I think that's part of the business model of these platforms, is to work within legal

ways, to find loopholes, they pay expensive corporate lawyers to do that work.

So you don't just need to pass legislation.

You need to have states which are dedicated to fighting to make it happen. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Ben Ray. Ben is the coordinator of the gig economy project

and the author of Scotland after Britain, the two souls of Scottish independence. He also has a

fantastic newsletter with weekly updates on what's going on with the gig economy in Europe that

is associated with the gig economy project. Ben was last on the

show last year to talk about the developments with the Platform Work Directive, which was this

piece of European Union legislation that was going to move forward the rights of platform

workers in that block of countries. On February 16th, the European Council, which represents the member

states, voted against the Platform Work Directive after many years of work on it. So I wanted to have

Ben back on to talk about what actually happened here, why this piece of legislation did not move

forward, and what it means for the future of rights of platform and gig workers

in the European Union after this long process seems to have come to this unfortunate end.

So the first part of this interview really digs into that piece of this, right? Getting into the

specifics of what this legislation was, how it would actually work, and why various governments

chose to oppose it. Of course, we see no surprise that France under Emmanuel Macron is a big

opponent of platform worker rights. And of course, you'll remember that from the recent interview

that I did with Nastasia Hajaji, where we dug into his plans to make France a startup

nation and how that meant not only transforming the state, but also empowering these particular

tech companies, and how the shift to the right within the European Union presents even further

...