 The next speaker we have is Paul Schuchens from the Catholic University of Leuven and Tilburg University and he will present today a paper on platform work and its regulatory effects for social security. So Paul, the floor is yours and we are very much looking forward to your presentation. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Lars, it's a pleasure. Thank you very much for the invitation to come to Bremen. It was very nice to hear it's a young university, slightly younger than I am. But it was very nice to hear that everything started with social sciences here. And although I'm a lawyer, my work in social law brings me to cooperate quite a lot in Leuven and Tilburg but also beyond that with social scientists. I mean we are a bit interlinked. And the fact that interdisciplinary research is so important in Bremen shows that it's no coincidence that you invited me to come over here because again social security law is very much interdisciplinary. When I prepared my contribution today I reckoned well this is the last one in a series of contributions this year on platform work and social security but the difference is that in most of the previous sessions those people were experts in social security and not so much in platform work and I think now it's a bit vice versa. So if I will become too technical I will see it. But if it's hard to follow in the technicalities let me know I will try to stay away from two technical things in social security. Now this speech is a little bit into a broader setting, broader research which we are conducting in Leuven, University of Leuven in Belgium in Flanders and University of Tilburg. And I have to say that much of the content is also being provided by a younger researcher, Alberto Barrio and a slightly less younger researcher, Saskia Montabovie, who are not here today and I'm simply presenting some of the research results and some more general reflections but do know that quite a lot of the work is done by them in Tilburg and some part of the work is done in Leuven. Now what is very much at stake is the following. Platform work, so platforms and people working in platforms are very often labelled as atypical non-standard work. They are something special, they deviate from the normal worker apparently. Is that problematic? Yes it is. In labour law and social security law, much of the laws and the systems and I think Germany is a very good example of that too. Much of the protection which has been designed for pensions for instance or for unemployment or for working capacity, it has been designed around the worker and especially the traditional worker. And platform workers are labelled to be atypical, non-standard, non-traditional and to some extent it has been mentioned already before with the first presentation the reference was made, they are freelancers, they are self-employed and there you have it already, I mean when I started my own PhD 25 years ago I worked upon self-employment and social protection and back then self-employed people, the traders, the craftsmen, the farmers they were labelled to be atypical for social security which is a difficulty suite because in my opinion they were very typical self-employed. But from a social point of view they were atypical because the protection law, the labour law protection, social security law protection was traditionally designed with a traditional worker, the 9 to 5 person and as soon as you deviate from that default situation from the traditional worker you run into problems especially with labour law but also with social protection law. And now we are 25 years later and I notice that in the European Union they refer to self-employment as typical and platform as atypical and then 25 years ago self-employment was atypical too. So my first thing I would like to focus upon a little bit is what is typical work and what is atypical work and what is the issue, what is the problem for platform work why are they atypical concerned to the typical ones. So this may sound a little bit theoretical but it's not so much theoretical as you will see. And that standard work, that typical work and I will use standard work and typical work and atypical work and also work as kind of synonymous you can make some distinctions but I use them as a synonym. That standard work is undergoing some challenges due to the digitalisation of work, due to the robotisation of work, due to the flexibilisation of work. Standard work is undergoing quite some impact of our societies and work is not done in the same way let's say 25 or 50 years ago and I would like also to draw your attention to that and I will come to the case of platform work and especially in Tilburg University we are focusing very much upon the social protection of platform workers in a comparative perspective. We compare some systems, are they protected, how are they protected and what are the issues and when you protect them for unemployment for working capacity for pensions for healthcare. And that's the last one, if you see that whole evolution and if we focus upon platform work there are upcoming challenges for regulating social security. It's pretty much now in the attention, it's very much in the attention social protection again and access to social protection. The European Union Commission and actually the European Union has such launched a recommendation, I know legally speaking it's rather soft but still it's a recommendation on the access to social protection and they are demanding the states like Germany but also other states to pay enough effort for atypical work forms like platform work but also self-employment can have access to the major schemes of social security including unemployment. If you looked at the first version of their draft it was even so that they were demanding that self-employed would have access on a mandatory basis to schemes like unemployment. I don't know how that would have been welcomed in Germany but it was welcomed in a very cool way in the Netherlands. They did not like the idea at all. The last version is now, it's a recommendation and they call upon member states to do the necessary efforts to envisage the possibility to give them at least on a volentary basis access to unemployment so we shifted a little bit from first mandatory to volentary and so on. But still it's very high on the agenda of the European Union it was very high on the agenda of Commissioner Junker and Commissioner Thessen to do something about atypical workers that are growing. If you look at the Netherlands and the UK the amount of people who are working in atypical way like self-employed people but also platform work is among them it's exploding. In the Netherlands it exploded. That was part of a very deliberate policy to have as many as possible people at work if possible in a flexible manner but not on unemployment and give them access to self-employment to give them access