The EU Platform Work Directive, provisionally agreed in 2024, creates new employment presumptions for gig workers that EU candidate countries will need to transpose.
The European Parliament and the Council of the European Union reached a provisional agreement on the Platform Work Directive in March 2024, after more than three years of legislative negotiations. The Directive — expected to be formally adopted and enter into force in 2025 — creates a legal presumption of employment for platform workers when the platform exercises a minimum degree of control over how they perform their work. It establishes five criteria for the presumption; if a platform meets two or more, workers are presumed to be employees and the platform must rebut the presumption to classify them as independent contractors.
The implications for Georgia — where food delivery, ride-hailing, and gig logistics platforms have grown substantially since 2020 — are direct and significant. Georgia’s Labour Code does not currently address platform work as a distinct category. Workers providing services through platforms are classified either as employees (if they have a formal contract) or as independent contractors (if they do not). In practice, the overwhelming majority of platform workers in Georgia — delivery riders, drivers, domestic service providers — are treated as independent contractors, without the employment protections that formal employee status would entail: minimum wage, social insurance contributions, occupational safety protections, and access to dispute resolution mechanisms.
This classification approach is not unique to Georgia — it was the standard in most European countries until the combination of regulatory action and court decisions began to shift the landscape. The EU Platform Work Directive represents the definitive regulatory answer: platforms are employers when they exercise sufficient control over working conditions, and that presumption can be rebutted only by demonstrating that the working arrangement genuinely constitutes independent entrepreneurship.
For Georgia’s EU accession process, the Directive represents a concrete legislative alignment requirement that will appear in the social and employment chapter of accession screening. The timeframe for transposition is demanding: member states will have two years from the Directive’s entry into force to incorporate it into national law. For a candidate country, the alignment expectation will apply during the screening process — which for Georgia could begin as early as 2026 for some chapters.
GILS Note: The platform economy employs an estimated 35,000–50,000 workers in Georgia based on available data from major platforms. These workers are among the most informally employed in the country, with the lowest access to social protection and the highest occupational risk exposure (particularly for delivery riders). The EU Directive provides a direct template for Georgian legislative reform. GILS will publish a detailed assessment of the Directive’s implications for Georgian platform workers in Q1 2027.
Read the full GILS analysis: https://labour.edu.ge/social-dialogue/