SSE Riga Assistant Professor Dmitrijs Kravčenko presents a paper on Platform Work in Latvia to European Commission
In October, SSE Riga Assistant Professor Dmitrijs Kravčenko took part in the European Commission's Peer Review event on the topic of “Platform Work” and provided an overview on the platform economy in Latvia.
Platform work is an employment form in which services are provided or mediated through digital platforms. Platforms serve as intermediaries that match clients with workers and this employment form primarily affects transportation, finance and food delivery industries (for example, company Bolt uses platform work).
A number of Member States have recently started to address some aspects of platform work however this has proven to be a challenging issue since the phenomenon is relatively new and the pace of technological and organisational change make it a "moving target”.
During the event, country representatives discussed various measures that participating member states have in place for protecting platform workers and analyzed how different member states define platform workers (are they employees or self-employed, and in which circumstances), what is the role of trade unions, and what an EU-level regulation of platform work may look like and what it might entail relative to existing national and EU-level legislation.
As an independent expert from Latvia, Dmitrijs Kravčenko prepared and presented a paper “The collaborative economy: a difficult path to navigate when seeking to simultaneously appease digital innovation and protect workers, without upsetting either”.