The Convention was agreed at the end of a two week conference in Geneva by a vote of 406 member-states in favour, 8 against, and 36 abstentions.
Member-states now have to decide whether to ratify Convention 193 or not within 12-18 months. Once ratified, the convention is binding on the member-state and should be reflected in its national regulations, though how this is done and the extent to which it is done differs from country to country.
To find out more about how Convention 193 came about and what it's consequences are, we spoke to Marini Thorne, a PhD candidate at Columbia University in New York who is an expert in platform work in India. Thorne attended the ILO conference in Geneva as an observer.
Gig Economy Project: Tell us about the dynamics of the ILO conference, because you have this tripartite governing structure made up of workers representatives, employer representatives, and the member-states. How did that play out?
Marini Thorne: You have the workers' side on the one side and the employers' side on the other, and those sides tend to be polar opposites in every debate, and then you have the member-states positioning themselves vis-a-vis these different positions.
Every Article has to be agreed one by one and progress is unbelievably slow. There’s a lot of blocking strategies deployed, especially on the employer side. So for example you could have several amendments put forward which all say practically the same thing, so even if they lose the first amendment there is then basically the same debate about the second amendment.
One of the ways in which the employers' side and some member-states sought to degrade the text was to put in provisions like ‘according to national law and practise’. The idea of inserting words like that is to undermine the ILO’s role, which is an international standard-setting body on labour issues. There are a number of Articles that have been watered-down due to the inclusion of clauses which act as kind of opt-out mechanism for member-states.
It’s important to remember that the way Articles are decided on in the convention is based on consensus, so there is a lot of watering-down of the text to get broad approval among member-states.
Also this conference comes in the context of a number of states, led by the United States, seeking to undermine the credibility of the ILO. The US has refused to pay its financial contributions to the ILO since Trump’s second presidency began. Usually the US has the deputy-director general position in the ILO, but the US representative was not allowed to take office a week before the conference because the US’ contributions are still unpaid.
The US was very supportive of the positions of the employers' side, which were essentially represented by the big digital labour platforms. The US also sought to strike informal alliances with countries, like Switzerland, Argentina, Chile and Indonesia, which were all quite strongly opposed to the worker positions and in favour of the employer positions.
But I don't think that the US had as much influence over the member-states as a whole as it would have liked, or is used to having.
GEP: Before we discuss some of the detail of Convention 193, how do you view the significance of Convention 193 as a whole?
Marini Thorne: The big victory here is that a labour standard on platform work has actually been established. Given that there was almost no protections and very little discussion of platform work, especially in some global south countries, the fact that a convention has actually been agreed is in and of itself a significant win, especially when you keep in mind just how powerful some of these platform companies are.
We should remember that the employers’ side were arguing for a recommendation, not a Convention, at the 2025 ILO conference, so this is something that they didn’t want to happen. They said it wasn’t necessary, it would be difficult to implement in practise, that national circumstances are too variable, and so forth. So the workers side, and some states, had to push hard for a Convention to happen in the first place.
The text itself is not especially strong, there’s quite a lot of areas where it is watered down, especially on worker classification, but also some other areas. But what is good about the text is that it is quite broad, so that it covers a lot of different issues which are relevant to platform workers, like how payment is made and structured, health and safety, online abuse and harm, and so forth.
So I think because of that the labour standard can be a useful tool. It would be naive to think that it will transform the working conditions of platform workers in and of itself, but it can potentially be important for advocacy work at government level. I think in terms of policy outcomes, its real impact will depend a lot on national conditions, in terms of the make-up of governments and the capacity of workers to organise.
GEP: What were some of the key policy dividing lines at the conference?
Marini Thorne: One of the key arguments was over worker classification. The employers were trying to argue that there should be recognition that these workers are self-employed and entrepreneurs. The unions, especially the ones from Europe, were arguing strongly against that, especially linking employment status to worker protections like holiday pay, sick pay and so forth.
Workers from global south countries were pushing for employment protections, but they were also strongly making the case to raise the standards of protection for all workers, whether they are self-employed or not. For example, a minimum wage for self-employed workers.
In countries with large informal economies, those sort of protections are very important because it’s very hard to get employment classification, so in that context it’s really important to strengthen the baseline of worker protections.
The final adopted article, Article 9, states that there should be a correct employment classification and that it should be based on the facts of the working relationship. I think the original draft text for the conference was stronger on worker classification, so that outcome was a bit disappointing. A majority of countries were in favour of the stronger text on worker classification but because there was no consensus on that text, there was a behind closed doors negotiation led by Mexico to redraft it in order to get consensus, and that’s when the text got weakened.
Another loss for the worker side was there was no inclusion of text on being paid for waiting time: the time when you are at work but not completing tasks. That was removed from the final text.
Gig Economy Project: What were some of the wins for the worker side?
Marini Thorne: On health and safety protections, there was an argument over whether that should be based on employment classification or for all platform workers, so the fact that in the final text it is not confined to employees is I think an important win.
There is text about platforms having to pay for the costs of work, equipment and so forth, that's important.
The articles relating to algorithmic management, the right to a human review of automated decisions for instance, are quite strong.
Article 20 establishes links between migrant workers and platform work, including the need to prevent abuses during the hiring process, which is important. Also, in Article 24 there’s a reference to intermediaries, and it states that member states have to ensure appropriate responsibility, and I think that goes with the question of migration and recruitment. These third-party recruiters are very important in some parts of the platform economy, and we know that platforms disavow responsibility in the context of intermediaries.
As I mentioned before, I think the breadth of issues which are covered is important because it draws attention to issues that some times get overlooked and in some states, especially in the global south, this Convention may be used as a template for developing laws on platform work.
Ultimately, it will come down to the mobilising capacity of platform workers to turn what is in this Convention into tangible regulatory changes at national level.
Gig Economy Project: How were the positions formed on the worker side? What input was there from grassroots movements?
Marini Thorne: Last year, there was an activist alternative summit outside the ILO conference. This year, they held an event in Nairobi in May to bring together platform workers from lots of different countries. So that has brought together various unions, NGOs and grassroots worker groups.
The form of representation for workers in the ILO has classically been formally employed workers in densely organised sectors, and obviously that is not currently the situation in the platform economy, so there was a sort of bridge-building initiative to ensure that the formal representatives of the workers, primarily represented by the ITUC, were aware of and engaged with the concerns of platform workers.
The event in Nairobi was important I think in building connections and allowing workers to shape the process to some extent. It also helped to offset some of the tensions between unions in the global north, where employment classification is a really central issue, and to countries where there is a really large informal sector and protections for self-employed workers are just as important as protections for employees.
Article 8 is one example of the influence of grassroots activists on the standard-setting process. It is about the formalisation of work, including the registration of self-employed workers. This is important in the global south context because, one the one hand, it states that workers should be hired formally, which is not always the case, and secondly because the reference to self-employed workers is useful because it is about facilitating them to access social security. It was clear that the intervention from smaller union groups including WIEGO, which represents domestic workers in the informal economy, did shift the needle in terms of the text that the workers representatives were arguing for.
There was a daily meeting amongst the workers group which was attended by all the national union representatives but also many platform workers who were sponsored by NGOs to attend the conference. At these meetings, some of the platform workers would say ‘this is a particularly important Article for us and this is what we think it needs to include’ and the workers group was receptive to that sort of input.
I think the coordination and collaboration achieved between different types of worker groups is one of the big achievements of this process. That creates a strong basis for more international collaboration and campaigns, which might take advantage of the fact that these are internationally located companies with strong parallels in their model across countries. There could be exciting opportunities that might arise from the connections established here.
