 Thank you all for being here with us. I know it's late in the day. On Wednesday, Davos has been a long, great week, hopefully, for all of you. And we hope to make this session very worth your time. So we want it to be interactive as well. So if you have questions, there'll be instructions on the screen for how you can write them in. Basically, go to the Flido website, and then new hashtag gig economy. And I will see them here on my iPad, and I'll work them in through the conversation. But we have an esteemed panel here today. My name is Alice and Chantel. I'm the editor of Fortune. And I'd love each of the panelists to just give a very brief introduction, say your name, where you work, and how you view the gig economy in a sentence, if we can. Let's give it a try. OK, Karim van Genep. I'm the Minister for Social Affairs and Employment in the Netherlands. I come from the private world. So I started this journey four months ago in January. I think the gig economy, or self-employed, is a big part of the Dutch economy as it is in most European and other countries. And for me, it really poses a challenge, because I see the innovation that some of the platforms bring. But we struggle a lot with the work circumstances of the people riding the bikes, pushing the boxes, and their perspective on a career, their social security. So there is a real divide, at least in the Netherlands, between people who work flexible contracts and people who work fixed contracts. And that is something that is putting a lot of pressure on society and on those people. Thank you. Sharon? Sharon Borough, International Trade Union Confederation, General Secretary. So I represent the workers, and I can tell you that, despite some good and emerging legislation, of which we need a lot more, these are informal jobs. Many of them are actually dependent employees, but there are solutions. And there is, in fact, a recipe for this, negotiated with employers and governments in the 2019 Centenary Declaration of the ILO, and we might talk about that. But it's much broader than just transport. It's actually the internet-mediated platforms, largely informal businesses, are undermining almost every aspect of professional services. Thank you. Nicholas? Yeah, I'm Nicholas, co-founder and CEO of Deliver Hero. We operate in soon 70 countries. We deliver anything from food to groceries to anything you want, basically. Of course, this is a super important topic for us. We need to deliver an amazing experience, and that can only be done if you are happy workforce and making sure that we also get access to a large workforce. So, an extremely important topic. And we believe that, in general, this is a very good thing, and it's a very accessible job. It's a very happy workforce, I should say, and they make actually good money, at least at our company. So, therefore, we have a very happy workforce. We want to keep a happy workforce. And for that, I think we need to further legislate and improve to keep it that way. But, yeah. Thank you. Naenat? Hi, Naenat Ghez, CEO co-founder of Papaya Global. Papaya is a global payroll and payment platform. We are covering 160 countries, supporting all type of workers from full payroll employees to contractors and EUR employees. And mainly what we see on gig economy from my perspective, gig economy cannot be said without the word compliance. And I think that's the balance between when it's good for the employee, but also when it's a good choice for the employer, what are the risks on both sides and how do you eventually get into a place where you are covering the risks and you are not creating a future risk on this relationship is a very, very big topic. Thank you so much. So, to open, just for some perspective, the gig economy provides either full income or supplemental income for over a billion people worldwide. I think Nicholas alone, those million contract workers. So, there's a lot of scale here. This impacts a lot of people. The gig economy has existed for decades, not just since Delivery Hero was founded or Uber was founded for decades and decades. This has been a marketplace. It provides flexibility and additional resources for the workers, but it can also be hard to earn a livable wage. And the benefits and upward mobility can be a challenge and might not even exist in some instances. And then in terms of the pandemic, that has really impacted the gig economy. Half of gig workers globally lost their jobs during the pandemic and many more lost significant income. And some countries are passing laws to turn gig workers into full-time employees because there's a lot of regulation happening. Every country seems to do it a little bit differently, which I'm sure is hard for companies to scale. It's hard to get us all on the same page, but we're here to try and find some solutions. Today, the best we can to a very challenging situation that affects lots of people. So, to open, I'd really like us to just give a lay of the land. What is the state of the gig economy right now that we're two years into COVID, that all these people did lose jobs, lose income? How has the gig economy been impacted? Do you want to start? I think what we saw over the two years of COVID is indeed that a lot of people working gigs or gig workers lost their income, not just their jobs, but they lost their income, which is still a big difference in most countries. What we see now is that with the recovery of the economic growth, we see many people coming back to those jobs, but we see also many people choosing to have other jobs in other sectors, where there is harder, better pay, better social