A new single European contract for digital workers

With the rising of a hybrid, distributed and digitally connected workforce[1] is growing the need to clarify well what are the characteristics of digital work and how it differs from traditional work.

This point is crucial to understand how to regulate it correctly .

An employee working two days from home is certainly a modern type of work, but it does not qualify as a real change in the worker’s professional life and in the way the company operates.

Instead, new ways of working have different characteristics that therefore require new ways of organizing, managing and regulating them. Let’see why.

Digital portals can be a showcase where labor supply and demand meet , or a platform that coordinates the organization of activities in a defined space and time , only when activities are coordinated digitally, without hierarchy, space and time constraints, potentially crossing the boundaries of a single company or state that new conditions in labor performance and in organizational frameworks are born.

The new ways of working thus concern those workers who can freely manage their tasks remotely, only occasionally going in the employer’s office. They can choose the projects they like most, working freely for multiple employers, even simultaneously, in some cases coordinating or (self-) coordinating autonomously with other workers and companies on temporary and integrated activities, like employees, freelancers or consultants at the same time.

These professionals in creative, technological, digital field, can be valued more on expertise and results than on working time, and need to be integrated into complex projects supply chains, activities and data, in a life long learning perspective, maintaining a constant rate of autonomy and openness to collaboration.

These professionals in the digital context can organize themselves autonomously on a cross-national/cross company dimension to achieve assigned or self-assigned goals. They suffer from bureaucracy, hierarchy, and compartmentalization of organizations, but outside companies they struggle with insufficient access to job opportunities, funding and welfare, struggling in keeping in touch with public autorities, public employment services, and unions.

They are not traditional executives, they are not entrepreneurs, they are not mere executors.

Somebody called them slash workers, other freelancers or knowledge workers. They can design, solve, create, manage, analyze and collaborate. They don’t have a stable and defined job description, they can’t be paid for the time they spend in the office, but they are critical to creating value in both the private and public sectors .

Currently, these growing workforce of digital nomads and digital companies find themselves in a kind of regulatory “limbo” where they have to choose between freelancing[2], small outsourcing, workers or employees status even if their real performance can often cross different legal terms.

How many workers do we find in this situation?

It is not easy to determine how many micro SMEs, Freelancers, Indipendent workers , hybrid employees are the result more of a discomfort with existing labour contracts than of an actual free choice, but the actual feeling is that we are talking of millions of workers and just as many companies that employ them.

How many companies in Europe, even large ones, are not making the best use of their human capital and struggle to adapt to digital work scenario[3]?

Gallup data present a rather worrying situaton in which very low engagement mirrors organizations struggling to meet market and employees expectations.[4]

These types of workers cannot be managed effectively with a single national labor law system or a single company contract . New regulating tools and legal frameworks to engage and support these workers shaping their activities over time are needed to be discussed and implemented.

The most suitable and modern tools for a NEW regulation of digital work should be through digital labour platforms and more specifically “digital platform companies”.

These new organizational objects are built to create the right ecosystem for business ventures and workers who want to compete efficiently and sustainably in the new areas of technology and the knowledge economy.

It is therefore necessary to implement a new european regulation of public and private work through technology platforms , along with the introduction of a new european platform labour contract for those workers and organizations that operate through the use of platforms.

A long term contract that transforms relationships and habits, enables access to skills and opportunities in a simple, equitable, transnational and cross-sectoral dimensios, and makes the provision of workers, its organization, coordination and remuneration simpler, measurable, stable and flexible.

A new form of regulation that overcome freelancing platforms[5] to create an ecosystem of work and services that combines autonomy and protections, responsibility and support, collaboration and competition, flexibility and stability, coordination and assistance, solving the problem of decent work and job quality in a new and innovative fashion overcoming fragmentation, complexity and informality.

This new platform labor contract, and related ecosystem, whose characteristics, problems and opportunities we will write again about, would benefit companies, which would be able to attract and manage qualified skills in a more stable and competitive environment , EU labour market convergence and national pension systems which would have a more solid health schemes and pensions funds.

It would benefit society, which would build more future proof ways of working for families and communities and more effective and flexible operating infrastructure for the implementation of public and private projects .

It is not only a matter of give representation to these new workers but of giving a clear horizon to new companies and organizations that can find new, more productive, innovative and inclusive operating models in those sectors where the workforce but is highly strategical.

The regulation of skilled, knowledge, cross national and high-tech work is waiting for a solution, and the advance of technology and social change are bound to increase the disconnect between these new ways of working and current regulating labor tools.

In this fruitless waiting could lie perhaps the reason of some social, labor market, productivity, inequality, problems and the delay in the development of a digital, ai powered single european economy.[6]

The EU institutions have shown how to intervene to face unexpected problems, now they must show that they know how to prepare european society for the future of Work.

Nicolò Boggian

Founder Whitelibra.com

[1] https://nicolo-boggian.medium.com/digital-work-is-the-real-frontier-of-digital-transition-e715e7a66299

[2] https://www.thestage.co.uk/news/half-of-freelancers-feel-job-insecurity-post-pandemic--survey

[3] In recent months large tech platforms have laid off hundreds of thousands of workers overnight, leaving them without income and protections, demonstrating that the problem of labor regulation even in tech sectors is far from solved even in the U.S.

[4] Only 21 percent of people found to be “involved” in their work, showing that there is a structural problem that cannot be attributed only to managerial behavior or individual organizations.

[5] In recent years there has been much debate about rider and driver platforms, neglecting the broader context of digital platform work particularly in B2B.

[6] https://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/analysis/digital-tech-europes-growing-gap-eight-charts