How should takeaway riders tied up by the dark web of platform legal relations break through? | culture

Licensed | School of Law, University of International Business and Economics

【Introduction】Recently, the problem of takeaway riders and takeaway platforms has returned to the public vision. A legal aid organization found, based on a large number of judgments: "There are not only algorithms in the delivery system, but also a lot of companies." The intricate network of legal relationships of these companies is tying riders to the ground. When the rider falls into the pit ahead, neither of these companies is sufficient to form his employer. It is worth thinking about, how did this network of legal relationships form? Why do takeaway platforms build such legal relationships with riders? How can the takeaway riders who are tied up by the above-mentioned legal relationship network break through?

This paper points out that online platforms have the dual characteristics of both enterprises and the market, which is the crux of the platform economy practitioners that are difficult to determine in law. The rapid development of information technology has reduced the internal management costs of enterprises and the cost of external transactions in the market. However, compared with the two, the savings in the internal management costs of online platforms are also constrained by government supervision, which aims to protect workers. As a result, the network platform has formed a complex contractual relationship with the platform economy practitioners by carefully designing the structure, selecting the contract type and formulating the contract terms, and ultimately placing the practitioners outside the platform enterprise. In terms of legal form, such contractual arrangements do not give the platform strong legal rights to practitioners. However, under the influence of multiple factors, it is inevitable for the network platform to strengthen the management of practitioners, and the development of information technology has also greatly improved the management ability of the platform. This raises the fundamental paradox of platform labor: the divergence between the formal contractual attributes and the substantive management attributes.

So how exactly should the law resolve this paradox? The author believes that there are insurmountable deficiencies in "forcing online platforms to assume employer responsibilities", and "incentivizing online platforms to assume employer responsibilities" is a more feasible institutional choice. The law can start from the two aspects of reducing information costs and management costs, and adopt flexible measures to guide, incentivize, and urge and incentivize platforms to assume the responsibilities of employers. The former relies on the design of the mechanism of "enhanced information disclosure", and the latter depends on the design of the mechanism of "flexible hierarchical labor protection".

This article was originally published in Culture Magazine, No. 1, 2022, pp. 87-96. It is hereby compiled and distributed for the consideration of all kings.

Platforms are not employers

——A new way of thinking to resolve the paradox of platform labor

This is an era of "redefining work". With the advent of the online platform economy, the form and content of labor have undergone subversive changes. As a result, labour law faces unprecedented challenges. The diversification of workers makes labor relations impossible to belong; the motorization of working hours makes working hours immeasurable; the unbounded business premises make the protection of labor places nowhere attached; the unowned social security makes labor welfare landless. Groups of practitioners such as chauffeurs, takeaway riders, online shop owners, cave doctors, home cooks, and independent designers are the witnesses to these problems. So, in the era of the network platform economy, why is the labor law left and right? So far, most of the answers to this question have begun from the particularity of the new type of practitioner, who is neither a traditional "worker" nor a typical "self-employed", so that he has to be separated from the existing law and become a so-called "dependent contractor", "non-employee worker" or "employee-like person". However, these widespread concepts of "third laborers" are not only extrapolated and vague in scope, but also complex in terms of rights and rules, which may even lead to unintended consequences of misclassification and covert employment. Under the structure of "employer-worker", since the approach of "practitioner end" is difficult, we may wish to change direction and do reverse thinking from the "network platform side", which is not another way to crack.

▍ Network Platform: Enterprise or Market?

Is a web platform a business? The answer seems self-evident. The network platform has assets, employees, actual controllers, and based on the internal bureaucratic structure to issue instructions, these are the typical characteristics of enterprises; but on the other hand, the network platform does not directly produce or sell goods like traditional enterprises, Meituan has no stores, today's headlines do not produce news, Didi basically has no taxis, it is more like a broker of all parties rather than a trader, with network effects and cross-subsidies, it will effectively match supply and demand, and further realize the liquidity and scale of the market. Perhaps because of this, when Alibaba was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, online shop owners, couriers, user representatives, e-commerce service providers, Taobao models, cloud customer service and a farmer from the United States rang the bronze bell of listing. This move has a deep meaning: Taobao is not only owned by investors, but also an ecosystem that accommodates multiple stakeholders. It is precisely in this way that the Anti-Monopoly Guidelines of the Anti-Monopoly Committee of the State Council on the Field of Platform Economy define online platforms as "a form of commercial organization in which interdependent bilateral or multilateral entities interact under the rules provided by specific carriers through network information technology" to jointly create value.

