Giuseppe Guerini: "The digital platform economy: a rapidly‑expanding phenomenon that goes beyond the borders of the European Union"

Digital platforms build a "virtual space" where interactions and exchanges take place that involve much more than simply matching supply and demand. These platforms are able to monitor and influence workers, suppliers and users in increasingly sophisticated ways. However, they also represent an extraordinary breakthrough innovation, offering new services for clients and new employment opportunities. They are able to do so through profiling systems and extensive use of data, employing artificial intelligence systems and algorithms determined by those who run the platforms.

As this phenomenon has grown, so have the various types of employment relationships established via digital platforms: self-employment, discontinuous working relationships and individualised employment contracts. In this context, workers’ cooperatives can be a useful tool for making employment relationships more stable. They also allow workers, who are the owners of digital platforms and the algorithms that make them function, to play a direct, leading role in these employment relationships.

But what is a platform cooperative?

A platform cooperative is essentially a co-owned business that is governed democratically with the involvement of participating stakeholders. It organises the production and exchange of goods and services through IT infrastructure and protocols that allow interaction to take place between different devices, both fixed and mobile.

Like any cooperative, platform cooperatives belong to and are governed by those who are most dependent on them, in this case the workers, users and other stakeholders. Of course, this is done with due regard for the appropriate contract classification of the working members, whether they work as employees or as self-employed workers.

That is why it is important for the EU’s digital transition strategy to make provision for initiatives that support the establishment of cooperatives to manage digital platforms. This should also foster collective ownership of digital services, data and technological infrastructure, thereby encouraging greater economic diversification and promoting economic democracy in the digital organisation of labour and business too. As the opinion highlights, there are some limitations with regard to the legal certainty of workers and consumers interacting on the platforms. It is therefore important to recognise the purpose of social dialogue on the one hand and, on the other, the role that social economy organisations can and must take on in this context.

The EESC’s opinion contributes in a timely and coherent way to the European Commission’s work on regulating digital platform workers and to a broader international debate on the phenomenon of platform cooperatives, showing that the Committee really is an attentive body able to represent civil society and Europe’s social partners.