security, better schedules. But when we look long-term, it might be the case that they make good money. But the question is, when they get into disability, who's paying for that? Do they actually have a disability insurance? Are they building up a pension? Are they making enough money to actually get a mortgage for a house and buy a house? So there are a lot of disadvantages to it. I understand the innovation part, I understand that many people want to work a gig, but if you look long-term for the career of people, for the earnings that they can make, there is a real concern there, and we haven't solved that yet. And one of the things we're looking at in the Netherlands is legislation, and that's also the same that we find back in the European Commission's proposal, that you assume it's an employment relationship until proven otherwise. And then, of course, you have to write down what the criteria are and what the process is, but that would make sense from the sense that else people who are mostly at the lower side of our labour markets are in a relationship with their employer or their assignee. That's actually just a working relationship and not an independent relationship. And what we see in the Netherlands, I can talk for the Netherlands, is that most of those jobs actually, when you add it all up, don't pay enough for people to make a decent life. I'm curious, you are a payroll platform and you have many gig workers on your payroll platform. Are wages livable for the most part? What does wage look like for the average gig worker? First, I think that gig workers are not only blue-collar workers. I mean, it's expanded quite drastically during the pandemic to white-collar workers that want to work from exotic places around the world and eventually they don't have any kind of employment arrangement and so on. So I think the gig economy shifted from having a very specific group of employees that was maybe more common to that to actually the highly paid employees that have the freedom and actually the power to go to their employer and say, I don't want to be hired by you. And I totally agree with what you said about... No one thinks about the worst-case scenario, right? I mean, because in reality, we never want to think what happened if we were going to need our medical insurance or life insurance and so on. But what we see on the gig economy, and this is always kind of our biggest concern, is the one that advises the employers because in reality, I mean, it doesn't matter what's the engagement that you have with this person, you are still responsible on him. And if something happened to him, you cannot say, no, I mean, this is on you because when there is a real issue on the table, somebody needs to step in and take the accountability for it. And this is where we see that all of a sudden, people understand that they have no medical insurances and bills of medical insurances can rise up to tens of thousands of dollars. God forbid, cases of disability or cases of death. And then you have the family against you that are asking what's going, how come? I mean, how come I don't have any kind of certainty here? So I think that I totally agree that eventually, the way that has been currently structured, first, it's good on the short term. So it's kind of, it's really nice when everything is good. But I mean, obviously this is the job of the governments to secure the kind of the biggest picture. Because I do think that we need to step, or to set very clear lines of what is gig economy, why someone needs to be hired as a freelancer, why he needs to be hired, or eventually to be as individual contractors. And even if I'll take Ukraine as example, I mean, half of the tech industry, or not half, 90% of the tech industry are actually working as independent contractors due to the fact that they have a very good tax regime in the country that is related to the fact that they're independent contractors. What happened now? They're not protected. I mean, if, I mean, they're solely kind of dependent on the willingness of their employer, not to dismiss them because maybe he's supportive and so on. But in reality, they're currently getting into a place where they have zero protection. Nicholas, I saw you raise your hand. Yeah, I think, and I can only speak for us. But of course, during the pandemic, we were the one actually getting people and giving jobs, who actually lost jobs and other opportunities. Well, we actually, I think we were a good help and support in the economy to drive that. So just having said that, then I think it's a very important point what we said here. Like, we should improve and see that there's social security and insurance and so on. And it needs to be legislation to help that. That it shouldn't be that if we want to support there or if there is support, there's an automatic reclassification risk because that's how it is in some countries. So I think there's lot of legislation. What we should not do, in my view, is of course to disregard what the workers want. And that is the flexibility and be able to generally earn more money in order for it to be an employment relationship when we feel like that feels better and secure. We don't have to go that way and make it worse for them. So I think in the countries that either have the option that we can choose or that it can be freelance but it can still have bargain power or they can have social security, I think is by far what we see is most beneficial. And again, we often speak about us like we all want that flexibility. I don't know, there's no difference. I don't know, they also want