Just as light has wave-particle duality, the new business organization of the network platform is the superposition of "enterprise" and "market", which is precisely the crux of the platform economy practitioners: if the platform is more like an enterprise, then they are naturally dependent on the platform "laborers"; if the platform is more like the market, they are independent of the platform "labor provider". However, how to judge the nature of the network platform?

The binary distinction between business and market stems from Coase's insights. In the classic paper "The Nature of the Enterprise", Coase found that the market mechanism in the real world is not free, from the discovery of counterparties to the signing and execution of contracts, the transaction costs in the market are ubiquitous, as an alternative to the value mechanism, enterprises take various factors of production into their own hands, and through the authority of entrepreneurs to dominate resources. This "domination" is embodied in the particular element of labour-power, the mechanism of command and obedience, which Coase points out in particular: the employer must have the right to control the work of the employee, either personally or through an agent. This right of control and intervention, which has the right to tell the employee when and when not to work, as well as what to do and how to do it, is an essential feature of this relationship, which distinguishes the employee from the independent contractor or from the executor who only provides the employer with the fruits of his labour. Distinguishing between firms and markets is only the first step, but more importantly: which resources need to be incorporated into the enterprise and which should remain in the market? Coase's answer was succinct: the boundaries of the enterprise would extend to the cost of organizing an additional resource within the enterprise, equal to the cost of completing the resource in exchange for the open market. As far as human resources are concerned, when the administrative cost of hiring one more person is less than the corresponding contract cost, the enterprise will hire, and conversely, the enterprise will outsource.

Through the Coase prism, it is not difficult to find that the rapid development of information technology reduces both internal management costs and external market transaction costs. In the case of the former, the Internet and big data technologies improve the efficiency with which companies collect, transmit, process, and use information, and use data sharing to remove barriers between departments and achieve effective collaboration. With the functions of auxiliary production, monitoring and performance evaluation, decision support, transaction processing and communication, information technology has greatly reduced the internal management costs of enterprises. In the case of the latter, the interconnected interaction of information infrastructure such as mobile Internet, cloud computing, and data platforms not only makes it easier to obtain and aggregate information, but also accelerates the flow of information and reduces information asymmetry, thus making possible goods and services under the "Coasean floor" that have not been realized due to transaction costs. Not only that, but reprogrammable functionality and reusable digital devices reduce the "asset specificity" of assets fixed to a particular business, allowing businesses to digitally connect to and use remote resources without legal exclusivity. Information sharing further breaks the spatial and temporal boundaries between internal and external, allowing enterprises to mobilize and match all available resources to maximize value in the entire economic ecosystem.

The simultaneous reduction of internal management costs and external transaction costs raises the intractable question: Is the firm tending to expand or shrink? In terms of the platform economy, the reduction of external transaction costs seems to be more critical. American scholar Ollie Lobel listed the advantages of online platforms in this regard in the article "The Law of Platforms": (1) creating an unprecedented scale of user networks, increasing the availability of supply and demand; (2) splitting transaction units in process and time to achieve customized transactions; (3) facilitating transaction innovation and structural combinations to meet personalized needs; (4) providing general services to reduce the threshold for relevant parties to enter the market; (5) using data analysis and dynamic ratings to improve trust before transactions. And assist in supervising post-transaction execution and resolving disputes. From the perspective of market transaction costs, the related search costs, transportation costs, tracking costs, and verification costs have been greatly reduced. In contrast, the savings in the internal management costs of network platforms face major obstacles, which is "government regulation".

Although private law has the primary goal of eliminating transaction costs, regulation tends to take into account non-economic values such as national security, public order, equitable distribution, and consumer protection. Based on the regulation of worker protection has always been an important factor affecting the scale of enterprises, on the one hand, the law gives enterprises beyond the "power" of general contracts to direct, supervise and reward and punish employees; on the other hand, it requires enterprises to perform the obligation of protection and care and assume employer responsibilities caused by the behavior of workers. Comprehensively comparing the impact of the platform economy on market transaction costs and management costs, enterprises will relatively reduce their own scale under the impetus of information technology. Empirical research in the United States also confirms that there is a negative correlation between information technology investment and corporate boundaries. In this context, the so-called new type of practitioners will naturally be placed outside the enterprise and become the outsourcer of free contracting in the market. It is understandable why Meituan insisted that none of the 4.7 million registered delivery workers on its platform were non-Meituan employees. However, the choice of network platform deliberately ignores an important fact - the decline in platform management costs and the soaring management capabilities it brings. This raises the fundamental paradox of platform labor: the divergence between the formal contractual attributes and the substantive management attributes.

