Psychologists, legal professionals, caregivers… The precariousness of digital platforms assaults an increasing number of sectors | Economy | EUROtoday

“Some are a tinder of care, a group of workers who are sometimes falsely self-employed and in other cases earn less than the agreement, which worsens the service. We believe that the Inspection would have to do much more to investigate this problem.” This is how Ignacio Gamboa speaks regarding part of the digital platforms dedicated to home care. Due to the tone and the complaint behind these words, they seem like statements from a union leader, but no. He is the head of the main employers’ association in the sector, the State Association of Home Care Services Entities (Asade), concerned about the “negative effect” of the expansion of digital platforms on their activity. It is a reflection similar to the one that broadcast by other employers’ associations and professional associations of psychology, nursing, law or home employment consulted by this newspaper. While politics and the media looked at food delivery platforms, this labor model so associated with precariousness expands into other activities, several of them highly qualified.

Adrián Todolí, professor of Labor and Social Security Law at the University of Valencia and one of Spain’s leading experts on digital platforms, regrets that so much attention has been focused exclusively on food delivery workers: “It seems that the only platforms in Spain are Glovo and Uber, and that is not the case. There are more sectors in which this twisting of working conditions occurs.” Pressure from public administrations has made food delivery platforms employ their delivery workers, with Uber Eats being the last to give in: it has just announced its “commitment” to the rider legislation and which strikes to a salaried mannequin, a yr after Glovo communicated the identical change.

At the same time, the platform economy is taking root in other activities that are not challenged by that norm. “We didn’t just want one rider lawwe wanted a platform law. That is, legislation that would regulate all these scenarios, with a broader vision. Food delivery is just the tip of the iceberg of the digital economy,” says Raquel Boto, deputy of the confederal secretariat for union action and strategic transitions of CC OO, about a barely quantified phenomenon: neither the INE nor Social Security offer statistics on how many people work through platforms in Spain.

The latest community study in this regard measures the situation in 17 European countries, among which Spain is not found, and with data from 2022. With the sample with which Eurostat worked, it estimated that then 3% of European adults worked at some point in the current year through platforms. These data also maintain that there are more men than women, more young than senior and, “interestingly” according to Eurostat, more qualified than without training. “More than half of digital platform workers reported that they were not covered in case of unemployment, illness and work-related accidents,” adds the European Statistical Institute.

With his figures, he calculated that in 2022 there were 28.3 million employees on platforms in the European Union and that in 2025 they would be around 43 million, 52% more. “The platformization it is getting an increasing number of. And it would acquire extra power with synthetic intelligence,” says the coordinator of digital platforms at UGT, Fernando García.

This phenomenon worries Olga Merino, member of the Official College of Psychology of Madrid. “There are platforms that do it phenomenally, but there are also others in which the quality of care is not guaranteed, that do not require the authorization of professionals or the minimum clinical and legal standards,” denounces this psychologist. It signifies that some platforms function with false freelancers, since they don’t function mere intermediaries, however moderately handle appointments, dictate costs and assign sufferers. That is to say, there may be not the independence required for self-employment, the central argument why justice has dominated on so many events in favor of the laborization (of staff below employment contracts and never as self-employed staff) of meals supply.

“We also find people who are employed with conditions below the agreement,” provides Merino, involved in regards to the proliferation of those instruments coinciding with the better demand for psychological well being sources. He emphasizes that focus on-line It looks like a “wonderful” useful resource, particularly because the pandemic, however that is no excuse to make neither care nor working situations precarious. “As a professional, it makes you angry that there are people who are harming those we serve,” he provides.

More in liberal professions

Psychology is a sector wherein self-employment was already frequent earlier than the emergence of platforms, which inserts with the traits of the service supplied by many professionals. “The difference when the platform comes in,” says Todolí, “is that it is the tool that sets the price and establishes the conditions, which penalizes based on performance. Legally, you are no longer self-employed and should be a workforce.” In his opinion, platforms and self-employment solely combine properly with Spanish rules if the device “is limited to managing collections and providing views of the worker’s profile.”