flexibility. And this is unfortunately not possible in practical, at least not in our industry, in that employment relationship that we're speaking of. Sharon? Well, I'm not sure everybody wants flexibility. Some do, depending on their situation in life. But I want to go back to the rules of the game. Governments have forever regulated labour markets. This part of the labour market has just escaped any kind of serious legislation discussion until now. Now it's a live topic in many countries. We've seen emerging legislation in France, in Spain, of course, on remote work, which part of again the undermining of professional... You know, you can actually earn as little in journalism as 15 euro a day because that's the going rate of an article. You can't live on 15. Even at the high end, someone who's known 60 euro an article, when you've got to do the research, the writing, the copy editing, you can't live on that either in Europe. So we've got to assess what we're really doing here and who's benefiting from what is an informal environment. Now, two things. First of all, the minister raised the issue of the employment assumption that you're employed unless otherwise proven. That's actually the ILO standard. That is the ILO standard. And there are many test cases now. The Uber agreement in the UK arose because of a test case around whether they're employees or not. They're the same with Deliveroo and many other companies depending on the country. But if you go to the global rule of law, what the Centenary Declaration says is that all workers, irrespective of their employment arrangements, are entitled to four fundamental pieces of rights. One is fundamental rights, which of course are the right to join a union, to bargain collectively, to be free of discrimination in terms of forced or child labour. And now occupational health and safety, which was the second one, will become a fundamental right at the ILO conference starting right now. And then you have an adequate minimum wage or income. And we have to figure out what that means, frankly, because you can't have people without living incomes. And some control over, well, it says maximum hours of work, but we say some control over working hours. And that actually is in fact a labour protection flaw for all workers. Then in addition, you need social protection. Now, if those things are in place, then let's have a look at what it means in terms of flexibility. For freelancers, genuine freelancers, who register as freelancers, whether the tax regime's fair or not, whether they're forced into it by the fact that it is indeed more beneficial, there are many, many independent contractors or freelancers. They are starting to again form cooperatives, which have always had a long history. So it might be your sort of service, but there are smart cooperatives, which are providing business services. But even then, some of them want to be recognised. And again, there are court cases for employee status. So this is a big debate in the EU. It will continue to be a big debate in Europe, but it's a debate everywhere. Because if the business sets up on this basis, simply to avoid the employment relationship, then that's as bad as the dehumanising exploitation through our supply chains, where you simply contract out layer upon layer until you have a hidden workforce, of which we actually have in the formal economy, 94% of workers in our supply chains are hidden workforce. In many ways, this is an addition to that, but it's even worse because it's on an informal basis, where the bulk of those billion people don't have a minimum wage, any form of rights, no rule of law, no social protection. We have to fix it. And we can only do that by having a genuine dialogue that is in the interest of secure work. Yeah, and I agree. We should make sure that we can enable a lot of the things that Sharon mentioned there. And I think what, again, going back to my main point, and what we should avoid is that we add other things to it that actually people do not want. And again, I think there are cases, if you look at Norway, we have a collective bargain agreement there, great, I don't know, great work with the union on that side. But the legislation and the agreement also allows those who wants to be on a freelance basis to be on a freelance basis. So therefore, it gives, I don't know, and we don't care actually in the sense that we just want what's best for the riders. It's actually more expensive for us to pay a freelance than an employee if you take an example there. It's just that if the majority wants to be freelance and we say, no, you can only be employee, we will not have enough riders in that case. So that's the problem. So therefore, having an openness on either or, that's a good solution. If there needs to be one or another, then we should look at what do the majority prefer and then have that as a basis and build upon that. And we have seen a lot of legislation that's been very good. I don't know, we have seen, I don't know, France is improving legislation, it's self-employed regulation, but it still adds so that more safety, security, Greece implemented recently that it can add bargain agreement to it. The social security shielded the similar. So we see a lot of legislation going in that direction that enable in that self-employment. Then of course, we also have one or two cases where it had taken that direction. I don't know, we have Spain, we have Geneva here in Switzerland took that direction and that did not turn out well. I don't know, that turned out on lower income. A lot of people lost their jobs and most people didn't