«Fake self-employment deposits» beyond digital platforms: ramifications of an ingrained problem

Abstract

The development of the so-called «digital platform economy» is reinvigorating a fraud problem in the management of labor relations deeply rooted in our practice: the false self-employed. However, this proliferation of false mercantile labor relations, which conceal genuine wage-labor relations, is nowadays linked not only to the exponential growth of service providers through digital platforms (Uber, Deliveroo, Glovo, etc.), but also to old forms of social economy, with the same deep roots and the subject of praiseworthy judgment, such as workers' cooperatives. Some recent rulings –some others don’t– reveal, with the collaboration of the Labor and Social Security Inspectorate, not only the proliferation of fraud beyond the digital economy sector, but the need for a more general, statutory and through collective bargaining, intervention than the extremely particular and case-related one that derives from the «government of judges».