▍ Platform Labor Paradox: Contract or Management?

The network platform forms a complex contractual relationship with practitioners by carefully designing the structure, selecting the type of contract and formulating the terms of the contract. The mainland online ride-hailing platform has adopted the "four-party agreement" model, signing an agreement regulating each other's rights and obligations between the network platform, car rental companies, labor service companies, and drivers. Among them, the car rental company has the ownership of the online booking vehicle, the network platform matches the driver to sign a car rental agreement with the leasing company, or the platform signs a car rental agreement with the leasing company and pays the rent; the labor service company signs a cooperation agreement with the network platform, the platform entrusts the labor service company to recruit drivers, and then the labor service company signs a labor contract or labor contract with the driver; the relationship between the network platform and the driver is clarified through the network service agreement. Taking the "Special Express Platform Service Agreement" and the "Service Cooperation Agreement" of the driver's terminal of the Didi platform as an example, it stipulates: "Once you log in to this application, generate an order or serve passengers through this application, it is deemed that you have fully read and accepted all the terms of this agreement, and you agree that this agreement is legally binding on you and our company." Article 9 further clarifies: "The body of this Agreement and its appendices are subject to civil laws such as the Contract Law." Our company and all drivers who provide online ride-hailing services only have affiliation and cooperative relations, there is no direct or indirect labor relationship, and do not apply the Labor Law, labor contract law, social insurance law, housing provident fund management regulations and other laws and regulations. ”

Online takeaway platforms also adopt a "tripartite agreement" model, reaching an agreement between online platforms, partners and takeaway riders. Depending on the "dedicated rider" and "crowdsourced rider", the tripartite agreement has a different look. As far as the "special delivery rider" is concerned, the network platform signs a cooperation agreement with the distribution partner to outsource the catering and distribution business in a certain area to the distribution enterprise in the form of commercial cooperation, and then the distribution partner signs a labor contract with the rider or forms an actual employment relationship with the rider through a third-party labor dispatch company. In the case of "crowdsourced riders", the riders register as platform users through network service agreements and sign labor contracts with "labor outsourcing enterprises" that cooperate with online platforms. For example, Meituan's "Online Delivery Officer Agreement" stipulates that when filling in the information, reading and agreeing to sign this agreement and related specifications and annexes according to the prompts on the registration page and completing all registration procedures, it means that it will become a service personnel of "Tianjin Woqi Human Resources Co., Ltd.", and its 7.4 article further stipulates that it is not allowed to use or borrow the name of the Meituan crowdsourcing platform to hire personnel during any period.

Compared with the multi-party contract of the mainland network platform, the arrangement of the US network platform is more straightforward. For example, Uber's User Agreement provides that Uber does not provide or acts as a carrier, and that all such transportation or logistics services are provided by independent third-party contractors who are not employed by Uber or any of its affiliates. In the Driver-To-Driver Agreement, Uber makes it clear that the Driver is an Independent Contractor who uses the Uber App to provide on-demand transportation to passengers, and that there is no agency, partnership, joint venture, or other joint relationship between the Driver and Uber, and that the parties are solely responsible. Similarly, the service agreement of The Housekeeping Service Platform TaskRabbit also states that the Housekeeping Service Provider is an independent contractor of the "Independent Business Owner" and the customer, not an employee, partner, representative, agent, joint venture and independent contractor or franchisee of TaskRabbit.

However, the contractual arrangements conceal a fatal flaw: they largely do not give online platforms strong legal rights to practitioners. Whether it is in the four-party agreement of the online ride-hailing platform or the tripartite agreement of the takeaway platform, although the platform can set general obligations for practitioners through network rules such as the "Delivery Service Specification" and the "Software Use Agreement", it does not enjoy the right to guide specific matters, and the relevant behavior management rights are still legally in the hands of labor service companies, partners or users. This feature is particularly prominent in TaskRabbit, which is positioned as an intermediary service, which advocates as an online marketplace designed to connect customers with service providers who wish to perform various tasks, does not control or direct the performance of service providers, and does not set work locations, working hours or working conditions. However, the platform's letting go of practitioners faces double pressure. On the one hand, online platforms bear the economic pressure to prosper the platform ecology. With the integration of online and offline, many elements of the platform economy are becoming more and more complex, as the constructor and leader of the platform ecology, the platform is not only the provider of the transaction space, the matchmaker of transaction activities, but also the formulator of transaction regulation, the maintenance of transaction order and the promoter of transaction diversity, and its functions are also expanded from the most basic technical services and data storage/analysis to payment/settlement, logistics, certification, credit evaluation, financial services, behavior management/regulation, etc. Competition around resource flows and basic service capabilities has become the main form of platform competition. Not only that, in the context of the high cost of law enforcement and rights protection, online platforms also play a role in private enforcement through management practitioners. Existing research shows that the rise of Taobao is inseparable from Alibaba's management of enforcing contracts, preventing fraud and dispute resolution.

