms, more often than not, generate an active mobilisation of workers that ends up supporting the efficiency goals of the platforms. In this sense, platforms exert not only rational but also normative control on them.

The expansion and specification of surveillance have been propagated by management as the means to achieve increases in productivity with increased independence, responsibility, choice and autonomy for the workers in pursuing their work (Vaujany Francois-Xavier et al., 2021). At the same time, managerial controls are maintained and even strengthened by means of algorithmic surveillance practiced through various monitoring devices that are embedded in the tools and mobile phones/apps with which work is undertaken and that have perceptible as well as hidden affordances (Schor et al., 2020). The use of algorithms by platforms means that surveillance increasingly befalls on non-human robots. Their preponderance has been reflected in the instances of automatic dismissals should workers contravene the set platform specifications.

In fact, the surveillance they are under, algorithmic alongside standard managerial surveillance as well as customer evaluation (when available, as in delivery and taxi services), operates as an assemblage that arrives at an “algorithmic gaze”, which ideal-typically ends up not only in replacing human observation but also replacing human decision-making (Newlands, 2021, p. 732). The implication is that the comprehensiveness of the surveillance workers undergo at work is thorough and may exceed what is necessary for work control purposes. Such workers are poorly remunerated, in dire need to keep any job they might have, and do not seem to value that much their autonomy or independence (Rivera and Lee, 2021; O'Higgins and Caro, 2022).

Patently, digital surveillance impacts differentially upon the implicated workforce. On the one hand, there are those that closely identify with the autonomy and independence claim, and to have them, they willingly accept the enhanced surveillance. These tend to be more educated, multi-skilled and dexterous; may perform creative or specialist work; are freelancing; tend to espouse post-materialist values; and attempt to incorporate them into their lifestyle, with at least some success. Their rewards are significantly intrinsic, specified as autonomy, mastery, purpose and psychological safety, but as they are highly skilled and dexterous, high pay is an anticipated extrinsic reward (Gol et al., 2018). Such outworkers are numerically few.

By contrast, the many are those working in micro-tasking and those engaged with platform-controlled gig work. They perform compartmentalized work tasks at on-site locations or at a distance. These tasks do not particularly resemble a complete job, as the latter would have been known until the emergence of mediating and mobilizing platform work. This compartmentalization undermines the central role jobs have for identity purposes and as anchors of the social structure (Pesole et al., 2018). The latter are working on the various platforms coordinating delivery, courier, cleaning, taxi services, etc. From repeated measurements, as already alluded to, it emerges that both those working in micro-tasking and gig work do so largely on a part-time basis (Urzì Brancati et al., 2019; Piasna et al., 2022).

Overall, there has been good evidence that supervision and surveillance have intensified, as in teleworking or gig work (Aloisi and De Stefano, 2022; Lal et al., 2023), or that worker isolation increased, which generates problems of a different order (Forte et al., 2021). Of course, apart from compliance, there is also opposition to algorithmic controls, as there are continuous breaches of the privacy dimension that enrage platform workers.

State intervention at the national level is beyond the scope of this paper and therefore not taken up here. With respect to the EU, despite delays, it has intervened by engaging in a series of legal movements that aim to have a binding effect on platform and gig work in all member states. Thus, an initial political agreement was passed at the Council of the European Union that stressed issues of social protection of all labouring categories and referred specifically to platform workers too (Council of the European Union, 2018). It was largely based on the European Pillar of Social Rights established in 2017 (OJEU, 2024 , p. 1).

The next major step took place in late 2021, when, under the impact of the pandemic, a set of measures was proposed to address the demands that have been expressed in relation to platform work. Indeed, the PWD was presented to the European Commission on 9 December 2021. It expressly aimed at “improving working conditions in platform work” (European Commission, 2021b, p. 1).

From the outset, the initial PWD documents looked into two major issues: the self-employed legal status of platform workers and issues pertaining to their work surveillance. Other issues were also touched upon, but they were rather peripheral to the aforementioned, as no specific measures were stipulated.

