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GDPoweR – Recovering workers' data to negotiate and monitor collective agreements in the platform economy. Comparative report

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Rodríguez Fernández, María Luz ; Geyer, Leonard

European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research - Vienna

2025

80 p.

digital economy ; crowd work ; self employed ; delivery ; workers rights ; trade union ; collective agreement

Austria ; Belgium ; France ; Poland ; Spain

Employment

English

Bibliogr.

"The GDPoweR project – Recovering workers' data to negotiate and monitor collective agreements in the platform economy – ran from October 2023 to September 2025. Focusing on food-delivery and ride-hailing, it examined how digital labour platforms collect worker data, how these practices affect workers, and how collective agreements on pay, conditions and data use are negotiated and implemented in Austria, Belgium, France, Poland and Spain. This report compares the five countries' platform ecosystems—active companies, workforce size and status, and legal and institutional settings—alongside their industrial-relations systems and existing collective agreements. It then analyses what personal data platforms collect (using workers' GDPR requests), workers' awareness of and responses to that collection, and the implementation of collective agreements based on recovered data and focus groups. The report finds collective agreements covering platform workers in ride-hailing and food-delivery in Austria, France and Spain, including some innovative agreements which can serve as blueprints for social partners in other countries. However, most agreements do not regulate the use of worker data by platforms and their effectiveness in improving workers incomes' remains limited. Methodologically, the report shows how workers GDPR data can be used to monitor the implementation of some aspects of collective bargaining agreements. Regarding platforms' processing of worker data, variation across countries and companies is limited, but significant with some platforms storing significantly more location data on their workers. Workers in all countries experience challenges exercising their GDPR rights, and their awareness of and experiences with the processing of their data is largely similar. Most have some understanding of what data is collected but lack specifics. Key decision-making process are seen as opaque leading to speculation about which factors matter. Workers' views on companies' use of their personal data include negative (feeling monitored, subject to unjust and opaque decision-making), indifferent (part of the job, modern life) and positive (use data for tax declarations, in conflicts/litigation against companies) experiences. Overall, workers' views on platforms' usage of their data are nuanced with most accepting companies collect the data is necessary for them to operate, but not more."

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0
International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license

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