플랫폼노동종사자의 근로자성에 관한 소고

Abstract

The transformation of economic values ​​such as the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Shared Economy has led to the spreading of Platform Labor, a new format of labor, which trades, mediates, or supplies the resources related to labor through digital platforms such as apps and SNS using computers or smart phones that have resulted from the development of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). The platform worker is in the middle or dual status, which is not a user or an employee in the traditional labor relations, but a worker who has user’s and worker’s personality at the same time, such that it is ambiguous to classify such a worker as user, worker, or self-employed. Although they provide labor, there are people who request labor and companies that use such labor; they are in a poor working environment because they cannot demand proper compensation, welfare, and insurance for labor providers, and they are in a blind spot regarding the protections offered by Labor Law. In Korea, there is a lack of understanding of the actual situation as well as establishing the concept of platform workers, and they cannot be protected by law as a worker because they are not included in the worker concept specified in the Labor Relations Act, and it is hard to define them due to variety of the types of such workers and lack of dependency on specific users. Therefore, it should be possible to review platform workers and special form workers in a quasilinear manner; however, it is not appropriate to include current platform laborers in the concept of special form workers due to the limit of the scope of special form workers. Also, now, there is a need to review and improve redefinition of the concept of existing concepts of special form workers to embrace platform workers in its concept, the possibility of broadening the concept of workers through interpretation or legislation, and acknowledgment of a worker's status as a platform worker through active interpretation theory by using the element of economic dependency as the main criterion rather than traditional elements of employment(usage) dependencies such as direction and supervision.