The argument over gig worker pay is not really about apps, algorithms, or bicycles. It is about whether a society that spent more than a century building labor standards will permit those standards to dissolve whenever work is routed through a digital platform. On that question, the better answer is yes, ILO Convention 193 should be applied to regulate remuneration for gig economy workers, but applied as law has usually been applied in periods of industrial change, with interpretation, adaptation, and institutional patience rather than doctrinal panic.
The stakes are concrete. Gig workers perform labor through digital platforms and temporary arrangements. They deliver food, drive passengers, complete tasks, and absorb many of the costs of production, fuel, phones, maintenance, downtime, risk. Their compensation structures are often opaque, unilaterally revised, and governed by terms no individual worker meaningfully negotiates. The issue is whether an international labor standard addressing employment relationships can be used to discipline those remuneration systems, so that platform work does not become a loophole through which wage protections disappear.
The strongest objection deserves serious treatment. Opponents argue that Convention 193 was built for traditional employment relationships, not for intermittent, task based, app mediated work. They warn that forcing an industrial era framework onto a novel market could reduce flexibility, raise compliance costs, chill innovation, and produce bad law because the legal fit is imperfect. This is not a frivolous concern. History is full of statutes and treaties applied too mechanically to new conditions, producing evasion, confusion, and black markets. One should concede the narrow point that gig work is not identical to factory work, salaried office work, or even conventional part time work. A driver who logs in for two hours on Saturday does not stand in exactly the same position as a full time employee on a payroll.
But the leap from that modest truth to the conclusion that Convention 193 should not be applied is unwarranted. Legal systems do not survive by refusing to classify new realities until a perfectly bespoke instrument appears. They survive by analogy, presumptions, rebuttable tests, and gradual extension of existing principles. The common law did not wait for a separate jurisprudence of railroads before regulating carriers. Industrial regulation did not begin only once every machine had a category tailored to it. New commercial forms have always claimed to be unprecedented; most turn out to be recognizably old arrangements with modern wrappers. Piecework is old. Casual labor is old. Labor intermediaries are old. Home based work is old. Workers being paid through formulas they do not control is very old.
That is why the phrase employment relationships matters so much. It should not be read as a museum label attached only to the 20th century payroll office. It should be read as a legal inquiry into economic dependence, control, allocation of risk, and who sets the terms of remuneration. Platform companies often insist they merely connect buyers and sellers. Yet many also set prices or pricing bands, rank workers, discipline them by ratings or deactivation, determine visibility, mediate customer contact, and structure the entire market in which the worker supposedly operates independently. When one side writes the code, the contract, the compensation formula, and the conditions of access, the historical instinct of labor law is to ask whether form is disguising substance.
The case for applying Convention 193 is therefore not that every gig worker is an employee in the classic sense, nor that every platform must adopt a standard wage grid. That would indeed be a square peg approach. The case is that Convention 193 supplies a legitimate framework for scrutinizing remuneration where platforms organize labor in ways functionally similar to employment, and for preventing compensation systems built on strategic ambiguity. In practice, that means using the Convention to clarify when an employment relationship exists, when remuneration must meet baseline fairness standards, and when the burden should fall on the platform to justify classifications that leave workers outside ordinary protections.
This is the historical middle path, and it is usually the durable one. The labor movement won lasting gains not by pretending every occupation was identical, but by insisting that variation in working arrangements did not cancel the underlying need for minimum standards. The Fair Labor Standards Act in the United States, social insurance systems in Europe, and later protections for temporary and contracted labor all emerged from the same insight. Markets produce flexibility; they also produce incentives to shift cost and risk downward. Institutions intervene not because all asymmetry is intolerable, but because some asymmetry becomes structurally exploitative.
Critics often invoke worker autonomy. Some gig workers do value flexible hours, multiple income streams, and low barriers to entry. That preference is real and should not be sneered at. Yet autonomy in labor law has always been a term vulnerable to abuse. The 19th century law of master and servant was full of formal consent. So were many company town contracts. So were early industrial piece rates. The mere fact that a worker can choose when to click on an app does not answer whether the remuneration they receive is fair, legible, or lawfully structured. Exit is not a sufficient substitute for standards when all major platforms converge on similar terms and workers bear the practical burden of information and risk.
Nor is the innovation argument dispositive. Innovation is not a constitutional exemption from labor norms. Railroads were innovative. So were factories, temp agencies, and logistics networks. In each case, the enduring question was whether new efficiencies would be purchased by reviving old forms of dependency under new names. When regulation has failed, it was often because states lagged too long, allowing entire business models to entrench around legal arbitrage. The race to classify labor as something just outside the scope of protection is itself a historical pattern, and not an admirable one.
The wiser objection is not that Convention 193 should never apply, but that application must be careful. On that point, caution is a virtue. The Convention should be used to regulate remuneration through functional tests, sector specific guidance, and due regard for genuinely occasional or independent work. It should not erase all distinctions among gig workers. A software consultant finding clients online is not situated exactly like a courier managed minute by minute by an app. But such line drawing is an argument for administration, not abdication.
What matters most is preserving continuity in labor law. If international labor conventions cannot reach platform mediated labor where the indicators of control and dependence are evident, then labor standards become relics, triggered only when business models choose old terminology. That would invert the purpose of the law. Convention 193 exists to address employment relationships, and employment relationships have always evolved faster than legal labels.
The lesson of history is not that old rules always fit neatly. It is that durable societies refuse to let novel forms of management nullify settled principles of fair pay. Apply Convention 193 to gig economy remuneration, carefully, concretely, and without romance. The novelty here is technological. The need for protection is not.