Employers and unions did not fit on the platform
Representatives of employers and trade unions differed in their understanding of the legal basis for platform employment - the definition of this concept was formulated by the Ministry of Labor and United Russia in a draft new law on employment, which was submitted for discussion at a meeting of the Russian Tripartite Commission (RTK) on Friday. Employers oppose the recognition of platform employment as an employment relationship, since this imposes additional obligations on them, while trade unions believe that only such a format can protect the interests of workers.
The current law “On Employment in the Russian Federation” was adopted back in 1991 and has been regularly amended for 30 years. At the beginning of 2022, the Ministry of Labor, together with United Russia, began to prepare a new version of the law, which, among other things, should introduce new forms of employment into the legal field. The final bill was submitted to the State Duma on January 11, its consideration in the first reading is scheduled for February.
Platform employment has become widespread in the Russian Federation since about 2018, but it became a noticeable phenomenon in the labor market in 2020, when the demand for taxi and delivery services sharply increased during the pandemic. The exact number of platform workers in the Russian Federation is unknown and, according to the Center for Strategic Research, may be from 2 million to 5 million people. The regulation of the labor status of such labor market participants is now a problem in most countries of the world, and the range of possible solutions involves both the recognition of their employees in the traditional sense (as, for example, in Spain), and the introduction of a separate specific definition into the legislation (as in India, see . "Kommersant" dated October 21, 2021).
The question of whether the relationship between the platform (aggregator) and the employee can be considered labor relations has also become a subject of disagreement for the parties to the social partnership in the RTK - they could not agree on the wording throughout 2022. As a result, at a preliminary discussion of the bill on employment in the State Duma in early December, the head of United Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, proposed removing the chapter on platform employment and introducing it later as a separate document (for more details, see Kommersant dated December 14, 2022).
Now the controversy has arisen because of the general definition of platform employment remaining in the bill. Under it, it is proposed to understand the activities of citizens "for the personal performance" of work or the provision of services under a contract. It is specified that such work is organized using digital employment platforms. As the head of the RSPP, Alexander Shokhin, explained to Kommersant, it is important for business that the wording be unambiguous. “However, it follows from the text of the draft law that illegal employment includes all relations that are not formalized in accordance with the Labor Code, which contradicts both Article 2 of the draft itself, which defines the categories of citizens who are employed, and laws regulating, for example, civil law contracts for the production of goods and the provision of services,” said the head of the RSPP. Let us explain that de facto employers are in favor of formalizing relations with civil law, rather than employment contracts, since in the latter case they will have to pay insurance premiums and experience difficulties when dismissing employees.
Trade unions also consider the wording proposed in the draft law to be excessively broad, but on different grounds. “It will blur the boundaries between self-employment and labor relations and thereby encourage the employer to transfer workers to the status of self-employed,” said Igor Kovalchuk, head of the executive committee of the Confederation of Labor of Russia. He insists that the definition of platform employment should be supplemented with a clause indicating that it can be carried out on the basis of employment contracts.
According to Anna Ivanova, head of the labor law practice at BGP Litigation, an acceptable option for the parties may be a wording that will allow, in the future, when a separate bill on platform employment is being prepared, to give such workers additional guarantees. “We are talking, for example, about the employer's payment for sick leave or vacations,” the expert notes.