in an easy way to platform work are we going to protect them for pensions and working capacity? There the idea we will see we will see it's an issue for later but it's not an issue for later it's an issue for today so if we don't take action today the problem will only grow. So that's a bit... traditionally because it's not the first time I'm giving this contribution it has been evolving traditionally I always start with this slide actually it's this slide it's an old, I mean you see the figures it's from 2014 but it doesn't matter because it didn't change so much the first time I presented it was three years ago it was 59% now it's 58% of the people in the active working population is working as a standards worker in a typical way so the she majority is still working in a normal way and the minority is working in an atypical way in the European Union so far the good news depending on whether you think it's good or not maybe a bit more concerning is that the number went down of typical workers and the number of atypical workers went up and I'm not going to dive into too much into details but first of all I would like to draw your attention to the traditional atypical work forms it's people working part-time apparently that's the biggest group and then people working on fixed term contracts for one month or for one year but then they don't know what will happen afterwards and then the ones working as a self-employed so they are not in a subordinated relationship with their commission, with their employer now if you add the percentages all together you will go beyond 100% and you will think okay we have again a lawyer in front of us not able to count properly this is deliberately done do know that some of the atypical work forms are combinations they work both part-time and fixed term and if you do it in that way you come to 100% so be reassured but there are some evolutions I don't know them by heart but at least I mean for instance in the US the growth of employment the last 20 years was mainly due to and thanks to atypical work forms the numbers of young people starting to work is going down on the basis of a traditional undifferent work labor contract so more and more young workers when they start to work it's on atypical work forms if you look at the Netherlands the number of people working in an atypical manner part-time whatever it's almost, well it's one-third something like one-third of the working population even more if you see some surveys especially women there work very often part-time but then I have to say immediately in the Netherlands they will say it immediately that a large group of those part-time workers in the Netherlands they do it on a voluntary basis they like to work part-time it's their wish so you have to be careful with part-time it's not always a negative thing sometimes it's considered to be positive well it's how you look at it self-employment is rather stable if you look the figures for the 25-30 years 16% of the active work population in the right in the European Union is 16% already for 25-30 years so no big movements there but there you have to be careful I mean the numbers of self-employed with employees the small, medium-sized enterprises very often that's considered to be something positive you start as a self-employment self-employed person as a self-employed activity grows and it becomes a smaller company a bigger company becomes a multinational that's what we want to some extent well at least when you see some policy makers the number of self-employed with wage earners went down and the number of solo self-employed as they call self-employed on their own without employees in the Netherlands they call them Z-set payer self-employed without employees it grew and very often those self-employed they're not always the lawyers or the architects but it are more and more freelancers it are the group of self-employed which are not very well regulated they simply earn some income not as a wage earner they're a freelancer and that group grew enormously and many platform workers do belong to that group of solo self-employed it's not to completely show you but very often so there are, I mean behind those percentages I mean there are some other realities taking place now typical work and where did I get the figures from it was from the EU Labour Survey it's from statistical data from the European Union and typical was there always defined as work which is indefinite full-time employment so it's workers working full-time and on the basis of an indefinite work contract so without knowing when it will stop from the beginning and not as a self-employed but apart from that because that's statistically full-time or typical work is also a kind of standard for regulations for labour law and social security as I explained in the beginning much of our labour laws and social security laws have been designed around a typical worker but who is then the typical worker who is that standard, who is that default then what was the kind of reference for labour law and later on social protection now there I think a very nice definition apart from the ILO the definition we once found by Walton he's a judge from Australia where I think he pretty much covers the original idea of the standard worker which was the reference in our societies and he defined it as a stable and I liked very much in the beginning that the reference to stability it was also mentioned in the first contribution it's a stable relationship and stable is the outcome I will come back to that later it's a stable relationship which is open-ended so when it begins we don't know when it will stop and hopefully it will end for the rest of my life even direct employment relationship so you have one employer one employee and they have a contract so it's not a triangular relationship like you often have in platform work where you have a kind of intermediary asking for a task or service and then somebody doing it that comes close to agency work and then you have triangular relations we don't like it often in labour law because then we don't know who's the employer who's giving the instructions it's complicating things in other parts of our life triangular relations may also complicate sometimes things so it's a direct employment relationship between one employer and employee between a dependent the one who's doing the job is depending on the employer's instructions so that's the legal dependency the boss employer is giving instructions how you should do it and when you should do it but it's also economically depending upon the employer because his main income is coming from that employer so economically he's depending upon his commissioners full-time so that's clear and his unitary again it's referring to that unitary employer session now I put that a little bit in this chart where you see especially labour lawyers will immediately see the typical elements