The (Unbearable?) Lightness of Self-Employed Work Intermediation : The Cases of Uber, Foodora and Amazon Mechanical Turk in the Light of the Italian Labour Law

The article aims to analyse the legal aspects of “digital work”, as including “work on demand via app” and “crowdwork”, involving, respectively, an “on-demand mobile workforce” and an “on-demand virtual workforce”. The breakout of digital work and the “commodification of labour” jeopardise, together with labour law standards, also the truly founding idea that labour is not a commodity. Nonetheless, the “challenge” of digital work may constitute an opportunity for further reflections on the development of protective schemes applicable to all human beings who work, regardless of the legal scheme under which they carry out their activities. To verify whether it is useful and possible to search for some protective provisions for digital workers outside statutory employment law, the article will compare the recent developments of Anglo-American literature and case law with the less open-minded perspective of Italian Law. The artcile will therefore propose try to find out whether it is possible to elaborate some protective schemes for digital workers through the recourse to contract law and self-employed work regulations. Under such regulations, the article will deal with some critical points (such as the possibility to refuse Amazon Mechanical Turkers’ work without payment, or to “dismiss” an Uber driver for low reputational rates), in order to verify whether outside labour law it is possible to find some protection for digital workers, and, in the affirmative, to what extent.