Legal Vacuum in Kazakhstan’s Platform Employment

Abstract

Recently, Internet platforms have been increasingly active in Kazakhstan, providing services, passenger transportation and food delivery. With this in mind, in 2023 the Social Code of the Republic of Kazakhstan was adopted. The Social Code regulates platform employment and makes partial additions to the Labor Code of the Republic of Kazakhstan on this issue. These additions need to reveal the true essence of platform employment due to the need for more elaboration on certain problems and on the lack of consideration of many European countries’ international practices and court decisions. Modern approaches to the regulation of platform employment have been revealed in European, Russian and Kazakh scientists’ works. The analysis of the works of these scientists allowed the authors of this paper to draw several conceptual conclusions, such as the objective need to classify the self-employed into “independent self-employed” and “dependent self-employed”, depending on which norms of civil and labor legislation can be applied. With this classification, particular importance should be given to the principle of authority — subordination in the relationship of the platform with its performers (or employees) in order to identify signs of a classic labor relationship. According to the authors’ opinion, in the conditions of a legal vacuum, it is proposed to reflect the most optimal ways of regulating such employment in the future law of the Republic of Kazakhstan “On Platform Employment”. The authors’ main idea is that when regulating platform employment, a rebuttable presumption of labor relations should be introduced and the burden of proving the absence of labor relations should be imposed on the platform.