Corporate Governance for Platform Workers

Abstract

Regardless of their status under employment law, we believe that corporate law holds untapped potential in reshaping the rights and working conditions of platform workers. While the law of corporate governance remains aligned with shareholder interests, the collapse of the law-and-economics underpinnings of shareholder primacy should prompt us to develop new approaches to corporate governance. In this Essay, we briefly set out three alternative models for determining whether stakeholders should participate in corporate governance: a democratic participation model, a theory of the firm model, and an information theory model. All are fully consistent with the precepts of standard economics that dominate corporate law theory, and they counsel in favor of extending governance rights to platform workers regardless of how they’re classified under labor and employment law. This reimagined corporate governance could provide avenues for platform workers to influence the firm policies that directly affect them as well as give them a degree of control over their working lives.