The spread of platform work has provoked academic and policy debates about appropriate ways to embed this form of work into national and supranational institutions of labour regulation.
A major instrument of such regulation is the re-classification of platform workers’ employment status, aiming at giving workers access to collective labour rights. While debates have been focused on appropriate regulatory approaches and criteria for status determination, little emphasis has been placed on the practical enforcement of platform workers’ status determination – although enforcement gaps are documented for other non-standard forms of employment and traditional enforcement mechanisms through supervision by unions are largely lacking in the platform economy.
Against this background, we use Germany and Norway, two coordinated market economies characterized by institutional cooperation between the state and the social partners, to analyse the institutions, actors and mechanisms for status determination in both countries. We ask what the challenges are in applying existing enforcement mechanisms for status determination to platform work and whether these mechanisms meet the needs of the workers in the platform economy.
The analysis draws on qualitative interviews and document analysis, and reveals three major findings:
- first, despite institutional differences, both countries face substantial enforcement gaps as platform-based employment models often remain undetected.
- Second, enforcement authorities follow a rather reactive ‘wait-and-see approach’ and shift responsibility to the legislators.
- Third, these gaps shift enforcement issues from politics to the courts. We discuss the ambivalent implications of this ‘judicialization’ of labour regulation and outline challenges for future enforcement of platform work regulation.
