Uber must employ its drivers, Dutch court rules

That's why different countries have various guidelines, e.g. if you economically depend on 1 contrahent (you fill in one invoice a month to the same one company), you are not self-employed, if you can't organize your own work however you like you are not self-employed, and so on.

So in general if you are driving for one company and 75% revenue comes from them, you are really not a freelancer.

This was and to a degree still is a big problem in e.g. Poland, where if you are unskilled you can be compelled to accept so called "trash contracts" which deny you any employee rights, but you are cheaper to the employer who exploits you.

It might be foreign to Americans who in general have extremely poor worker protection laws (even worse than the trash contracts I mentioned), but in many other countries it doesn't really work like that.

Most people wouldn’t think that a person earning a high hourly/daily rate working in some big enterprise, or a freelancer that takes home a respectable annual income is being exploited. But lots of people think that lower income gig contractors are definitely being exploited. I think the truth is actually a bit more complicated than that, but in any case, the law in most countries is that a person must not be allowed to enter into any arrangement that resembles employment if a set of minimum entitlements aren’t provided.

One way of looking at contracting arrangements is that they’re simply a way of bypassing these requirements. This never used to be a contentious issue, because contractors used to be primarily high income earners. But now that there’s a new class of lower income contractors, they must be protected, and the regulatory response has generally been to outlaw elements of contracting agreements in general.

A more sensible approach, if you wanted to achieve this outcome, would be to apply these regulations only to contractors that bill below a particular rate. But that would require making legislative concessions for high income earners, and nobody cares about doing that. I’ve been a contractor for years, and I can guarantee you that nobody is being exploited when I bill some huge bank an especially high hourly rate for months on end, but anti-contractor regulations routinely interfere with my ability to do so.

There is a limit on how much can and can't be done within the EU, it's not a gravy train buffet. There is peer pressure and potential, let's call it cascading effect. Some lawmaker will hear about this and try to get it passed in another country as well. I struggle to think of one state which would simply accept Uber as some great Enterprise idea, look at the history here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_ridesharing_comp... Most places banned and this bit. In December 2017, the European Court of Justice ruled that Uber is a transport company, subject to local transport regulation in European Union member states, rather than an information society service as Uber had argued.[99]

So at best, tolerated for the time being.

In Europe, working without full compensation is typically called illicit work(instead of side gig), not extremely frowned upon, but the main job has to have proper compensation. It very normal and expected to get 4 weeks paid holidays or more, sick days covered, insurance in most places, pension contributions etc. Uber tells you to get a car, petrol, pay insurance and take jobs when available, and get none of the above, who are they kidding.