The directive acknowledged the misclassification and, in its final version, proposed a new legally binding arrangement. It upholds the employment presumption for platform workers, which is based on a set list of control criteria and rules and is rebuttable. Thus, it will be possible to determine whether a platform is to be considered an employer and hence its workers as employees or not. Platforms operating at the national level and across borders are also now obliged to declare work to national authorities and to make key information about their activities and the people who work through them available to the national authorities.

As far as surveillance and worker's control by digital/automated means are concerned, which constitute the larger part of the PWD final document, the directive is set to protect workers' personal data and regulate algorithmic surveillance and management. The directive is at pains to distinguish which it considers and which it does not as an online platform, as it aims to address the former only (OJEU, 2024, p. 5). In particular, the uncontrolled processing of personal data by AI systems that operate on the basis of automated decision-making systems is to be adjusted. To do so, human oversight of them is to be introduced, while specific rules are formulated and applied. Indeed, in its final version, the directive recognises the need for transparency in the use of algorithmic surveillance and management and for control in personal data collection. Thus, it introduces human monitoring (human review) and a set of rules that gives the right to those performing human monitoring to contest automated decisions (European Parliament, 2025). It also provides the means for workers to express their view and contest an automated decision (OJEU, 2024, pp. 2-9, 19–20).

Then, digital labour platforms are tasked to consider and protect their workforce from excesses such as work intensification and insecurity that outflow from the use of automated monitoring systems (OJEU, 2024, p. 10). Particularly, undue pressure upon workers is stigmatized and platform worker protection with respect to safety and health issues is noted, notwithstanding an emphasis on mental health protection. National governments are tasked to develop related preventive measures (OJEU, 2024, p. 20), which means that this is basically an ethical call with no substantial policy implications.

Of course, excessive monitoring goes hand in glove with the well-established fact that the work organized by technological platforms has a logic that is opaque to employees (Ajunwa and Greene, 2019), which is recognised in the PWD (OJEU, 2024, p. 3). This may have an effect on furthering the individualization of platform workers by developing their own perception of job quality and motivation to work (Dunn, 2020).

Moreover, this comes on top of already existing legal EU stipulations that one has the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, that produces legal effects concerning any worker or similarly significantly affects her/him, which obligations are extended to include digital labour platforms. It also applies to persons performing platform work who do not have an employment contract or employment relationship (European Commission, 2021b, pp. 26-29).

Relatedly, the PWD proposes to introduce and establish the collective representation of workers in consultation processes in the platform economy too (OJEU, 2024, p. 5, 8, 23), although no specific measures are introduced to that effect. The expressed aim is to achieve transparency and accountability in the collection and use of personal data, implying the imposition of definite limits. Further, the directive calls for enforcement of applicable rules for all platform workers, including those working across borders (OJEU, 2024, p. 5, 16). Payment issues are also touched upon but only in a broad sense and in relation to the overall aim of achieving equality and transparency (European Commission, 2021b).

Some protection from dismissals is anticipated, but as the process is delegated to national governments, it does not have an immediate binding authority (OJEU, 2024, p. 23).

The 26-page-long PWD document itself elucidates in much detail and in a comprehensive way the various work situations encountered by platform workers and stipulates corrective measures for them with an eye and expressed aim to regulate and normalize them in line with the European Acquis. It also states that the directive will become law in all EU-27 countries by the second of December 2026, and that it will be reviewed three years later too (OJEU, 2024).

A long and indeed challenging process of discussions and negotiations followed which in the process trimmed down some of the changes that the initial draft PWD proposed. Subsequently, in mid-summer 2023, a general approach was agreed upon (Council of the European Union, 2023a, b), and the document took the road to be further elaborated as legislation in progress, summing up agreements and disagreements too, leaving room for additional consultation before it was to be tabled for a European Parliament vote (Council of the European Union, 2023a).

