Abstract:
In the era of digital economy, the lack of systematic governance mechanism for platform-mediated work leaves the existing legal regulatory system unable to effectively address the power expansion of platform enterprises over labor organization, economic dominance, governance decision-making and the like through algorithmic technologies. This has resulted in platform workers facing practical dilemmas such as algorithmic control, high occupational risks and difficulties in rights remediation, etc. Meanwhile, the integrated rights allocation model in current labor law, which centers on the identification of labor relations and follows the “all-or-nothing” rule of labor rights entitlement, fails to adapt to the autonomous characteristics of work arrangements for platform workers, leading this group into a vacuum of labor-rights protection due to difficulties in identifying labor relations. Therefore, it is urgent to break the rigid binding relationship between labor rights and labor relations, and deconstruct composite labor rights into relatively independent rights elements via applying the bundle-of-rights theory. Through the reorganization and hierarchical allocation of rights bundles, a rights protection system that conforms to the features of the platform economy and the safeguard needs of platform workers should be established, based on which a targeted regulatory mechanism for platform power can be constructed. This governance approach takes rights protection as its fundamental perspective and “restricting power to protect rights” as its core methodology. By clarifying rights content and regulating power exercise through legislative measures, it ultimately advances the standardization and legalization of platform-mediated work governance.