Abstract

The distribution and organisation of work through information and communication technologies is probably one of the most current and debated aspects of the digital economy. Labour platforms are not only opening up new prospects for economic development, but also raise many issues that are still far from being settled. The supranational nature of market players, the multilevel architecture of companies’ technological infrastructures, and the substantial inscrutability of the algorithms used to manage workers’ activity and the matching of service demand and supply significantly hamper the design of effective policies. In this scenario, traditional legal remedies risk being unfit in view of the complexity of ongoing processes. A considerable challenge is that of developing new regulatory strategies capable of providing crowdworkers with higher levels of protection, without curbing economic growth. The paper deals with these issues by adopting a techno-regulation perspective, a regulatory paradigm according to which technology is seen not only as an object but also as an integral part of the regulatory process. After a review of the current situation of labour platforms, as well as a brief introduction on the very concept of algorithmic governance, we hence sketch a proposal for the protection of gig-economy workers that integrates legal remedies and technological solutions (blockchain) into a single regulatory strategy.