of a typical labour relationship the worker is in subordination the bilateral contract he gets a salary income for work, work for income that's the kind of exchange the market exchange which in the contract the economic dependency the mutuality of obligations I work for your income, you give me income because I work it's interlinked and the work is usually performed by the employer's premises I will come back to that immediately self-employment is deviating from that because it's not in personal subordination they are free, they are their own boss they don't get instructions from their and they are traditionally not economically depending upon their employer because they have many clients so if I don't do the job for you I go to another client and the least clients have the more depending to their commissioners and then they come close to the work the economic dependency and they don't have a salary, they have an income so the self-employed they are deviating from most of the elements in the employment relationship but the stability is also important the indefinite duration and the full-time employment gives stability to the workers in the first place he knows that every month or every week or whatever he will get an income and he hopes that it will go on until he does not want to go on anymore that's indefinite, that's the stability element but the stability is two-sided the stability is two-sided it's not only for the waitress it's also for the employer because if you have happy employees then you know they can rely upon them so the loyalty, the trust and you can go on with them and you will train them and you will invest into them and it's a kind of two ways and that was the idea of Ford that he was actually the company Ford based on he was very much backing up this kind of idea if you give them enough stability and reliability, they earn income and they will buy your products your cars, your 4T and so on so it was a kind of two-sided stability which was created both for the employee and the employer and if you're looking at part-time work for instance and work which is only fixed term it's deviating from that stability income stability or time stability other major atypical work forms and what we have been undergoing especially in the UK and the Netherlands but I would say largely in Europe was more flexibilisation going away from those full-time indefinite and going away to some extent from that stability, from that loyalty and so on create more flexibility in the labour relationship so if you deviate from those charts you're dealing with the traditional atypical work forms put them in those circles part-time fixed term self-employment and so on those were traditionally already for 30 years 40 years they made atypical work forms deviating from typical work and that had consequences to give you for instance a security one or two examples where you will immediately understand what it's about for instance self-employment traditionally we say self-employment we don't cover them or we don't protect them for unemployment for the risk of unemployment because the risk of unemployment is based very much upon the relationship between the employer and the employee it is the employer sacking you so a lot of our conditions is looking at why did he fire you what is the reason that you are on the street now it's based upon the relationship between you as an employee and an employer but as a self-employer it does not have an employer you cannot protect them for unemployment that was traditionally the idea why self-employed were not protected for unemployment same for part-time work well part-time work your income will be part-time and that can create problems for instance for your building up of your pension suddenly your income is low the number of hours you have been working is low your pension record will be less developed compared to a full-time and your pension will be in the end of the day potentially low maybe lower than a social or a minimum pension and then suddenly you see that states made corrections and we are saying for part-time work some extras we will count more their hours so that their pension will be higher so they were having had to correct why because they started from the traditional worker full-time and so on so if you deviate from the traditional thing you sometimes have to if you want you have to deviate from your traditional rules in labour law, social law and for instance in Belgium when they designed the unemployment scheme for self-employed we have a kind of mini unemployment scheme for self-employed they had to invent new rules specifically for the self-employed for the ones for the wage earners because they worked atypically they worked not in the same way as wage earners so that's a bit what the traditional three layers of atypical work lately and if you look at some reports of Eurofound and others you see that apparently there is a kind of explosion of new atypical work forms so the three traditional ones part-time fixed-term and self-employed have been now work-onvended by and there's a number of new types of atypical work forms and platform work is sometimes also labelled as one of those atypical work forms crowd work is then also being referred crowd work as part of platform work or outside of platform work portfolio work is being mentioned apprentices, freelance workers they call it marginal work and so on and so forth now we had a closer look at those atypical work forms, those new ones we had a report from Eurofound 2-3 years ago and we tried to find out what is different compared to the other traditional three ones and most of the time what we found out was that they were a further combination of the existing three ones that they were applying part-time and fixed-term together so it's actually not new it is intensifying the existing atypical work forms in one work form crowd work, if you see the traditional elements of the traditional workers which I've been mentioning before well crowd workers are not you cannot think many boxes of the traditional workers they do not work very often indefinite it's very little jobs little tasks, they don't do it for one they may do it full-time on a platform and this morning after the beginning it was interesting but it's not full-time for one client for one provider it's maybe full-time on the platform unless we consider the platform to be the employer then this line of course would become coloured as well as for the other ones so there you see the other atypical work forms which we have been looking at and some parts which were showing elements of the traditional work and some parts were not showing elements of the traditional work portfolio workers which were also in another position because they have a kind of portfolio they are being their designers for instance they are fashion people they are skilled workers and they are looked for for their skills and they are in a much stronger position they sometimes refuse they do it because they want to do it and so on very often in extra time many of the portfolio workers work extra to their main job as a kind of extra income whereas crowd workers they are very often it's a big crowd most of the time more upon platforms at least from the data I could read because we don't have so many many data now why is it relevant because why did we do so for all those atypical work forms when it's deviating from the traditional work when the element of traditional work is not there then it may be that some of the laws designed around the traditional work will be problematic for them for instance if the full-time element is not present for the atypical workers all social laws like pensions which start from full-time work will become problematic for those workers will need some corrections in the laws otherwise you risk that the protection will be lower so that was for us the kind of indication why we did it so in our research comes then platform work and I will give a definition of platform work immediately for our project really such a big issue for law I mean it's I mean the last couple of years, 2-3 years the number of meetings conferences projects on platform work it exploded but when you hear the data for instance 2 years ago I still remember on the European Union one of the conferences that EuroFound was saying this platform work it is extremely marginal they said it is 1.5% of the economic active population is working as a platform worker it's marginal but I mean and moreover they said economically everything is going well so what is the big fuss one of the statements they were making okay it's something new it's evolving and there may be some issues and it's challenging some of the traditional systems like social protection systems but what are we talking about it's I mean we hardly can count them on one hand I mean and so on and so forth that was a bit the main message I had some reserves there I said well how did you calculate your 1.5% I mean because some of them don't consider them to be workers and maybe they are not in your sample because they don't consider themselves to be workers and hence they did not react and there they had to acknowledge that maybe in the counting there may be some issues is it really an issue as I mentioned I mean platform work in the most extreme it's the kind of combination of end part-time and defined work and self-employment and we know those things already for 30 years and we know how more or less to address it so now we have to address it in a combined manner so from social or maybe it's not a big issue yes and no it's to some extent it's not a big issue if you really go into the essence again it's part-time fixed and self-employment and we already have some tools but some new challenges we noticed and the first challenge I think it has to do with the tasks it has been mentioned before already the gigs the little tasks it's very little I mean part-time work traditionally we think then of half-time work so you get a kind of contract for half-time or maybe one-third or whatever but here we are talking about little tasks gigs it's micro and how to deal with that because with pensions those little micro tasks are very difficult to capture sometimes pensions are calculated in numbers of hours of working in countries that you need to have to work so many hours a week but here we are talking about little tasks which are very difficult to calculate in hours it's quite problematic for some extent another problematic issue is that sometimes those little tasks a little amount of time can generate big amounts of money and we are not used to that in Social Security we are used to 38 hours of week 40 hours of week of work and for that kind of hours of week you get that kind of amount of money and with that kind of money you will get that kind of pension in the end of the and now suddenly it can be that say in five minutes you earn a disproportionate amount of money and how to deal with that in Social Security so it's indeed well upsetting a little bit the traditional approach of designing our social systems I would go one step further it's very hard to find out and that's what's the reason why my questions before to colleague Schreidel are those activities work activities is it work I'm pretty sure that most of you have been very active on one or another platform without you noticing maybe that you were working or were you working for instance I think you have been putting some reports on TripAdvisor or booking.com or whatever to share your experiences in a certain hotel or restaurant or a place well do you know that you take away the work from the person who traditionally was writing reports in the guide the touristic guide and he was going to eat in the restaurants or going to sleep in the hotels and he was testing it out he had some French movies about him that he was that was his work and he was earning income out of that now we do it and we share it because that was very often the idea of platforms sharing but is that work it's an activity you spend some time to and sometimes you say do I really have to do okay I will do it and I will say a little word and so on and so forth is it work I don't think you consider that to be work yourself you did not earn income I guess maybe indirectly you can have some credits for it I don't know but it's not always easy to make that distinction I mean influencers or people on social media having a lot of followers sometimes they get money for that big money for that because many people follow them so they get subsidies from companies to make sure that their clothes are somewhere being mentioned in in the report is that work it's definitely is income probably a person will use that income to live upon that will that person consider that to be work is it important yes it's important because if they consider that to be work they have to declare it you have income declaration you have tax you have social security contribution that if you yourself from beginning from the outset don't consider that to be work you will not have the inclination to report it to your authorities it's not that you try to avoid the law some of them of course try to avoid the law but sometimes you're even not aware of what the law is so it becomes I mean traditionally in social law we have a huge problem that problem still exists between who are the wage earners who are the self-employed that's also an issue for platform worker but we have a new problem coming up when is an activity a professional activity and when it's not a professional activity and in Germany it's an issue in Belgium it's an issue in France it's an issue of work related activities so the first element we have to know is the activity work or is it not work and then the second element is it self-employed work or is it employee