Conceptualising employment relationships: why the law struggles to regulate platform work

Aza, Asymina (2025) Conceptualising employment relationships: why the law struggles to regulate platform work. LL.M(R) thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

To date, regulating platform work in a manner that genuinely extends labour rights to workers has been an uphill battle. Across jurisdictions, the notion of the standard employment relationship has shaped both the scope of labour law and the course of its conceptual development, limiting the law’s capacity to regulate atypical forms of work, such as platform work. Against this backdrop, this dissertation explores the extent to which labour law has been able to conceptualise and respond to platform work. After deconstructing the notion of the standard employment relationship and its legal counterpart - the contract of employment, this dissertation explores how platforms have organised work, through an analysis of four patents filed by Uber and DoorDash. This analysis is followed by a comparative overview of caselaw on the determination of platform worker status. Overall, this dissertation finds that a major obstacle to extending genuine labour rights to platform workers is to be found in platforms’ ability to organise and reorganise work through algorithmic means around the legal form of employment, resulting in these firms being able to repeatedly place workers into the legal category of self-employment - even following court decisions to the contrary.

• Item Type: Thesis (LL.M(R))
• Qualification Level: Masters
• Subjects: K Law > K Law (General)
• Colleges/Schools: College of Social Sciences > School of Law
• Supervisor's Name: Dukes, Professor Ruth
• Date of Award: 2025
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2025-85287
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 03 Jul 2025 08:13
• Last Modified: 03 Jul 2025 08:16
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.85287
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/85287