On the other hand, online platforms have administrative pressure to supervise the suppliers of goods or services within the platform. The Internet is not an extralegal place, but there is no doubt that the power structure and central authority of the traditional state are constantly decentralized in cyberspace, on the contrary, based on the power law, the network platform is constantly centralized, and the two jointly promote the state to transfer regulatory power to the platform, and a "administrative outsourcing" platform governance model has emerged, and the platform has in fact become a "quasi-administrative organ" that exercises "quasi-administrative power" to practitioners. Therefore, although the Didi platform stipulates in the "Hitchhiking Information Platform User Agreement": "As an intermediary information platform, this platform provides various information services for car owners and passengers, and unless there are clear provisions in the law, the platform is not responsible for the losses that you may suffer in the process of using a private passenger car sharing", but the agreement is basically ignored in the face of the "case of the murder of the flight attendant late-night hitchhiker". Article 57 of the Personal Information Protection Law (Draft) adds a gatekeeper obligation for "an online platform with basic Internet platform services, a huge number of users, and complex business types", supervises and disposes of business operators within the platform, and has the responsibility to stop providing services for products or service providers within the platform that seriously violate laws and administrative regulations to deal with personal information "The government manages the platform, the platform manages the practitioners".

The combination of weak contractual rights and political and economic pressures makes it inevitable for online platforms to strengthen practitioner management, and information technology provides excellent tools. In fact, mobile devices, the Internet of Things, and the underlying data and algorithms have fundamentally changed the way labor and resources are identified, monitored, and controlled, to unprecedented degrees. As Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, points out, because today's actions are all computer-mediated, we can observe behaviors that were previously unobservable. The comprehensive grasp of the labor process gives the platform the ability to continuously dismantle and standardize the labor process, and redistribute labor control with the help of digital technology. Taking the takeaway platform as an example, the rider's delivery is first split into three stages, that is, to the store, to pick up the meal, and to deliver, and the rider must feedback to the platform system after each stage of the task, at the same time, the platform system is responsible for guiding, rewarding and punishing the rider, and the consumer is responsible for supervision and evaluation. After repeated iteration and optimization of the delivery time, all the time track monitoring, the calculatable amount of acceptance, overtime rate, bad evaluation rate, complaint rate, real-time feedback of the points level system, practitioners are finally "trapped in the system".

▍ Solving the dilemma: coercion or incentive?

The mixture of market and enterprise, contract and management makes the legal positioning of platform economy practitioners uncertain. In the face of this dilemma, what is the solution?

The first path that comes to mind is "forcing online platforms to assume employer responsibilities." The approach argues that the rise of the platform economy has created conditions for online platforms to supervise arbitrage, and by excluding workers who should have been included in the enterprise, the platform has removed its obligations, resulting in increased inequality and a decline in wages, so it is necessary to force them to establish labor relations with practitioners. This idea has its origins. Over the years, it has been not uncommon for mainland enterprises to use labor dispatch to reduce labor costs, and disputes arising from "temporary, auxiliary, and alternative" job restrictions have also existed in large numbers. Coincidentally, a study of Austrian courier companies also shows that companies subcontract work to independent contractors while still issuing instructions directly to them, a false form of self-employment that not only exempts companies from the constraints of working hours, but also does not have to bear the burden and risk of vehicle maintenance and management.

However, this intuitive solution has insurmountable shortcomings. From the perspective of rules, there is still disagreement about what kind of practitioner should be included in the labor relationship. The diversity of work styles makes the new type of practitioners look different, or by the impact of the economic downturn, the practitioners are forced to enter the traditional job market without competitiveness; or driven by the individual's internal drive, they prefer flexible work arrangements and voluntarily join, which leads to "basic survival gig workers without main business" (such as full-time couriers), "basic survival gig workers with main business" (such as shared employees), "self-realized gig workers without main business" (such as online writers), and "self-realized gig workers with main business" (Like Slash Doctor), we can't imagine experienced IT specialists and crowdsourced hourly tools having the same legal status.

