Experts: Better relationship needed between online platforms and service providers

A take-away rider delivers food in Dalian, Northeast China's Liaoning province, on Feb 3, 2018. [Photo/IC]

China should establish a virtuous relationship between economic online platforms and service providers using them, as the number of latter has reached 70 million and is expected to grow to more than 100 million in 2025, experts told the Beijing News on Monday.

Sharing economy, peer-to-peer-based activities of getting, providing or sharing access to goods and services through online platforms has gained momentum recently thanks to the popularity of smartphones, especially with the rise of applications such as Didi Chuxing on ride-hailing and Ele.me on food delivery.

According to a report released by State Information Center in February, the transaction volume on sharing economy totaled 4.92 trillion yuan ($735.69 billion) last year, up 47.2 percent from a year earlier. Among the figure, non-financial sharing accounted for 42.6 percent, with 2.09 trillion yuan of deals, increasing 66.8 percent year-on-year.

Xue Donghui, a manager for flexible staffing with HR services provider Career International, told the newspaper that though new hiring is needed in technological research and development on these new platforms, many new jobs have been created for ride-hailing drivers, take-away riders and deliverers .

As the SIC data showed, compared with 7.16 million employees working for the companies of sharing economy in 2017, the number of services providers working via internet platforms was 10 times as many as that of the former. Given the huge scale of services providers, majority of which work part-time with flexible timing, experts called for division to manage the group.

The Beijing News cited Xu Ke, executive director of digital economy and law innovation research center for University of International Business and Economics, as saying the relationship between services providers and platforms should be divided based on different physical dependence and economic dependence.

As for those with low dependence, part-time staff members, for instance, platforms could insure them against injury at work to protect their rights and interests, and also to decrease legal and moral risks for platforms, on the other hand, Fan Wei, deputy dean of labor relation department at Capital University of Economics and Business, said to the newspaper.

Nowadays, platforms usually resort to two ways to solve the problem, said the newspaper. One is outsourcing the labor to local companies, which sign agreements with workers. And platforms often do not pay social insurance for these workers, or just buy a commercial insurance for them; the other one is cooperative relation, the platforms claim that it only offers a channel for people to provide services.

Meanwhile, some experts do not think the platforms of sharing economy do not want to build a labor relation with services providers on their platforms, but they indeed face some difficulties, including their growing stage, uncertainty on related laws, regulations and policies, the Beijing News reported.