The case for regulating gig economy pay is real. So is the danger of doing it badly.
That is the true dispute beneath the resolution that ILO Convention 193 should be applied to regulate remuneration standards for gig economy workers. No serious observer can deny the underlying problem. Digital platforms mediate work for drivers, delivery couriers, task workers, and other contingent laborers whose compensation is often opaque, unilateral, and volatile. Rates change without negotiation. Incentives come and go. Algorithmic management obscures how pay is set. In many jurisdictions, the result is a labor market that delivers flexibility to consumers and firms while shifting risk downward to workers and, eventually, to the public purse.
The strongest proponents of applying Convention 193 put the matter plainly. They argue that the International Labour Organization already has an instrument aimed at private employment agencies and worker protections, and that gig platforms are the modern functional equivalent of labor intermediaries. Why reinvent the wheel, they ask, when an existing international labor standard can be adapted to establish fair remuneration, prevent a race to the bottom, and stop platforms from exploiting classification ambiguity? On this view, refusing to use an available framework is just a sophisticated way of tolerating underpayment.
That argument deserves respect because history does not favor laissez-faire romanticism in labor markets. New forms of work repeatedly arrive wrapped in the rhetoric of innovation, flexibility, and individual choice. Then, after enough abuse, law catches up. Industrial homework, casual dock labor, labor brokers, temporary agency work, and dependent contracting all generated the same initial refrain, this arrangement is different, so old protections do not apply. Usually, the refrain was less an analytical insight than a business model.
But the fact that worker protection is necessary does not mean every inherited legal instrument is fit for every new labor form. Institutions endure for reasons, and legal categories matter for reasons too. Convention 193 is not a blank check for all intermediary work. It addresses private employment agencies and the employment relationship. The question is not whether gig workers deserve remuneration standards. They do. The question is whether applying this specific convention to gig work is the soundest path to get there.
Here the case for the resolution weakens. Its core move is analogical: platforms resemble private employment agencies because they connect workers to clients, shape access to jobs, and influence terms of work. That analogy is not frivolous. In some sectors and on some platforms, it is quite strong. Yet law is full of cautionary tales about overstretched analogy. A rule designed for one institutional form can misfire when the underlying structure differs in legally important ways.
A traditional private employment agency typically recruits, places, and supplies labor into a recognizable triangular relationship. A digital platform may do some of that, but it may also function as market-maker, dispatcher, reputation ledger, payments processor, and price-setter all at once. Some platforms exercise near-employer control; others are closer to bulletin boards with software. Some gig workers rely on one app full-time; others multi-home across several platforms for supplemental income. A convention built around agency work can illuminate part of this terrain, but it does not automatically map onto all of it.
That distinction matters because remuneration standards do not float free of status. Pay rules are bound up with who sets terms, who bears business risk, who can discipline whom, and whether the worker is in fact an employee, an agency worker, an independent contractor, or something in between. If states apply Convention 193 to gig remuneration without first clarifying the employment relationship, they risk constructing a regulatory facade: some standards for pay, perhaps, but no coherent settlement of the broader rights and obligations that make labor law work.
That was the strongest criticism raised in the debate, and it should not be brushed aside as formalism. Piecemeal solutions can entrench the very ambiguity they mean to restrain. A platform might comply with a remuneration formula while continuing to deny collective rights, social insurance contributions, due process in deactivation, or responsibility for work-related costs. In that scenario, Convention 193 would not so much solve misclassification as stabilize it.
Supporters respond that this is precisely why an ILO framework is useful. It can force member states to confront ambiguity, create a baseline, and begin the process of adaptation through familiar institutions rather than leaving workers exposed during years of legislative drift. There is wisdom in that institutional instinct. International labor standards often work less as self-executing commands than as organizing principles, nudging national law toward convergence.
Still, one must separate using Convention 193 as interpretive guidance from applying it as the governing instrument for gig remuneration. The first is prudent; the second is overconfident. Good governance depends on legal fit. When a convention aimed at private employment agencies is made to carry the full weight of platform labor regulation, three risks follow.
First, legal ambiguity increases. Member states will differ sharply on whether a platform is an employment agency, an employer, or neither. That divergence invites litigation, uneven enforcement, and forum shopping.
Second, partial compliance becomes attractive. Platforms can accept narrow pay obligations while resisting the more difficult questions of status, bargaining power, and social protection.
Third, institutional credibility suffers. International labor law is strongest when its categories are intelligible and its application is disciplined. Stretching a convention beyond its clearest scope may win a tactical headline and lose strategic clarity.
None of this implies passivity. On the contrary, the historical lesson is to regulate with precision before evasion hardens into precedent. Governments should develop targeted remuneration standards for gig workers, including transparency in rate-setting, minimum earnings methodologies tied to waiting time and work-related expenses, limits on unilateral pay changes, and enforceable dispute procedures. They should also clarify when a platform is acting as an employer, when it is acting as a labor intermediary, and when a genuinely independent contractor model exists. Convention 193 can inform that effort, especially where a platform resembles an agency in substance. But informing is not the same as being the proper vessel for the whole project.
The temptation in every new labor controversy is to choose between nostalgia and improvisation, to force the future into an old box or abandon law altogether. The better tradition is constitutional and incremental: define the relationship, identify the power, attach the duty. Labor law has survived technological upheaval not by pretending all work is the same, but by recognizing recurring forms of dependency beneath changing machinery.
The gig economy is not beyond regulation, and remuneration standards are urgently needed. But urgency is not a license for category error. The wiser course is to borrow the protective principles behind ILO Convention 193, not to declare that convention itself the answer to a problem it only partly fits. History is full of expensive efforts to regulate the right abuse with the wrong instrument. We should not fund another one.