Gig Economy in Europe: Examples from Sweden, Netherlands and Germany

(Virtual Meeting)

Join the Washington, D.C. chapter of the Labor and Employment Relations Association (DC LERA) for a virtual conversation about the gig economy in the European Union with Annamaria Westregård of Lund University (Sweden), Mijke Houwerzijl of Tilburg University (Netherlands), and Roman Kormann of the German Trade Union Confederation. This conversation will be moderated by Petra Hansson of the Swedish Embassy to the United States and was organized with the assistance of Daniel Haufler of the German Embassy to the United States and Benoit Sevcik of the French Embassy to the United States.

Topics to be discussed include working conditions in the gig economy in Europe; policy proposals put forward by the European Commission; protection of gig workers under Swedish, Dutch, and German labor law; and employee participation in algorithmic systems in the context of work.

Moderator

Petra Hansson is a Counselor with the Swedish Embassy to the United States in Washington, DC. Petra Hansson has been attached to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Sweden since 1998. Previous postings include the Swedish Embassy in Paris (2014-2019) and the Swedish Embassy in Bogotá, Colombia (2002-2005). Petra Hansson studied at Science Po Aix and graduated from Uppsala University, Sweden.

Annamaria Westregård is an Associate Professor at the Department of Business Law, School of Economics and Management, at Lund University, Sweden. Annamaria Westregård is conducting research on crowdworkers in the gig economy, and how Sweden’s social parties and the traditional system of collective bargaining is impacted by the new digital economy. Dr. Westregård has previously carried out research on topics such as Personal Privacy and the Workplace, Drug testing and Rehabilitation, self-employment, rehabilitation and employment protection. Westregård is a senior lecturer in Labour Law and serves as Director of third cycle studies at the faculty. She has published widely on labor law in both Swedish and English. In recent years, she has written and published papers, articles, and book chapters on collective bargaining for self-employed workers in Sweden, umbrella companies as employers in Sweden, and social and labor protection for workers outside the employment relationship.

Mijke Houwerzijl is a Full Professor of Labour Law at Tilburg University (since 2011). She is co-editor of a leading Dutch labour law journal (Tijdschrift Recht en Arbeid; since 2006), external board member of the Institute for Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the EU (IAAEU in Trier; since 2018) and she chairs the Dutch Department of the International Society for Labour and Social Security Law (ISLSSL; since 2010). Until recently, she also was an endowed Professor of European and comparative labour law at the University of Groningen (2010 – 2020). Dr. Houwerzijl has published widely on Dutch and European labour law and social security law, with an emphasis on legal aspects of transnational labour mobility within the EU. She has been involved in many international and national (academic and commissioned) research projects, most recently on cross-border subcontracting, working poor, economically dependent workers and platform work. Recently, she finished a Dutch book project about the impact of platformization and algorithmization on the protection of workers, funded by the Dutch foundation Instituut Gak.

Roman Kormann graduated in social sciences and has been working for the National Executive Board of the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) since 2015. He is an officer in the ‘Digital Worlds of Work and Workplace Reporting’ department, where he is responsible, among other things, for the topics of labor research and transfer. In the DGB project “Work of the Future,” Roman examines current developments in the world of work from a trade union perspective. The focus in this context is on the topics of the platform economy and artificial intelligence. He is also looking at the question of how solidarity and workforce participation can be achieved in the world of work 4.0. Roman Kormann has two children and lives in Berlin.

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