work which is also an issue that's about those gigs in the work and then the third element I think which is challenging is a geographical element spreading that was also the reason of my question of the sample is a German the sample or is it beyond the potential here is enormous you can have somebody behind the computer doing a little task especially online offline we can track them they're biking here we deliver on their back or Uber Eats and so we see them they are not the most complicated cases in my opinion although most of the fuss is now about them in social law wage earners but that's not so complicated I think much more complicated are online activities where we don't have a clue where they are I mean they can do their job wherever here in Bremen I'm here for one day and a half I can do some activities I'm back tomorrow in Tilburg and I'll continue and I mean where am I working is it important yes it's important because in most of our systems where you work that's the place where you're socially protected and it's already an issue for post-it workers people who for two three days go to work somewhere and go back can you imagine if you have those little tasks can you do it today here tomorrow there and so on there is another issue and in Europe they don't know how to answer this issue for the moment and then I even don't talk about the fact that the one who is asking you to do something is somewhere totally different other different place in the world that the platform is located somewhere else having its main seat somewhere else that the server is at as to the controller things we have been discussing already before it becomes rather problematic to impose some of the legislation and so on and it's more challenging than it goes beyond the European Union even though you can say they should be in our system the next question will come there how to make that they will pay the necessary duties and that they will obey by law and so on and so forth and that's quite a challenge and there you see that the intensification of those are typical workers becomes a problem okay for our research we are the major problem the concept of platform worker does not exist legally at least not in social law except now for France and Belgium it's not a legal concept in our social laws in the pension it's not the platform worker is the following person nevertheless in our research we wanted to find out is the platform worker protected does he enjoy or she enjoy protection for Social Security and what kind of protection but we had to track that person down in one way or another and how to define how to make sure that we were comparing the same person across the systems we were looking at so we made a known definition what you see here and I will go very quickly I think as you did as well what was interesting was especially the ones who were getting income or remuneration because you have many platforms you can also have sharing platforms you can have we were not interested so much in those sharing platforms where we were sharing things and so on it was unless it was an economic sharing of course it's about income so that's especially a focus group in there people selected online that I don't have to from a pool of workers I don't have to explain that too much through the intermediation of a platform a platform you have a huge variety of platforms I will not go too much into detail here because I'm pretty much sure you know very much about it even more than I do but I mean you have online you have offline platforms you have platforms as it was mentioned which are simply a marketplace do not intervene too much simply make sure that providers and consumers do meet each other but others are monitoring very much and steering very much the action on the income I mean with Uber you are not free of course to set your rates on the satisfaction rates on how to behave and so on so that we left open so we have that multitude but we find some differentiations and I think in a further on we find out whether there are some typologies again that was also one of the questions that I was asking before personally so it's not a company doing the service on the amount so the other side is asking so you do it short term to ask the gigs for different persons or companies so from the taking side the ones consuming we don't mind so much whether it's a person or a company but the one who is providing it personally so that's not a company but especially in exchange of income that was rather crucial for us so that's kind of a slide and there you see very much a triangular relation again of what you also will see and notice in agency work it comes very close to agency work and some of the colleagues especially of labour law they try to make the comparison between agency work and platform work and to find out whether the labour law protection and social law protection labour law could be a kind of reference for the labour law and social protection for platform work and that was a little bit the definition of the person who we were singling out and then the next question was is that person being protected so we are now looking at some systems in Germany in France, UK, Belgium, Netherlands and I show you some of the slides and I will not go too much into detail but I will say some things so we are dealing here with a platform worker who is raising some income out of activities he or she is performing on a platform where does he or she end up in the social protection system because most of our countries do not have specific schemes for them alone they either will end up as an employee or a self-employed if it's considered to be work, if it's not considered to be work it can also be resume but I will not go too much into detail I will keep it here simple either it's an employee or a self-employed do know that for the moment and some of you the multitude of cases now going on on the question the Uber driver or Amazon Turk provider is he an employee or is he a self-employed and it's amazing to see how the outcomes how different they are I mean in the Netherlands it was a this time last year they had their very first case on delivery driver and the delivery driver was considered to be a self-employed person so the judge in Amsterdam said if I look at the criteria the ones I was referring it's clear that he's working on his own and he's self-employed whereas the driver was saying no I'm bound by the delivery by that and that and that someone slated the trade union launched a new case on a totally different aspect and another judge in Amsterdam was saying no they are employees they are wage earners and now we have a third case the same in France the same actually in the US the same in the UK so this battle is now being fought out whether their employees are self-employed and so on so sometimes they're considered to be an employee sometimes they're considered to be a self-employed