want that setup. So of course, we have, I think in Geneva, I think there was a job loss of 60 or 70% that never recovered. So again, it gives lower pay because it often comes to minimum wage then. And so I think ideally they can choose. In that case, I think our standpoint is that we should listen what the rider wants but we should add what both of you said. It's like, how can we add social security? How can we add, I don't know, protection, safety and other rights and bargain agreement if represented well? And what do, I assume you've done surveys of your riders. What do they want? Like you say they want the flexibility but what do you have stats? So, I don't know, of course, we measure a lot of happiness and generally the happiness is high, I don't know. So generally, because that's important, otherwise we cannot keep them at the job. But the best case, and of course, if you ask our riders, of course, they want flexibility because they came for flexibility and that opportunity opens up and easy access to a job. So the only cases that we can offer both, and here we have a case that's between 70 and 75% choose to self-employment and 20, 25, 30, then we'll choose the employment set-up approach. And the problem there is, of course, if you can only address 25% of the population, then it's very hard for us to attract people to come. If you can address 100%, that's the best case. We can offer both. In the second best is that we can at least offer it what 75% want. But I think the question is, if you let them choose, do they understand what they're choosing? Because they might choose a flexible job because it pays better. But if that flexible job does not offer disability arrangement, does not offer a pension, then they're actually worse off. Or you say, well, maybe the rider doesn't care, maybe the company doesn't care, but then the society has to pay for it. So either the cost is with the employer, the cost is with the rider, or the cost with the society. But as an employer, if you decide you don't want to bear the risk, and the employer has to bear the risk, and the employer decides not to bear the risk, then it goes to the society. But the employee in the middle is still the one who gets disabled, long-term ill, who wants to buy a house, or has to have a pension later on and doesn't have it. And I agree there. And of course, social security, and either it's paid by us or by the employee or the self-employed. But I think that's the legislation we have to bring forward to make it better, to make sure that the case, if you get ill, sick, something happened, injured, I don't know, that they are covered. But why do you think flexibility, which presumably means hours, is actually not possible within an employment relationship? So first of all, those who are flexible, they might actually work for many companies and they might actually work here. And I would also not assume that, and it was almost hidden that they don't understand what is best for them. I would say that they are very smart. They're very educated. So I think they are very capable of knowing what is best for them. That's my belief. I didn't say that they didn't understand it, but they might make a choice that's more short-term than long-term oriented. I agree. Right, but to the other points, so I lost a little bit of a second point. Flexibility. Right, right. So of course, they will work when they can make the most money and it will go like, maybe I go Uber and here I can get there and now maybe the delivery hero, my delivery or now it's not good enough. Now maybe I do something else or maybe I want to pick someone up and just make the decision now. Now it's not good enough or now I want to meet with a friend, now I want to pick up my kids, now I have schoolwork, I have an exam tomorrow and instantly making that decision. If you have an employment relationship, we have to exactly know when they're working at what point in time because we can just quickly get them out there and the good part is that when there is that, is that they out when they make the most money, which is aligned with us because that's when we need the most. So of course, it helps us that it helps, they are making that. If we have to be the one steering when they should be out, then of course have to making sure that they're out at the times that we say they're out. I'll add to this maybe, I mean, I think when we see flexibility and you ask what workers want and we saw it during COVID, it was actually the digital normat flexibility is completely different. We had people following the sun, so they were all following wherever there are less COVID cases and more currently freedom and no quarantine periods. And what we see actually is, I mean, when you're looking on those people that are working remotely, in many cases you are paying their taxes in one country and in reality they are, I mean, around the world in tons of other countries at the same time. And from my perspective, this is much more concerning on kind of the economy because first what happened, and as you said, I mean, yeah, they are smart. People understand already where they have tax benefits, so maybe they are paying a taxes on specific country where they have kind of favorable tax benefits, but in reality they live on another country if something happened to them, obviously, I mean, they will go to the hospital near where they live. In reality, employers don't know. I mean, there is no knowledge sharing and data sharing on employees, even within Europe, which is always kind for me very, very kind of interesting. And I think that, and maybe, I mean, I'll just