Takenori Mishiba; Kotaro Kurashige; Syoko Nakazawa
Journal of Work Health and Safety Regulation(The Japan Association of Occupational Health Law) The Japan Association of Occupational Health Law 1 (1) 54 - 91 2023/01
[Refereed] There are almost no direct restrictions on health and safety in the gig economy or its users; if serious cases of law evasion occur, however, courts will, based on the intent of applicable laws, attempt to offer remedies for workers with flexible judicial discretion with regard to the employer’s duty of care, and this initial step may lead to the formulation of concrete laws in the future. In the future, essential duties to be imposed on platforms after new legislation is formulated are risk investigation, provision of investigation results to gig workers, and sincere response to collective bargaining, while measures to be taken by the Government include investigations of general risks associated with gig work and of ideal countermeasures and the provision of relevant information. In addition, a scheme is necessary to make it possible that in cases where cooperatives that are protected under the Small and Medium-Sized Enterprise Cooperatives Act assign industrial physicians to conduct interviews with cooperative members, when the physicians deem it necessary to do so, cooperatives can approach clients, etc. (including platforms) to improve the working conditions of the members in question. Furthermore, as experts in occupational health or other fields have pointed out a number of gig work-related risks, their findings need to be utilized in formulating new legislation, flexibly applying the employers’ duty of care, and conducting mandatory negotiations between platforms and gig workers.