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COURTS✒ EDITORIALABSURDITY:
China draft rules offer millions of gig workers employment contracts
Filed 1h ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk
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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0
Photo: Rijksmuseum · CC0 · via Wikimedia Commons
China's Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security has published draft rules requiring online platforms like Alibaba, Meituan, and DiDi to sign standardized employment contracts with gig workers, covering minimum wage, holiday pay, and rest time. The rules would also ban platforms from pushing workers to register as individual business owners specifically to dodge those contracts. Public comment runs until Nov. 8.
The country has an estimated 280 million flexible workers, many currently working without formal contracts in delivery, courier, and ride-hailing jobs marked by long hours and price wars between platforms. The draft also requires platforms to explain their management algorithms, and bars algorithm-only decisions to cut off orders or ban accounts without human review.
The full dispatch is available from the source below.
✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK
Telling a courier to register as his own tiny business so the company owes him nothing is a trick as old as any company town, just dressed up in an app. A rule that names the dodge and closes it is worth noting, though the real test comes after the comment period closes and somebody has to actually enforce it against the companies that invented the workaround in the first place. Until then it is a draft, and drafts have a way of growing loopholes of their own on the way to final text.