raise a radical kind of thinking that we have, but I really think that this is the place where everyone need to have one digital identity because in reality I think that, I mean, I might earn my salary in many, many countries. I mean, the same year, you can see digital nomads that are moving from one country to another and eventually, I mean, if you don't have one data or one identity for them and one data sharing, I mean, payroll, I think, needs to be rethink because in reality, payroll currently, it's very, very local. If you are starting to have two or three countries all together, it's becoming very complex in the majority of the cases. I mean, people will say it's not worth the risk. I mean, the accounting and the auditors and all of the tax structures will cost me more than just, I mean, eventually kind of do whatever I think and live by the odds that I'm gonna be audited. And I think, I mean, looking kind of in the global perspective, this is something that really needs to be addressed on in terms of a global kind of trends because we will see more and more people that no one knows where they live. No one knows who they work for. Who they work for, yes, but I mean, where do they pay their taxes and if it's in relation to where they live? But that's only really possible within Europe. I mean, that mobility, or if you happen to have dual citizenship, but then somebody who's got dual citizenship, one of which is the US. I can't. A young person will end up paying tax in two countries. No. And they will. I mean, I have people who are on consultancy contracts because I can't actually hire them in Belgium if they live in the UK or somewhere else. They've got an American citizenship and a UK citizenship, for example, they end up having to pay a fortune rationalising taxes. Now, no young person, I'm sorry, without representation can figure that out. So they get to 30 or 40 and suddenly they're in the site of the IRS or something and that's a disaster. So we do need to figure it out. But my point is here that you've got, you know, we've let this escape, the normal regulation of the labour market. And unless we actually sit down and work out, doesn't matter about choice, people can have choice, but how do we work out that flexibility? Many people work two or three jobs. There's no difference in that, but there are rules of the game and there are rules for employers and there are responsibilities for employees. So, you know, I think we've just let it escape. We need now to say what are all the vested interests, including the worker and the responsibility of the employer and let's make these formal working environments. Otherwise, the 60% of the world's workers who are now informal with absolutely no guarantees, as you said, from a societal point of view. Is that what you really want for your children and your grandchildren? I don't think so. So a bunch of companies are trying to work on this as a charter of principles for good platform work, which wants to establish a benchmark for job quality. The CEOs of Uber, Postmates, Grab, Deliveroo, Cabify, MBO partners all got together and they came up with eight different points. One is diversity inclusion, safety and well-being, flexibility and fair conditions, reasonable pay and fees, social protection, learning and development, voice and participation, data management and platforms. I mean, how close to reality is this? Is this just a pipe dream? Are we so far away that we can't even imagine it or is this a work in progress? Can we all get on the same page? What they avoided there was a legislative framework because I was part of those discussions and unlike, you know, your kind of attitude like the Norwegian environment, et cetera, absolutely opposition by the US companies to freedom of association or collective bargaining. So we're far. We are. We're a long way. I mean, it's not impossible to solve. It's simply a matter of will and if companies want to deny workers fundamental rights, they haven't got a problem. But if we want to work out how to make it work for everybody, provided the employer is not trying to escape, you know, and we would argue that employers have to have a social licence to operate. They have to pay tax. Therefore, they have to figure out what the relationship with the employee and tax is. You know, you can't just freelance the entire labour market and pretend that people are going to have any kind of security in terms of pensions or in terms of medical benefits and so on, let alone broader social protection. It's just not humane. I think in general what we also have technology is that the world has changed, technology has changed. The way we want to work has changed. What the younger generation want has changed versus when we grew up and so on. So trying to also fit it in to kind of a box that we thought was the right is also wrong. And there are changes to how we want to operate, how we want to work today versus in the past. And I think we're also a little bit stuck in that framework. So I think, again, I want to come back to what they said. I think that's great and we should enable that. And maybe there are one or two points that should come there as well. And maybe bargain power, collective bargain agreement could be one of them if that's not part of it. So I think it's more like we have to also realise that there is a difference in how we work today versus what we've done in the past. And we have to make sure that that comes into the legislation. We also have to make sure that we listen to what the people want. And not what we think that they want, but actually want. And I