The “convenient fiction” of self-employed contractors on digital platforms

It’s been a big week. On Monday the Guardian published The Uber Files, a global investigation revealing how Uber broke the law, swindled authorities and secretly lobbied governments across the globe.

Uncovering a vast array of documents leaked by whistleblower and former Uber executive, Mark MacGann, The Uber Files exposes emails, iMessages and WhatsApp exchanges between Uber’s most senior executives as they hustled to enter markets where the company’s use of unlicensed drivers is illegal.?

In a compelling video interview, MacGann says: “I was the one telling people that they should change the rules because drivers were going to benefit and people were going to get so much economic opportunity. When that turned out not to be the case - we had actually sold people a lie - how can you have a clear conscience if you don’t stand up and own your contribution to how people are being treated today?”?

“I was the one telling people that they should change the rules because drivers were going to benefit and people were going to get so much economic opportunity...we had actually sold people a lie"

How they are being treated, by Uber and many other digital platforms, is not as employees. These workers are defined as ‘self-employed contractors’, which means that while they work for these platforms, and make these platforms money, the platform owes them no protections, benefits or opportunities.

This would be fine if these workers were, in-fact, self-employed contractors in the traditional sense and took it upon themselves to organise and pay for their own insurances. But this isn't happening - as has been made clear in the wake of numerous, uncompensated worker deaths.?

A story on the risks of the gig economy that aired on Wednesday night ABC’s 7.30 Report? heard the story of Xiaojun Chen, one of five food delivery drivers who died on Australian streets across three months in 2020. After two years of legal battles, the Personal Injury Commission awarded Mr Chen’s widow and two children $830,000.?

This was a landmark ruling that will hopefully lead to change in the rideshare and food delivery industries. It’s a space where digital platforms refuse to acknowledge their workers as employees, “preferring the convenient fiction that they [are] self-employed contractors”, as the Guardian reports in The Uber Files.??

But what about the disability sector, where the “convenient fiction” of self-employed contractors is a dangerous and fast-growing reality??

The rollout of the NDIS has seen many businesses engage with disability support workers as self-employed contractors, sending them out to work with some of our most vulnerable members of society without even basic insurances and protections.?

These workers have no guaranteed wage rates or penalty rates for working nights and weekends, no superannuation payments, no help to return to work in the case of injury or protection from liability when things go wrong — and yet perform the same work, in the same ways, as employees in the rest of the sector.

Businesses will argue that, were they to offer the safeties and rights of employment, their workers would lose the flexibility to work when and with whom they choose. This claim is completely untrue, as our model at Hireup - a disability support provider employing thousands of support workers across Australia - can attest.???

As Tony Burke, the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, said from Parliament House on 7.30 last night: “The only way to deal with this is to have government action. The only way to change the situation for these exploited workers is to use the building that I’m in right now and legislate.”

I sincerely hope this happens - and I’m committed to seeing the convenient fiction of self-employed contractors revealed for the dangerous falsehood that it is.?