Study: About two-thirds of Romanians use digital platforms to supplement their income

Almost two-thirds (62.5%) of workers who use digital work platforms in Romania engage in this type of activity on a regular basis, and over 43% devote more than 20 hours per week to it, according to data from a specialized survey processed by Monitorul Social, a project of Friedrich Ebert Romania.   According to the research, work through digital platforms (Uber, Glovo, Bolt or Wolf) has become, for many workers in Romania a current activity to get income.Almost two thirds (62.5%) of the workers who use the digital platforms regularly – their number is high as compared to those who do this activity occasionally or rarely : Poland (66.2%), the Netherlands (65.1%), France (64.1%) and Spain (62%). On the other hand, easily lower percentages are recorded in Finland (55.8%) and Denmark (52.1%).In Romania, 62.5% of workers who use digital work platforms in Romania engage in this type of activity on a regular basis, and 43.7% devote more than 20 hours per week to it.   As regards the distribution of workers by gender, it is noted that in all anaylsed countries the share of men is higher. Thus, in Romania, out of the total of workers on digital platforms, 55.9% are men and 44.1% are women. The largest gender gaps are found in the Nordic countries, where the percentage of men working on platforms is much higher than that of women: in Finland, 66.7% men vs. 33.3% women; in the Netherlands, 65.4% men vs. 34.6% women. In contrast, the smallest gender gap is observed in Poland, where men account for 51.9% and women for 48.1% of workers on digital platforms.   'Romania does not yet have a legislative framework regulating the occupational status of platform workers. For this reason, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Romania lagged behind certain European countries in terms of the number of people working on digital platforms,' note the researchers.   According to the quoted data, besides the activities performed through digitial platforms, 67.8% of the workers in Romania were employees, and 13.5% stated they were self-employed.A similar situation is recorded in Spain, where 67.3% were employed against 9.7% self-employed, in Poland – 69.7% employed against 9.8% self-employed, and Slovenia – 61.6% vs. 10.3%.Regardless of their declared occupational status, platform workers operate under highly individualized arrangements, with limited opportunities for collective bargaining and unionization, in a legislative vacuum that leaves room for abuse and exploitation of Romanian workers. Romania needs to address the gaps in current labor legislation regarding the occupational status of platform workers and apply provisions to improve working conditions and social protection, in line with the new European Directive approved in 2024," experts say.   The EIGE study, conducted in 2021, is based on a survey that collected data from nearly 5,000 platform workers in ten European Union countries: Denmark, Finland, France, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain.