By Foo Yun Chee
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – EU countries on Monday tweaked draft rules aimed at giving workers at online companies such as Uber and Deliveroo employee benefits, ahead of negotiations with EU lawmakers who want more comprehensive rules than both EU governments and the European Commission.
The draft rules announced by the EU executive in late 2021 would be a global first and are part of a raft of legislation intended to ensure a level playing field between online and traditional businesses.
In their draft version agreed on Monday, EU countries propose that companies will be considered employers if they meet three out of seven criteria.
The criteria are supervising the performance of workers through electronic means, restricting their ability to choose their working hours, and restricting their tasks, preventing them from working for third parties, setting an upper limit on pay, setting rules on their appearance or conduct and restricting their ability to use subcontractors or substitutes.
The EU executive said the rules would cover some 4.1 million of the 28 million workers at online platform companies across the 27-country European Union.
The European Parliament, which proposed its own changes in February, wants the rules to include an indicative list of criteria to determine whether a worker is an employee. Such criteria would include whether the worker was subject to a fixed salary, defined working hours and work time, and supervision by the employer.
EU countries said workers should be informed about the use of algorithms used in decision making processes at work when these decisions concern them, while lawmakers say important decisions should not be taken by automated systems.
Uber criticised the proposals from both EU countries and lawmakers.
“As many countries across Europe have demonstrated, there are better ways to uphold European social values without removing the independence and flexibility that the majority of platform workers say they want,” Uber Vice President Anabel Diaz Calderon said in a statement.
Delivery Platforms Europe, whose members are Bolt, Deliveroo, Delivery Hero, Glovo, Uber and Wolt, was equally critical.
“While the text approved today brings more clarity than the original proposal, it still fails to draw a clear enough line between employment and self-employment and it does little to enhance the situation of the genuinely self-employed,” it said.
EU countries, EU lawmakers and the Commission will now thrash out the details before the draft becomes legislation.
(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by Susan Fenton)
