ABSTRACT The new ways of organising work and offering services on the market through the so-called digital platforms seem to have put the traditional legal standards for classifying employment relationships into question. The mechanism of functioning of digital platforms, in fact, seems to put together a series of ‘old’ problems in a new combination. On the one hand, platforms present themselves on the market as subjects with an apparently rarefied organisational structure, moving along the threads of algorithms; on the other hand, those who collaborate with them seem to do so in a spontaneous, voluntary, random and flexible way. The radical fragmentation, or reduction to the minimum, of the productive organisation, is accompanied by the fragmentation of the work activity itself, made by an anonymous multitude of people (‘crowd’), who move together in the light of invisible dynamics, dictated by unknown algorithms. Academic scholarship - and in some countries also case law - has already offered many and different answers to the problem of the legal classification of the relationship of those who work for/with the platforms. They vary according to the methodological approaches and the systems used as a reference. The present paper argues that it is not possible to provide for a general answer to such question, valid for every concrete case. In fact, the specific features of each relationship between the platform and the workers might largely vary from case to case. However, some elements that are functional to the solution of the classification issue are still disputable and shall be clarified: (a) in most of the cases, the platform does not act as a mere intermediary between the supply and demand for a certain service; instead, it represents the direct supplier of that service, which is provided through the activities of the workers; therefore, the workers are fully integrated into the platforms’ organisation; (b) in the light of the rating mechanism and the adoption of certain contractual clauses on withdrawal – that will be described –, often the worker is made illegitimately liable for the unfulfilment of the obligations to the customer; (c) when the conditions a) and b) occur, a substantial overlap between the business carried out by digital platforms and the workers’ activities can be detected and this shall be taken into consideration in the investigation on the legal status of the workers, especially in order to prevent any attempt to circumvent the application of the employment law protections.

中文翻译：

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数字化与工作：平台经济带来的挑战

摘要通过所谓的数字平台在市场上组织工作和提供服务的新方式似乎已经对分类雇佣关系的传统法律标准提出了质疑。实际上，数字平台的运行机制似乎以新的组合方式将一系列“旧”问题组合在一起。一方面，平台在市场上作为具有明显稀疏组织结构的主体出现，沿着算法的线程前进；另一方面，与他们合作的人似乎是自发，自愿，随机和灵活的。生产组织的根本分裂或减少到最小程度，伴随着匿名的许多人（“人群”）对工作活动本身的分裂，他们根据未知算法所决定的隐形动力一起运动。学术奖学金-在某些国家还包括判例法-已经为在/与平台工作的人的关系的法律分类问题提供了许多不同的答案。它们根据方法学方法和用作参考的系统而有所不同。本文认为，不可能为每个问题都提供有效的通用答案。实际上，平台与工作人员之间每种关系的特定功能可能因情况而异。但是，对于解决分类问题有用的一些要素仍然存在争议，应予以澄清：（a）在大多数情况下，该平台不仅充当某种服务的供求之间的中介；相反，它代表通过工人的活动提供的服务的直接供应商；因此，工作人员已完全融入平台组织中；（b）根据评级机制并采用某些关于提款的合同条款（将在下文中进行描述），常常使工人对未履行对客户的义务承担非法责任；（c）当出现条件a）和b）时，可以发现数字平台开展的业务与工人的活动之间存在实质性重叠，并且在对工人的法律地位进行调查时应考虑到这一点，