The (Unbearable?) Lightness of Self-Employed Work Intermediation

The paper analyses, from a juridical perspective, the classificatory schemes able to comprehend the vast spectrum of phaenomena labelled as “digital work”, as including crowdsourcing and online intermediation of non-digital activities ("work on demand via app"). Both these activities are difficult to fit within the notion of employment dependency as developed by Labour Law in the last century. Safe for pathological cases, digital workers shall be deemed self-employed workers, since they are not legally bound to perform any activity. The paper will therefore try to classify digital work under the triangular scheme of “intermediation of autonomous work”, and will try to individuate whether it is possible to search for some protective provisions applicable to "digital" workers outside the field of statutory employment law.