This specialist signifies that platforms are making their approach into an increasing number of liberal professions past psychology, similar to educating (particularly in non-public courses), structure, journalism or legislation. “We are concerned because digital platforms are emerging that, protected by a pseudo appearance of law firms, carry out irregular advertising,” denounces Antón Echevarrieta, dean of the Álava Bar Association. He is the president of the working group for the skilled safety of the authorized career in opposition to digital platforms of the General Council of Spanish Lawyers.

“They are outside of deontological and collegial control. They exercise unfair competition,” warns this skilled. He believes that some shoppers contact these platforms with out figuring out that they aren’t really legislation corporations, “which ends up harming their users.”

Another certified career the place this mannequin is gaining weight is nursing. “We see platforms that are sold as a step towards modernization, but that really only fragment the profession and promote job insecurity,” provides the president of the Illustrious Official College of Nursing of Seville, Víctor Bohórquez. He factors out that in his sector these platforms are utilized by privately managed non-public and public facilities for nurses to take spare shifts, duties that medical facilities have to cowl rapidly. “Clinical and therapeutic monitoring is a central part of our profession. This way of working calls it into question,” says Bohórquez.

The worth of pace

Gamboa, the president of the house care employers’ affiliation, elaborates on this concept: “The platforms cover some needs, but we should not confuse them with professional home care, such as that articulated through contracts with public administrations.” He believes that the “agility” of those instruments and their “accessibility” drives their use in an more and more digitalized society, that many households flip to them as a result of they reply rapidly, on the expense of, in lots of instances, the standard of the service or the working situations of the employees.

It is a mirrored image just like that issued by the employers’ affiliation of employment at house. “If the platforms are like the Yellow Pages used to be, informing some professionals, that’s fine. But if there is an intermediation, it has to be in the right way, through duly accredited and approved private placement agencies,” says Ana Garrido, president of the Spanish Association of Personal and Domestic Services, who sees no “fit” within the present Spanish rules for home staff to be autonomous.

The message that these two employer representatives ship will not be completely different from that expressed by many different enterprise voices, who see within the platforms a sort of unfair competitors: they imagine that they’re taking away their enterprise share as a result of they will supply decrease costs, because of their decrease working prices. The nice Spanish employer’s home, CEOE, supported the rider legislation in 2021 and maintains that help when questioned about this problem, regardless of the fierce confrontation they keep with the political face of this norm, Yolanda Díaz.

Neither these employer representatives nor these of the skilled associations consulted point out particular platforms. They level out the issue of their sectors, however want to not specify names and surnames. That train is strictly what the report does Fairwork Spainready by the Complutense University and the Primero de Mayo Foundation (related to CC OO), based mostly on a strategy applied by the Internet Institute of the University of Oxford. It consists of evaluating working situations on platforms utilizing ten primary ideas. Compliance with every one awards one level.

In Spain, of the seven corporations analyzed within the final version, three stay clean (Taskrabbit (furnishings meeting and different related duties), Cuideo (care) and Glovo), Uber obtains two factors and Cabify and Livo (healthcare) three factors. All of them fail on this report, removed from the one one which approves, Just Eat, with seven factors out of ten potential. It is the one meals supply platform that respects the rider legislation since its implementation. Some of those corporations reacted to the report with the same old arguments with which they defend their mannequin, similar to that they assist to “digitize word of mouth and informal forms of connection” that exist already within the labor market, or that they favor conciliation.

The important creator of the report, the Sociology professor on the Complutense University Alberto Riesco, additionally observes a “diversification” of the platform market, which he identifies as a “challenge” for public administrations. To deal with it, it highlights the significance of Spain transposing the European directive on platform work. It has a spirit just like rider legislationhowever it isn’t restricted to this sector, it applies to the remainder of the platform financial system. Spain should incorporate the textual content into its rules earlier than the tip of this yr, a problem given the parliamentary fragility of the Government.

“The priority is that the transposition covers this lack of rider law“, that it is not restricted to that sector, that it encompasses the group of workers on digital platforms,” ​​says Riesco. He says that in Spain “there is a perceived tendency towards the laborization of work on platforms, driven by the delivery due to the pressure of the administrations, but also without as much pressure in the transport of passengers, as in Uber.” This company does not hire its drivers directly, but rather operates through subcontractors, which connects with a final idea from Riesco: “Employing is better than a model of false self-employed, but it does not solve all the problems of the platforms. “It is not a magic solution.”