For this reason, the law has to return to the identification of "workers" again. In 2018, the California Supreme Court held a ceremony in Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v. The Superior Court proposes the "ABC test", which in principle treats all practitioners as "workers", unless the unit can prove that (1) the practitioner is not under the control of the unit in the execution of the work; (2) the service provided by the practitioner is not a business project of the unit; and (3) the practitioner's work is the same as the transaction or commercial activity that he or she normally engages in independently. However, the so-called "control" is clearly an uncertain concept, as the California Ayala case shows: the central question is not how much control the employer "actually" exerts, but how much control it "has" to exert. To that end, California translated the ABC test into the Worker Status: Employees and Independent Contractors Act, which covers more than 10 criteria, but none of them are dynamic and none are decisive.

From a conceptual point of view, the mandatory approach preconceivedly assumes that platform employment should be adjusted by labor law, ignoring the social and economic mechanisms behind it. The modern sense of labor law is based on the Industrial Age Ford production model, which is based on the premise of assembly line operation enterprises, but with the transformation of industrial enterprises to network platforms, both contracting relations continue to socialize, both labor relations and continuous marketization, labor law must be changed in response to the "boundaryless workplace" (boundaryless workplace) (high-velocity labor market) of the new economy. According to the 2021 China Sharing Economy Development Report, from August 2019 to August 2020, a total of 20.97 million people earned income through creative, live broadcasting, e-commerce and other work, taking Meituan as an example, in the first half of 2020, the total number of riders who earned income through the Meituan platform was 2.952 million, far exceeding the number of employees of Wal-Mart, the world's largest employer, and far beyond the range of traditional labor laws.

The failure of the mandatory approach makes "incentivizing online platforms to assume employer responsibilities" a more viable institutional option. The "mechanism design" theory of Harwitz et al. reveals the principles of this approach. In short, the actions of online platforms and practitioners depend on how they examine and weigh the costs and benefits of different actions, but since the specific information on employment or outsourcing is private and decentralized, it is neither reasonable nor possible for regulators to pre-set the legal relationship between the parties. Therefore, as a set of incentive mechanisms, the role of the law is to facilitate the transmission of information as much as possible, and to adopt appropriate institutional arrangements to promote the pursuit of personal interests of all parties to coincide with the goal of maximizing social well-being, so as to form "incentive compatibility". Since the voluntary assumption of employer responsibility by the platform is the best welfare for all parties, the law can start from the two aspects of reducing the "information cost" and "management cost" to incentivize the platform to assume the responsibility of the employer.

The reduction of information costs depends on the design of mechanisms to "strengthen information disclosure". Network platforms shall perform transparency obligations, and clearly and unambiguously inform practitioners of network rules and management rules involving practitioners' rights, obligations, responsibilities, and interests. Recently, Didi's public "draw" statement is only a small step in the transparency of the platform rules. In the future, we can learn from Japan's 2020 Act on Improving the Transparency and Fairness of Specific Digital Platforms, which requires online platforms to establish proper communication mechanisms with practitioners, formulate procedures to ensure the fairness of transactions, and facilitate dispute resolution systems. In order to introduce external supervision, the platform should also report regularly to the labor inspection department on the actual implementation of the above system. At the same time, considering the secrecy of algorithm control, regulators can extend a series of regulatory measures from the "automated decision-making" system under the Personal Information Protection Law (Draft), requiring platforms to show what personal information practitioners have collected and used to train algorithms and discipline practitioners. In order to verify the authenticity of the relevant information, on the one hand, the platform should leave a clear record of the model, data and decision-making results for subsequent judgment whether the algorithm leads to discriminatory or other improper consequences; on the other hand, the platform should explain the algorithm rules to the practitioners and show what kind of changes will occur in the output results if the relevant information is changed, thus proving the operation of the algorithm in turn. This undoubtedly provides the best tool for practitioners trapped in the "algorithm" to question and oppose.

Fundamentally, "the success of the platform stems from the participation of countless subjects, not the ownership of a small number of people", and only practitioners are not excluded from the decision-making of the platform, but participate more deeply and substantively in the governance of the platform, can they ultimately achieve justice. Practitioner participation can take many forms. For example, the law may require online platforms to establish "practitioner committees" responsible for deliberating major matters such as practitioners' identity positioning, platform rules, and rights and interests protection, and in order to avoid the committee's virtualization, relevant proposals that have not been discussed and agreed by the committee must not take effect. For another example, the law may introduce a collective bargaining system to encourage practitioners to form trade unions or other coordinating organizations in a democratic form, and on matters such as the nature of the relationship, work remuneration, working hours, rest and leave, labor safety and health, vocational training, insurance and welfare, etc., the two sides should uphold the principle of good faith and rational consultation, and achieve labor-management harmony within the framework of collective relations.