now if they are considered to be employee you very often hear a kind of hooray especially of the ones who are fighting for the social right they say yes we won the battle and now labour law and social protection law will become applicable because for the self-employed their protection is very weak very often no labour law and social protection very marginal look also the German case where most of the self-employed are not fully protected only partially protected are not protected at all but you have to pay attention and for instance in Germany I think you're very familiar with that even if you're protected as an employee as a wage earner for social security when your work is done in an irregular way irregular in the sense when your income is low you will not be fully protected and then you see the income thresholds of course or the duration travels thresholds if your work is not continuously being performed a certain amount of days suddenly other rules start to apply and what you will see on the chart is when you see the little bird it means that you're protected for that risk old age or invalidity or contributory and employment or maternity paternity if you see the crosses you're not protected and if you see voluntarily you may be protected if you want to enter within some restrictions and then you see the more irregular and that's very often for platform workers because they work in an irregular way and therefore I also had the findings of the full-time presidents so what were very interesting because it could have an effect and also the income they were gaining could have an effect the more irregular it becomes the more crosses you will see and the lower the protection will be for other countries the more irregular the activities are the more voluntarily or the more crosses you will see I will give you one example from France for instance and then I will stop with those charts in France you have kind of the same they can either be employees or self-employed many of the platform workers are here in the micro-entrepreneur in the small entrepreneur the small businessmen as they call them France did something specific for them for all small businessmen the issue in France is the following if you have low income out of self-employed activities you are having a hard time in France because you have to start to pay contributions from a kind of minimum income it's depending upon the activity either 30,000 a year or 80,000 a year so even if you earn less you start from there which was of course killing off some of the businesses if you have platform worker with some little amounts of income you generate that income so what did France do they lowered the threshold they said we allow you to be a self-employed even if you don't earn that amount of money and you can start to pay on the basis of the real income you earn and not from the 80,000 to the 30,000 threshold that's nice but at the same time they were skipping some of the protection and you see that at the end of the day most of the platform workers are here but only with a very partial protection that's a kind of picture for the countries it's not typical for France or Germany we see the same in the UK we see the same in the Netherlands and so on and it has to do with the irregular work now for source protection we see three major challenges which have to be addressed in our systems the first has to do with work what is work and irregular work the pattern of most of those people is rather irregular they don't work from 9 to 5 in a very irregular pattern not at least for one client if your systems like the pensions and so on are designed in that way or the contribution level is designed in that way you have a problem and you have to adapt your systems if you want to accompany those people into your systems the employer is an issue who is the employer so if you consider the platform worker to be an employee but who is then the employer so you will have to adapt your systems there as well and then the third one is income instability income treasures which are being used I'll give you an example there and that's quite an issue I think what to do with apparently quite many of them have a very low income what to do with your source security the worst thing you can do is to allow them in on the basis of that low income and to give them high benefits in the end because then that's not sustainable for your system but some systems are doing that they say they are welcome they pay low contributions we don't care they run into the system we are inclusive they pay low contributions on the low income and we guarantee them some minimum benefits later on which are higher than the income they declared before that's not good for the stability of a system but the alternative is we guarantee them low benefits that's not good either because then you will have to correct through poverty schemes and social assistance schemes so that's a kind of big issue that we are struggling with and you see in the UK for instance they more or less decide to give subsidies on top of the irregular income irregular in the sense of the low income so they are subsidising those forms of work which of course is very nice for the platforms and the commissioners because it's cheap labour which is being provided and that's quite an issue by law you cannot address this issue this is more by social policy but I think for social security consequence now to close off I mean out of the work we have been doing we see three major challenges or three major conclusions one is and that's something I did not address here because it's rather legal technical it is possible to introduce them into your systems platform workers it is but you have to focus first upon to what extent to deviate from the traditional worker if that's clear to you if you understand how they work you can adapt your systems you can make an unemployment scheme for self-employed and you can make an unemployment scheme for platform work if you want if you understand how they work and if you're open and willing to deviate from the traditional workers but therefore you first have to understand how they work that's a kind of legal approach second I think there is an evolution going on at least in social security I think more and more we should move away with income out of work work was always very important I think we have to protect income all people want to earn income to live their life upon so protection tries to make sure that when you lose your income you're protected now we still have that element of work in between I don't know whether we can continue to keep it up as an important element in the design of our social security systems I think income protection is more important as I said before the influencer or the person working online he or she is earning income not always aware that he or she is working but income is being earned and income is to be