Platform Employment

Platform employment — any productive activity performed by persons to produce goods or provide services carried out through or on a digital platform, and:

• the digital platform or a phone app controls and/or organizes essential aspects of the activities, such as the access to clients, the evaluation of the activities carried out, the tools needed for conducting the work, the facilitation of payments, distribution and prioritization of the work to be conducted; and
• the work is for at least one hour in the reference period.

This definition is broad and includes different forms of digital platform work, including digital platform work for own-use, digital platform employment, digital platform unpaid trainee work, digital platform volunteer work and other work activities carried out on or through a digital platform.

Moreover, this definition emphasises the notion of control and organisation by the platform, which is essential to disentangle digital platform work and other type of work taking place via a platform. For example, a customer and a service provider exchanging via Teams or Zoom does not constitute digital platform work, as these two communication platforms do not offer integral services like ratings of participants, payments and matching of the two parties.

Handbook on Measuring Digital Platform Employment and Work