agree. We have to make sure that it's not what they want now short-term and then there's a negative consequence at long-term research and security and other things. That should be solved. That should not be the problem. So I think there are two developments at the same time that come together now. One is, yes, we live in different times. After Corona, technology developments, another way of, if you talk about future of work, another way that people want to work. They want to work more in networks. They want to do more longer-term gigs, I think. But it's different from working for the same employer 30 years and you do it step by step. That's really changing. That's one big development. I think the other big development that I've seen as an employer myself is that we, at least in Europe, we have developed our labour market laws so far that many contracts are pretty fixed. It's difficult. If you want to restructure a company, it's difficult. And that's why you get a big insider-outsider discussion, also led by the unions who often were, it's changing, much more on the side of the insiders and the outsiders. But you get a big divide between insiders and outsiders. So what happened in the real economy, in real life, is that people found creative ways when they were an outsider and companies who wanted to use those outsiders. And that's one of the reasons that the gig economy started. Because employers saw these fixed labour agreements that were too fixed for their needs. That I need more flexibility. Some people wanted more flexibility. And that's how a whole kind of second labour market that came into existence developed itself but without a lot of legislation. And that's, I think, the point where we are now. We have this development in technology, in wishes for how you want to work. And we have a labour market that's at one side very fixed and at the other side very flexible. And there's a saying that we use in Dutch politics now. We want to make the labour market the fixed part less fixed and the flex part less flex. So make fixed less fixed, make flex less flex. So that comes together again. But those two developments come together. And that's why we negotiated with employers and with governments the centenary declaration about what are the basic labour guarantees for all workers. And my question would be, is this way of working really decide by workers, I'm totally committed to talking about flexibility or multiple jobs. I mean, we've dealt with this forever. I can tell you how the entertainment industry bargains for a fair contract. We've done it for decades. And they work for different gigs, literal gigs, where they do actually work for different venues or if they're on films, different companies, etc. It's not an impediment to giving people the dignity of work. My question is, is it really the employers who want this to happen? Or is it the employees? Because none of the benefits you raise for me as a negotiator of more than 30 years are impossible. They're difficult. And yes, sometimes we run up against the fear of other workers, but they're not impossible. And I think there are both to it. Speaking also of the younger generation, I don't know, they stay two, three years at a job. I don't know, it's not this what we had in the past, and they stay 30 years now. I don't know, they don't want, many don't want that. And the same comes also, and I speak with our case, I don't know, when it comes to writers. Yeah, some of them might have another job. Maybe they're bartenders, but they also want to work more than just bartender because that is just in the evening. Or maybe they're DJs and they want to have some extra. Or maybe there are studies and they take university, but they need a little bit extra income. Or maybe they just lost their job and they want to have a amount to bridge and access. And so there are different needs and different, I don't know, so it's very hard to say like, what do all of them want? As the gig economy grows, doesn't some of this almost take care of itself? Like don't you, Nicholas, have to have good benefits to be able to recruit and retain a million drivers? And that I think is the key and the core here because the perception is that we want it because we don't want to pay social security. And social security is paid and it's used to happen by the self-employed or that we don't want to, that there's some tax or something. No, not at all. And we are happy, and that's not the reason why we would prefer self-employment is because that's what they want. And we need to hire as many as we can, and that's what they want. And that's why we have to provide what they want. And if you don't provide what they want, including if they want to pay benefits, the flexibility, all the wishes that had, the more wishes we can fulfill, the more we can attract. And that's 100% what we want. And I hope that we can improve legislation such that we can also add certain benefits like social security that we can cover that, or that pension. And we spoke before about the kind of French model, which is a good example because, I mean, everyone that did business in French know that it was one of the hardest country to employ someone or to dismiss someone and so on. And a few years back, they made this model that is really kind of intent to the gig economy. I mean, you have those institutional, I mean, licensed by the government, you can register as a self-employee, part of a kind of salary. They will make the deductions. They will assure that you pay disabilities. They will take, they will be the responsible parent for your, eventually, for your