protected and that element of work will become I think less important in the design of our systems remains the issue of marginal income and marginal income out of work what to do with that I think here the best approach is to be coherent what is not to be recommended is to allow to have them including in our systems with low contributions and to give high benefits you have to be coherent transparent or equivalent but to some extent you will have to support some of the activities in some way and that's quite an issue how far to go with the social support because if you do not pay attention you're giving subsidies to some platforms giving them the possibility to make use or abuse of cheap labour which we are subventioning so we don't have to step into that trap so that's a bit the research we are now doing in Tilburg and in Leuven and the first outcomes we have in social security some of the outcomes are rather similar of 20-25 years ago when we did a study on self-employment but there are some new challenges which popped up because of that rather extreme a typical kind of platform work thank you very much so I'm pretty sure this presentation has raised a couple of questions and so the floor is open to the audience if there are any questions thank you very much for the talk you had a slide where you showed different figures regarding relationship between employee and employers for different type of works I don't understand the crowd work types would you please explain it more I couldn't I couldn't understand which information this figure gives yes this one only the crowd workers so here are the elements which traditionally you find for the traditional workers which are important for labour law and social security law because most of the time those elements have been influencing the type of protection and what we simply did with some of the, these are simply six more with some of the atypical workers like crowd workers we tried to figure out which of those traditional elements in the normal labour relation are present for those crowd workers and here in the extreme we found none so it means that they are at a very extreme out layer if I can say so from the traditional worker and it means that the challenges to design your labour law and your social security law can be more challenging in the same way you could say that the real self-employed in the most extreme way if I can say so having many clients and so on and so forth would also be in that kind of position but some others atypical like economically dependent self-employed to give you another example this is a self-employed person with one boss well with one commissioner he only has one client and that shows that economically is depending upon that one client and then you see certainly that some elements of the traditional worker the traditional wage starter show up with that economically dependent self-employed or here the owner manager of an own company that's I think an interesting case you have some self-employed to organise themselves in an own legal company and they work within their own company as a self-employed so they are a kind of single company and they give themselves an income of wage which is completely fictitious so it's a self-employed bargaining with his own company asking to set a wage what kind of wage do you want so he's on the basis of that wage he's raising his contribution so here you see that some of the elements you come close to and so on so that was a chart about and it helped us to get some insight on what are the elements we have to pay attention in the laws and legislation and where the legislation may have intervened to adapt to the own situation of those people that was a bit a chart thank you for your presentation it seems to me that you're looking at 21st century type of work arrangement based on late 19th century first 20th century kind of legal structure which is sort of in your language which is a bit of pre-collage isn't it so I was wondering whether what you think of a basic income an unconditional or a negative income tax it would get away with unemployment insurance would get away with pension funds to some extent wouldn't that be much nicer that's something I did not actually I touched upon it when I was talking about subsidizing work I did not have any questions that I directly raised as to the first you're completely right and that's what I think the wrong approach or wrong policy I noticed in some of the states countries, policy makers trade unions, employers and so on so the first thing you see in the battle if I would call it the battle of the fourth industrial revolution they say well let us qualify that kind of work as employees the time of the year we can say so it's going on very much in most of the countries it's the battle of qualification the battle to have them qualified as employees, as wage earners and then everything will be solved that's a bit of the approach you see now and every time again when there's a case it's like a football game when there is a case in front of the court and the judge decides this is an employee, you hear the shear saying yes we won they are considered to be employees now we can start to apply labour law and we can start to apply social security and everything will be solved which I don't think so I think we will have to adapt also the labour law as such intrinsically and the social laws intrinsically to their kind way of working otherwise it will not work it will not function some types of work it may function but some types of work it may not function so that's a bit of the call we are doing and that's what we try to figure out and to get on table is to what extent is it possible to design social security in an appropriate way to their ways of working and that's something we did in the past for the self-employed we found that it's possible but you have to think out of the box and maybe for some risks you have to accept that the risks are not to be protected and more and so on and the same is taking place for platform work be it that the question could be that maybe it's impossible I mean some months ago I had a discussion with somebody and they said maybe we have to knowledge this is the end of labour law and this is the end of social security law that's what the person was saying those are old school things from the 19th century and what we try to do is to squeeze that on those people I do not follow that completely that logic and then comes in the element of let us go for basic income well I'm not personally so much in favour of the basic income idea for several reasons I mean the first one but that's maybe because I'm old school and conservative and traditional because in traditional social law protection but also in societies traditionally a cornerstone of work ethos if you look at labour law but especially social security the whole design is not only about rights it's also about