Then, an agreement between the EU Parliament and the EU Council, which represents member states, was announced on December 11, 2023 (Council of the European Union, 2023b). Yet, a few days later, 12 national governments out of the 27 practically vetoed the PWD, i.e. Bulgaria, Czechia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Sweden and the three Baltic states. These raised objections, and the bill was frozen, as announced by the outgoing Spanish presidency of the EU (on the 22nd of December 2023).

Following this, the declared intention − announced on the 16th of January 2024 − was that a new set of negotiations shall begin under the then-new Belgian presidency (European Parliament, 2024). Despite the renewed effort in February 2024, the PWD was vetoed again by the same group of countries.

Finally, on 11 March 2024, the bill was endorsed by the employment and social affairs ministers, as the two remaining countries (i.e. Latvia and Greece) that objected to it voted in favour “in the spirit of compromise” (ERR News, 2024), although it was not supported by the relevant German and French ministers (Press Release, Council of the EU, 2024). A month later (on the 24 April 2024), the European Parliament adopted the PWD with a substantial majority (European Parliament, 2025).

The PWD, marked as Directive 2024/2831 (of the Council and the European Parliament), was decided on 23 October 2024 and published in the Official Journal of the EU on 11 November 2024 (OJEU, 2024). The Directive entered into force on 1 December 2024 (Lexology, 2024). The next step is that the PWD has to be transposed and thus incorporated in member states legislatures as national law by 2 December 2026 and of course applied.

The PWD has been hailed as ideologically left-wing (PES, 2024); certainly, trade unions have welcomed it (ETUC, 2024). The long negotiations and the opposition it encountered have been linked in journalistic accounts to the adverse position of ruling political groups in several countries and to the opposition by platform-based companies.

In fact, it has been suggested that pro-business conservative political forces were stalling the agreement since all of the countries vetoing the proposal in December 2023 and in February 2024, except Germany, were governed by either right-wing or liberal parties (Euractiv, 2023). This element indicates that the debate about the PWD was ideologically motivated. Besides, a lot of politicking has been at play too, while employers − major platform companies, such as Uber or Bolt − have lobbied intensively in undermining the agreement on the PWD (Corporate Europe Observatory, 2024).

Given the ideological perturbation involved in the passing of the PWD, it remains to be seen whether there would be further complications in the transposition process, i.e. in the incorporation into member-states legislature and in implementing it at the national level (ETUI News, 2024).

The introduction of the PWD is bound to insert a measure of regulation and, in this sense, formalization in a work area that has been marked by an unfathomed yet substantial informality. The informality to which I allude is related to the finding that, in good part, platform-controlled work de facto employs young, part-time, foreign, and/or casual workers that often do not appear on record. In fact, most of them are susceptible to accepting the imposition of informal work arrangements or even preferring them themselves for a variety of different reasons. The unregulated, hence informal, element in their work might have been partial, but it was very often present. The PWD that sets specific criteria for the legal designation of platform workers as employees also included the institutionalized recording of aspects of platform work jobs and provides a definite framework for platform surveillance to a degree that was unavailable before its establishment. All these are to be regulated once the PWD's transposition occurs. To that measure, PWD promotes the formalization of various aspects of platform work, which should prove beneficial to workers, for they will obtain social and economic rights that hitherto have been denied to them. In this sense, the PWD definitely promotes a move from the informal to the formal.

In essence, the realization of the PWD would mean that several aspects in the workings of platforms will be communicated to national authorities on a regular basis and, in this sense, shall be recorded, made formal and regulated too on the basis of specifically designated criteria. It is expected that this set of processes will benefit platform workers in relation to obtaining a true designation of their employment status and hence in acquiring social and economic benefits, allowing them to do away with excessive work surveillance, and, to a lesser degree, by making more feasible the unionization of platform workers. Of course, there are still significant aspects that concern platform workers, such as issues of pay or the precarity of their work situation, that the enforcement of the directive will not affect. Overall, the PWD-related developments mean that platform work will be moving towards a formalization in aspects that so far have been unseen and therefore not regulated by the relevant authorities and thus kept informal.

