Legal Status of Platform Workers in Russia : Right on Unemployment and Social Assistance

Russian national legislation is on the stage of adaptation with new challenges “gig-economy” brings. Determination of legal status of crowd-workers remains to be an open discussion (Shevchuk & Strebkov, 2017; Chesalina, 2018). Even though legislators tried to define and regulate these completely new relations via introducing the term “distance work”, the majority of platform-workers do not fall under the scope of Labour Code regulations. In order to be considered as a “distance worker,” a person should have official employment relations with employer- significant contract of employment. The positive part is that distance workers enjoy the same rights as standardly employed persons, and they are fully covered by Social Security Schemes. That category of workers may claim as for contributory as for noncontributory schemes as well. However, nowadays more and more companies develop their own internal platforms and employ distance workers. According to relevant data, in 2020 every 5th employee will be counted as a distance worker. Thus, most of the crowd-workers are not officially employed by the platforms and perform their activities or as individual entrepreneurs or as false self-employed. As it was described in the paper, individual entrepreneurs are less protected in comparison with distance workers. However, they still can upgrade social security protection by subscribing to voluntary schemes- such as maternity and sickness leave