duties and the duties was very much work related to work ethos in employment in working capacity for instance the idea is to bring you back at work or at least to activate you or at least to and so on which is absent in basic income from a kind of design I have some doubts about that secondly but I'm not economically financially too strong but I understood also from some colleagues from the from the economics that financially speaking it depends of course where you put the income level of basic income it's very hard to have it organised recently in the Netherlands they had some research, big research from colleagues from the Faculty of Economics in Belgium and the Netherlands and they had some tests and so on and at a certain moment they said we stop they did not even finalise it they stopped, they said it's insane you cannot finance it I have to say I did not read it completely but that was the message thirdly and this is more political or ideologically the basic income is something which was once launched by one of the colleagues from the University of Leuven the French speaking University of Leuven and it's a thing which comes and goes I think it's now the third time when we are debating it's very strongly and it's the third time I well I notice that we have been debating so I'm getting old I have a feeling so it will go down I think as well and now suddenly I found that from the liberal right and the left liberal left they were finding each other traditionally it was something from the left that was launched to have more redistribution and more equivalence and so on but now suddenly I notice that from the liberal right there was a very strong support for that basic income Silicon Valley said we should launch basic income I said where did they where did they and then the question came at what level we don't know but not too high of course, of course not too high give them a little bit of petty money we've seen the UK with some of the persons on unemployment some unconditional income but not too high and then you have a fantastic crowd who can do all kinds of little jobs for which you don't have to pay any taxes or contributions and for which their living is being subsidized by a solidarity group a state why in heaven's name should I subsidize or should my state subsidize or should my collectivity subsidize companies and so on yet they were finding each other there and it's more political, ideological fordly if you want if you look in European Union basic income I mean there is only one way out it's European basic income not the national one because then you're doing very strange things at what level that's a very hard discussion relative absolute harmonization so even as an idea I don't like it but also in some practicalities I have some problems with it yeah thank you very much for okay so thank you very much for sharing especially the discussion with us I was thinking all the time is this like a deja vu why? because we had similar discussions around data protection until we finally realized that there is no way with our legal tradition to deal with data protection on the internet that's why for the first time to the best of my knowledge and I'm not a law expert we launched an entirely different logic of how to regulate data protection in the EU and we changed the underlying principles and now the world looks at us as being very innovative when it comes to regulating things on the web I'm wondering shouldn't we do the same here principles would be very easy the first one is follow the money so wherever you work and you get income social security is applied second thing is what is it that you want to protect you want to protect citizens of the EU no matter where they are so okay every time someone with a EU passport is working he has to be treated by that logic so I'm just doing the analogy and out of the blue of the problems that I see would go away so my simple provocative question would be why don't we do it are we too stupid thank you very much for this comment and I would say to a large extent if not fully I agree but my first call was we should move away from that labour thing income I'm not talking about labour law I always laugh at my colleagues of labour law I'm very sorry for the ones who are sitting here very often I say to them in the middle ages in social security at least we already protect freelancers and self employed and whatever you're still in your wage earners situation for social protection what do we want to protect at the end of the day it's income loss and labour is a kind of mean way it was for many decades the gateway to income I think my parents and even me to some extent my generation working from 9 to 5 hardworking that was the way of raising your income and that was also the model it was also the model of welfare state and that's the reason why labour was also I think because of the fact that for decades we had some stability here all kinds of incomes have been generated and all kinds of income generation development have been generated it's not only out of labour so I think the focus should be much more upon income raising and income protection whatever the source of income is and there indeed if you follow some sound logics follow the money you can start and so on and so forth and that I follow to your last element we ourselves in Leuven but that's already 30 years ago once we launched the idea of a European system at that time it was simply for the moving workers but we have been developing and very strangely enough the last 2-3 years it's a very old idea again this was put on the shelf and they said we'll explain again that idea of the European insurance and we think that for the very mobile worker and the platform worker is a European worker even global worker you can say what sense does it make to try to track down where on which location that person is physically standing it's European work we should be proud to some extent that some people work in European manner I mean many of the researchers work in European manner not global manner so why not having initiative on a European level that's something we launched in another time and then it was for other type of people and platform work was not present but there you see the connection again but if we do so every time again we get a response very nice idea very bright but impossible to implement we don't have the power to do so and blah blah blah and so on and so forth but maybe with this when this we may grow that maybe the mind setting maybe change but that's definitely some of the elements we would like to put on table again why not moving away from the traditional way and I do agree I think we need out of the box solutions not starting from the traditional work thank you very much Paul I would also have a couple of more questions but I think we are running a bit out of time so I think we have to move on to the next presentation