Research On The Legal Relationship Between The Offline Workers And Online Platform

The judicial practice is inconclusive about the legal relationship between the offline workers who provide service via Internet and the online platform,whether it shall be recognized as labor relationship,employment relationship,service relationship,contractor relationship or intermediary service relationship.As a typical representative of this kind of dispute,in defining the legal relationship between “e-drive” and drivers,the court didn't recognize it as labor relationship based on the traditional three factors in defining labor relationship in the labor cases.In the case of traffic accident liability,some courts defined it as employment relationship and some courts held the opposite opinion.In my opinion,this specific relationship can't be accurately regulated under existing Chinese law.The California Court preliminary concluded that Uber was the employer while its drivers were employees,but the Borello test system is not applicable all over the United States,the court recognized that the conventional criteria was unable to adapt to the employment under sharing economy.In this regard,American scholars advocate to add “dependent contractor” into employment relations and independent contracting relations to fit the new employment mode and provide the offline workers with necessary security such as social insurance,wages and working hours,tax preferences etc.As we do not take the “two-fold” way to regulate employment like the United States and there is no independent contractor under Chinese law,it is difficult for us to directly use this “dependent contractor” way to deal with the new employment model in sharing economy.But we can learn from the idea,in the existing system,we shall define the legal relationship between the offline workers and the online platforms as intermediary contract relationship,and apply special regulations to specific groups in need of special restriction or protection.