taxes, but it stills give you the flexibility. I think those type of arrangements are the one that we need to see more and more, the one that eventually does not go to the employer because in reality, I think that what governments are doing, it's like going to the employers, telling them, check if he's really kind, he can work as a contractor or not. I mean, do some, do some tests, take the liability if you did a mistake, or if we will find it's working with specification. It's a huge responsibility that, I mean, that eventually employers is taking and taking and taking, and you see, we see what happens with Uber eventually and so on. Yeah, they get tons of fines because somebody decided they haven't employed people correctly. I think that eventually, I mean, when they did the decision to employ them correctly, they did what the employees wanted, and I mean, they gave them what they wanted, or I mean, they negotiated the terms. So I think that, yeah, I mean, currently the model of employing gig economies and assuring that they have this structure, they are self-employed by themselves or they are, but you don't trust them, okay? So you're sure that, yeah, they need to deduct everything they need, they need to, as well as you don't trust people to contribute to their own pension, right? This is why, I mean, most of the government currently have mandatory pension to their employer. So I think it's really doable, but it really needs to be in a way where governments are starting to move forward and to understand that they need to support this. Is it financially viable for a lot of gig economy companies like in Uber? I feel like the world is better because Uber exists. My life personally is better because Uber exists and because that category exists, and I think for a lot of these delivery companies, people would feel the same way. So they're innovative, but if they had to employ everybody full-time, they'd be out of business, they couldn't afford that. So where is the line between innovation and, yeah? I would disagree on that. I don't know, the challenge is rather that most of them might not want it, so they will have hard to find riders that, yes, you're right. Maybe the service would lack because they don't have that, but it's not that it's cheaper for us to have the gig. We have to pay more for it than if we would pay... Can you explain that a little bit? What is the cost for employing someone kind of on a freelance basis then versus full-time? Why would that be more expensive? So generally how it works is that when a rider is freelance, they are very good entrepreneurs. They go and making sure how they can maximize what they can gain and what they can make, and therefore, generally, they make more money. And then, of course, some of that money goes to pay social security and other things and tax and other benefits that it would have as an employee. So but not the cost for us is slightly more in the cases where we can compare. But because of their innovative spirit, they also generally are better at optimizing when to be out, how to make money, how to game the system, or making sure that they make as much money as possible. As when we try to tell them, like, now you have to go out in the car and here's your moment and here's the street you need to stand on, we are not equally good at that. No data in the world be as good as them to know exactly where to be, when to be, how to be. And that's why it's favorable for Uber in this case, to make sure they give that responsibility to the riders. And therefore, you have a good service because they know where you are and when you want to be, not you particularly, but they know where to be at the right time and place. And they share intelligence. So they know peak hours, that's the point. And peak hours, they're going to earn more. But Uber for you is a nap. It's just a nap. You pay in the middle of the day if there's no business, maybe half the price you'll pay at peak hour, but you still pay it. If you want to really travel at that point. So for you, it's a nap. Why would it matter that the worker wasn't being exploited? When you feel better, if they actually did have pensions and social security and so on, they're actually offering a service to you. I'm not just worried about the transport people, can I say? I think that'll be resolved by courts and by legislation because the employment relationship is a live issue. What I'm really concerned about is, we've got young professionals, go to university for four years, come out with professional careers in everything, in legal services, in medical services, in journalism, in content information, pick a service. It's now being undermined by internet-mediated platforms. There's nothing, again, wrong with the technology. It's really about how you ensure those people, like we have done for generations, get a fair contract price. So if they only want to take one job or two jobs a day or a week or a month, then at least you know they're getting a fair contract price for that work and people aren't being exploited by undercutting each other at the base. They can bargain above that. But they can also join a union between governments and employers' responsibility. They can earn a pension. They can get access to health. And indeed, if they're injured or they're sick, you know, payments for the normal things you get with a work guarantee. So that's what we have to figure out. And it's not impossible. Many countries are starting and have done it, some of them, but it is really going to have to take employers who put those principles together in good faith, but they're