Can the PWD be seen as a breakthrough? It would appear that way. It's not that criticism hasn't come up; it has. Indeed, the scope of the expected PWD intervention has been criticised as lacking in terms of the regulations it will provide because it fails to address the need to improve algorithmic management provisions (Veale et al., 2023) or the precarity of platform workers' work situations (Aloisi et al., 2023).

Overall, despite criticisms, the PWD initiative seems to be comprehensive in regard to gig and crowd work by addressing two issues: introducing non-automated human intervention and safeguards to increase transparency in the use of algorithmic surveillance and establishing a pertinent set of legal criteria for considering an individual an employee.

Every element of socioeconomic life, including the job, is changing as a result of digitalization. Work has been extensively and multilayeredly digitalized over the years, changing its nature and content in the process. Digital tools and resources, which have been mostly unregulated and informal, have allowed for the emergence of delivery services, remote work, and other non-traditional labour arrangements. Reviewing relevant material has been the task at hand in order to demonstrate how the growth of digitalization and platform work has caused challenges for the workforce, leading to the EU's intervention through the PWD. The latter's intervention in two main areas of concern implies that the operation of platforms will become less opaque. This can occur but by rendering their operations and the informality that marked them more transparent towards establishing a determined and legally binding formal appellation.

Then, it is the algorithmic surveillance of platform work primarily affecting crowd- and gig-workers that is posing a significant problem to those directly concerned. This form of surveillance renders possible the constant scrutiny of workers and collects personal data on them in excess of what may be considered necessary for work monitoring. Thus, there is a violation of privacy, and it may be seen to permeate the home-work and private-public divide. Platform workers have reportedly expressed their objections on this and other matters of concern to them, but this opposition has not been expressed in an organised form since they are largely individualized with extremely limited union organization. Besides, the conditions of their work do not facilitate nor are conducive to collective action. Nevertheless, platform workers have raised their demands, calling on the state to regulate platform work.

At the EU level, there has been an attempt to address the issues and regulate the platform economy with the launch of the PWD initiative. After an extended period of negotiation and bargaining, the PWD was finally passed in late 2024 and shall be incorporated in the legislature of all EU-27 countries by the end of 2026 at the latest.

The enforcement of the PWD may be seen as the start of a legal procedure that will formalize the work status of many gig workers, which will affect their finances as they will no longer be self-employed, and shall regulate the surveillance they are under by introducing a human interface dimension that is in line with other mainstream work monitoring conditions in Europe. The procedure has commenced with the establishment of the PWD. The next step is the transposition process, i.e. the incorporation of the PWD in each of the EU's 27 member states legislatures in the course of two years after the final PWD's approval.

By itself, the transposition process has not advanced a year after the directive was passed. This might indicate that the transposition process is a low priority for the national governments of the EU, despite the fact that one more year remains in the timeframe, which contributes to legal uncertainty. Nevertheless, at least one country (the Netherlands) has already announced that it will require more time to effect the process, indicating a delay. Thereafter, how such legislation will be applied is unsettled, which nevertheless will determine the effectiveness of the directive. In the meanwhile, the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) is preparing to negotiate the application of the PWD (ETUC, 2025). A reasonable, perhaps, expectation - but no more than this - is that the application of the directive as national law might not be entirely unitary but variable, following the established practice in the observance of labour law in each of the different member countries. At this point, however, there is no certainty about the unfolding of the PWD implementation process.

Additionally, the PWD's implementation is limited in scope because it does not interfere with the established work organization norms, save from formalizing the characteristics of gig employment that it particularly suggests. Furthermore, it is now impossible to predict how gig workers will respond to the directive's effects. Especially given that the existing systems are rife with informality, which some of them may find acceptable or even preferable.

Overall, it may be said that the introduction of the PWD would not be a panacea. But its introduction entails an infusion of a modicum of formalization in what has been a technologically versatile, albeit utterly unregulated, work context.