Professor Sandra Fredman's platform workers paper among Industrial Law Journal's most-read
A paper by Professor Sandra Fredman, Professor of the Laws of the British Commonwealth and the United States and Director of the Oxford Human Rights Hub, has been highlighted by the Industrial Law Journal as one of its most-read recent publications. The article, 'Fair Work for Platform Workers: Lessons from the EU Directive and Beyond', was co-authored with Darcy Du Toit, Alessio Bertolini, Jonas Valente and Mark Graham.
The paper examines the EU Directive on Platform Work and its implications for the protection of platform workers – an area of work that has grown rapidly and is often marked by precarity and insecurity. It is estimated that, as of 2022, there were over 28 million people performing platform work in the EU alone, with that number likely to have risen to 43 million by 2025. Platform work is arranged through apps or websites and matches workers to tasks such as ride-hailing or food delivery.
Professor Fredman and colleagues' paper argues that while the EU Directive has made a welcome start, further work is needed to ensure the full protection of platform workers regardless of employment status. Making use of extensive research from the Fairwork project, the article considers who should be protected by law, the substantive rights that should apply, and how evidence from the project can help inform a future ILO Convention on Platform Work. It also suggests that the issues raised by platform work have wider significance for other forms of non-standard work and for sectors governed by artificial intelligence.
Another of Professor Fredman's articles, 'Substantive Equality Revisited', has consistently been among the most read and cited in the International Journal of Constitutional Law. The paper argues that substantive equality should be understood through a four-part framework.