Employee participation is deemed necessary in the name of good governance and corporate social responsibility. For this reason it forms an essential aspect of legal instruments drafted by international public institutions and aimed at multinational enterprises. Despite this, enterprises clearly prefer to take a unilateral approach in the rules they adopt to implement CSR policies, and an individual approach to employee relations, to the detriment of collective labour relations. CSR thus presents two radically different facets: one of which is favourable to transnational social dialogue, while the other presents firms with an opportunity to regain areas of control over their employees at the expense of public freedoms and fundamental rights. The co-existence of these two aspects of CSR confronts public authorities with the following dilemma: either they allow self-regulation to take its course, and risk seeing violations of international labour law and national legislation, or they intervene in order to ensure compliance with existing international instruments.
Addressing the social protection of platform workers, the French legislator in 2016 and then in 2019 made moves to incorporate these workers into the general social security regime with regard to certain covered risks (work injury and occupational diseases), and to improve adequacy (enabling possible access to complementary coverage). However, these moves rest on radically opposed perspectives. Rather than reasserting the legal responsibility of the employer vis-à-vis workers' health and safety, we see responsibility placed with the platform, but only on a voluntary basis under the aegis of corporate social responsibility. This risks fragmenting social benefits, to be determined by each platform, thus weakening the practices of mutual protection and risk pooling among enterprises and workers that lie at the heart of social security. In doing so, the legislator has broken the link that had as its historic objective the goal of social inclusion and has encouraged in different ways the privatization, or a recommodification, of social security in the commercial interest of private insurance companies. Moreover, this has been done using the Trojan Horse of the French labour code. This approach is in contrast to the converging position of international organizations, such as the European Union,
This special issue of the International Social Security Review addresses the important topic of social protection for digital platform workers in Europe. The special issue highlights the risk that social protection systems may be largely undermined by a decline in social solidarity in favour of individualism, the partial or full privatization of social security, and a reduction in protection levels, all as a result of the emergence of digital platforms and the support they receive from legislators in most countries.
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