New paths of protection in the digital labyrinth

The deployment of digitization has stimulated new employment practices which lead to reflection on the role that labor law must play in the process of digital transformation of industry and the economy. The new working modules develop from collaboration, to sharing, to chance until a new cooperation.
The interference of ICTs has destabilized the system, weakening the foundations on which work relationships relate, causing the disruption of the typical coordinates of the time space of the performance and the abandonment of the concept of physical proximity to marry the proximity functional. In this context, times of life and work merge and mingle, hierarchies blur, economic safeguards for workers become increasingly evanescent, the risks multiply.
At the same time, new modes fill geographic distances recovering bands of vulnerable workers otherwise excluded from the market, promote the emergence of new competitive territories and stimulate a new way of working, but must seek a new set of rules that will allow the worker to return to the center of the system.
One of the most evident manifestations of the disruption and of the relativity that time and space assume is due to the phenomenon of work on the platform named also virtual market place. Although these facilities have the potential to create benefits for their clients or workers, as well as for their consumers (in France we talk about social responsibility of the platforms) labor law questions the new protagonists of the working relationship trying to understand if the relationships that the platforms contribute to create are manifestations of real work activity (and as such to be protected).
In the new digital labor market, the working relationship is based on the culture of "always available". This is a culture that generates a variety of dysfunctional behaviors (health risks, phenomena of presentism, failure to respect working hours, tendency to work even during periods of illness ...).
The impact of technology also manifests itself in terms of inequality by promoting the cd. économie de superstar populated only by those who are qualified and able to use technological devices occupying all the working positions not replaced by robots.
The growth of digital platforms and the broader growth of self-employment makes evident that new employment practices, zero hours contract increases the vulnerability of workers who are lacking the protections of mechanisms to attain reasonable working conditions and earnings, as well they are deprived of structures that give them a voice to demand decent working conditions. Labor law has entered a new era: the boundaries of protections need to be redrawn to regulate a job spilled on demand that has changed both for the worker and for the employer that are partly defrauded by the typical dating powers acquired by the platforms.