going to have to accept that they can't simply allow the model of the work to benefit them at the exploitation of the employee. And it's got nothing to do with choice of hours. We do have a question in the audience as well. Can I still respond on that? Because I often had a word of exploding and I can only really answer for delivery. And the thing is that if we would exploit, we would not have any workers because they would not do it. And the more we have to hire, the more people we have to get, the more we have to pay. And the thing is that it's not that we can pay, oh, that person is willing to work for five euro and that person is willing for seven euro. If you need two jobs, both will get seven euros. And if you have a thousand people in an area, we have to pay what the thousand person want, the minimum what that thousand person want, for everyone. So even if someone would have worked for less, at least that doesn't work in the delivery space. It's not just about wages. I mean, what happens when one of your drivers falls off their bike and gets injured? Well, they are secured. And so they have security. By whom? By whom? Well, we are giving and making sure that they are safe and secure. Okay, so you're a decent employer by choice. That's not the case in many countries. And so then they can't earn any money at all. And so that's exploitation. They get, you know, sick in some other way. Everybody else can go to the hospital, but they can't. But if you're allowing someone, I mean, the government allows someone to be a freelance. So I mean, they can eventually kind of set the rules, right? I mean, if in order to be a freelance, I need to have a personal medical insurance. This is a very easy request that eventually you can enforce on the individual, on the gig worker. And in reality, I mean, I think that government are not setting those clear rules for the gig workers. They are going and saying, okay, you're the employer. You know that this guy is young and he's probably irresponsible or he doesn't care about that. But I mean, it's very easy. It's a very easy structure. They're paying taxes. I mean, they have relationship with the government. They have relationship with everything that is related to. So this environment needs to be created. And I think that it hasn't been created properly. Okay, we have to stop right here and do the audience question, please. Yeah, just an observation. It kind of sounds like we're talking about worker exploitation. So we're also talking about digital technologies facilitating a marketplace where that exploitation is happening. So if we go back to forget, like go back to pre-internet to the point that exploitation has been happening for decades, centuries, wouldn't we just go to the source of demand for that exploitation and begin there? In other words, if we break the marketplace to say employers of these workers, not the platforms, employers of these workers, whether it's the consumer side, like would you feel to the point on convenience when in the mid 90s, when you were buying clothes and you figured out that those clothes were being manufactured by child labor somewhere in the world, you made a conscious decision as a consumer to say I'm not up for that. This is the same issue based on what I'm hearing. I'm not in this day-to-day. But do you guys mind responding to...? I think it's both true. I think there is a role for governments to legislate more of the head, make flex, less slacks and make fix less fix. I think there is a role for the governments and especially on that whole gig economy that starts to exist next to the hardcore economy, so to say. So that's one. The second one is that if you really want this to work, then indeed the consumer has to play a role as well. And some consumers do, but there is a problem there because the concerned citizen that you are now might be somebody else and the calculating consumer. If you buy a t-shirt and you think it's too cheap as a concerned citizen, you say I won't buy it. But if you can't make and meet at the end of the month, you will still buy the cheap t-shirt. So yes, you're right. There is a role for the consumer, but that only goes also that far. So you have to do it both. You have to be a responsible consumer. The government has to step in and do more legislation on both sides. The fixed house has to be less fixed and the flex house has to be less flexed. But also the employers need to take up their responsibility and be responsible employers. Because I find it difficult to understand that there are still employers out there that put people on the bike without the proper insurance, but it does happen. All three have to play a role. I agree here and I totally agree on everything you said. Final comment and then we're out of time. Sorry, but I think to take your kind of comment, I mean, in a different comparison to kind of how do you produce or manufacture clothes? I mean, you know, and use child slavery here. I mean, the gig economy, they have the power. I mean, we need to ask them to come work for us on this and these terms. And this is a completely different kind of mindset. I think that, I mean, and you said it very clearly. I mean, this is how you need to employ them in order for them to work for you. It's not the right way. It's not the other way around. So I think it's a huge difference. Thank you. So clearly a lot of work to do, a lot of passion though. So I think we'll get to a solution eventually with all these smart minds working on it. So thank you for your input. Thank you for the great conversation. Thank you for all of you for being here.