Week 7: The legal classification problem

Employee or contractor — the one legal question that quietly determines almost everything else this course has covered

The question that decides almost everything else#

“Employee or independent contractor” sounds like a narrow legal technicality, but minimum pay, injury cover, unfair-dismissal protection and union access mostly flow from the answer to it, not from any rule written specifically about platform work. Get the classification right, from the platform’s perspective, and most other protections simply don’t apply yet — whatever a country’s labour law otherwise says about employees.

China’s version of the same manoeuvre#

Meituan and Ele.me both route riders through layered subcontracting chains, registering them as individual business owners rather than employees of any single entity in the chain — so that no one link, examined on paper, looks like an employer with the obligations that would imply. It’s a specific, documented legal structure, not a metaphor. It’s also the structure China’s own regulators eventually responded to directly: the 2021 “Guiding Opinions on Protecting the Labour Security Rights and Interests of Workers in New Forms of Employment,” issued jointly by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and seven other central departments, explicitly names platform-mediated work and instructs platforms to take on specific protections — accident insurance contributions, clearer contract terms, dispute-resolution channels — without formally reclassifying riders as employees. It’s a deliberately intermediate move: real obligations imposed, without touching the underlying classification question this week is built around.

Not a uniquely Chinese problem#

Common-law systems spent the better part of a decade litigating almost exactly this question over contractor status — a different legal mechanism, but the same underlying manoeuvre: structure the relationship so the employment finding doesn’t attach. Seeing the China case and the common-law contractor cases as two implementations of one idea, rather than two unrelated stories, is what this week’s moot is actually testing.

Before the session#

Read the assigned explainer on individual-business-owner registration in the delivery sector and come ready to argue, in a short moot, either side of “this structure is a genuine business arrangement” versus “this structure exists to avoid an employment finding.”