The reduction of management costs depends on the design of a mechanism for "flexible hierarchical labor protection". Subject to the government's strong regulations, online platforms have to place practitioners that could have been absorbed, and even have to resort to complex contractual arrangements and information technology to achieve their management objectives, which undoubtedly increases costs. Tracing back to the source, on the one hand, because the mainland labor law is based on the principle of "high safety + low flexibility", it is too rigid in the design of rules such as dismissal protection, contract change, working hours, wages, etc., just as Yin Weimin, minister of human resources and social security, said in 2016: the labor contract law has caused the labor market to be insufficiently flexible, and the labor costs of enterprises are higher. On the other hand, because the mainland labor law upholds the guarantee mechanism of "all has and nothing", there is a huge gap between contractual rights and labor security, so that practitioners in the middle state cannot obtain appropriate protection.

Based on this, the mainland labor law should first comply with the trend of global deregulation and improve the flexibility of the labor market, with the concept of "flexicurity" (flexibility and security), improve the conditions for the transformation of fixed-term contracts into open-ended contracts, increase the statutory dismissal grounds and economic layoff rules, reduce the economic compensation rules, and allow enterprises to reasonably change labor contracts. Second, the mainland labor law should enrich the legal level of decreasing guarantee intensity, allowing network platforms and practitioners to choose different social security tools in their respective industries. For example, food delivery workers urgently need to be included in work injury insurance, while programmers who subcontract programming through platforms may not. Finally, mainland labour law should clarify the fundamental right that all practitioners, regardless of status, should enjoy minimum guarantees.

In July 2021, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and eight other departments and the State Administration of Market Supervision successively issued the Guiding Opinions on Safeguarding the Labor Security Rights and Interests of Workers in New Employment Forms and the Guiding Opinions on Implementing the Responsibilities of Online Catering Platforms to Effectively Safeguard the Rights and Interests of Takeaway Delivery Workers, in order to make up for the following shortcomings in the protection of the rights and interests of practitioners: (1) Implement the right to equal employment and anti-discrimination, platforms must not illegally set discriminatory conditions such as gender, ethnicity, age, etc., and must not illegally restrict practitioners from employment on multiple platforms ;(2) to provide fair and good working conditions, the platform should strictly implement the national labor safety and health protection standards, scientifically determine the workload and labor intensity of practitioners, and must not formulate assessment indicators that harm the safety and health of practitioners; (3) to achieve minimum wage protection, the platform should pay labor remuneration not lower than the local minimum wage standard to practitioners who provide normal labor; (4) give practitioners a series of "carrying rights", such as endowment insurance, medical insurance, cumulative leave, and so on. In addition to the above-mentioned traditional guarantees, in the future, we should also combine the technical characteristics of the platform economy to protect the personal information rights and interests of practitioners, and strengthen the algorithm interpretation, choice and manual intervention rights of practitioners for the algorithm control of the platform. In short, with the reduction of management costs, the state has been able to take flexible measures to guide, motivate, and urge online platforms to assume the responsibilities of their employers and treat practitioners in vulnerable positions well.

At the end of The Nature of the Enterprise, Coase quotes Professor Francis Raleigh Batt as saying that the distinction between an employee and a servant is not the existence or absence of a fixed wage or remuneration determined by a special committee of enterprises, but rather the freedom of the employee to be employed. This reminds us that no matter how strong the peremptory of labor law may be, it cannot obscure the inherent autonomy of labor relations. If legislators cannot gain insight into the internal logic of the platform economy, formalistically apply traditional rules or rashly start another stove, it is inevitable that they will not be circumvented, shared, and passed on by the network platform through rule design, and the result will be cured. Because of this, starting from the side of the network platform and returning to economic rationality is not a solution to incentive compatibility, which is exactly the meaning of the "labor-capital cooperation, not labor-capital confrontation" long-term advocacy of the mainland.

This article was originally published in The Culture Journal, No. 1, 2022, pages 87-96, originally titled "Platform is not an employer - a new thinking to resolve the platform labor paradox". Welcome to share personally, media reprint please contact the copyright owner.