Week 10: A typology of three regimes

Adding the EU's Platform Work Directive as a third case, and building a typology across China, Australia and the EU

The EU’s mechanism: flipping who has to prove what

The Platform Work Directive’s (Directive (EU) 2024/2831) central move is a rebuttable presumption of employment, set out in its Article 5, triggered once a platform’s relationship with a worker shows enough of the control-and-direction indicators the Directive lists in Article 4 — things like setting pay levels, closely supervising performance through electronic means, or restricting a worker’s freedom to organise their own work. Once triggered, the burden flips: instead of a worker having to prove they meet an employment test, the platform has to prove they don’t. That single procedural flip changes the practical dynamic of a dispute entirely, independent of what the underlying substantive test for “employee” actually says.

One axis, three regimes

China’s individual-business-owner registration, Australia’s employee-like worker category, and the EU’s rebuttable presumption can all be placed on one axis: who has to prove what, to whom, before any protection applies. Building that typology, rather than ranking the three regimes by how protective they sound in a press release, is the actual analytical task — a regime can sound protective and still leave the entire evidentiary burden on the worker. On that axis, the EU mechanism is the clearest departure from the other two: China’s 2021 Guiding Opinions and Australia’s employee-like worker category both add protections without disturbing who carries the burden of proof, while the EU directive is built specifically to shift that burden.

A presumption-based mechanism fits naturally into a civil-law system already built around codified rules and burdens of proof; a case-by-case common-law approach fits a system built around precedent and individual adjudication. Neither choice is neutral — each regime’s design reflects the legal tradition and political economy it grew out of, which is part of why copying one jurisdiction’s mechanism into another rarely works cleanly. A rebuttable-presumption provision transplanted directly into a common-law system without the surrounding civil-law procedural context could easily end up litigated exactly like a case-by-case test — the mechanism’s formal shape doesn’t guarantee its practical effect survives the move.

Before the session

Bring a one-paragraph draft of your comparison axis for the essay due next week — the session is built around workshopping these in small groups.

Teaching team