The Hungarian Supreme Court (in Hungarian: “Kúria”), has ruled as follows: In the current legal environment, the tasks performed by food delivery workers and their “dependence” on their platform provider cannot be considered an employment relationship. The food delivery worker and the platform provider are in a contractor (service type) legal relationship under Hungarian law. Although the Supreme Court emphasised that its decision relates exclusively to one specific case, the judgment allows further conclusions to be drawn, not only concerning how Hungary governs “platform workers”, but also concerning the issue of reclassification of contractor relationships and employment relationships.
In Hungary, currently there is no general definition for platform-based work, and in addition to what has been discussed in recent years in the legal literature, we can basically accept the characterisation the present judgment of the Supreme Court “creates”.
Hungarian legislation follows a binary system when assessing work-related activities: the legal relationship is either an employment or a contractor relationship. There are no specific rules for working arrangements whose characteristics lie somewhere between those two types, as there are in other EU member states or third countries. Consequently, when assessing the situation of Hungarian food delivery workers or other platform workers, what is relevant is the circumstances in which the work is performed.
The Supreme Court also pointed this out in its judgment when it compared the facts of the case with judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union and with the draft EU directive on platform work. According to the draft EU directive, “contractual relationships in which digital labour platforms exert a certain level of control over certain elements of the performance of work should be deemed, by virtue of a legal presumption, to be an employment relationship”.
In its judgment, the Supreme Court dealt with one specific case of platform work, where the food delivery platform provider provided an intermediary service through its platform, between customers ordering food and drinks and the restaurants concerned. Food delivery workers provided the services via an app and used branding elements determined by the platform provider, but they typically operated as individual contractors (or, exceptionally, as shareholders of self-owned companies).
The details of the legal relationship were set out in a service contract and general terms and conditions (GTCs), and the details of the work to be performed were set out in the order defined by the app: food delivery workers could set at their own discretion, the time periods during which they could be assigned to deliver food and drinks. They could also refuse order, but in such cases would be ranked lower in the system, meaning that they fell farther back in the ‘queue’ when applying for the preferred time slot they wanted. They were not disadvantaged in any other way (such as a pay reduction).
In the lawsuit, a food delivery worker filed a motion to have their contractor relationship reclassified as an employment relationship, and to have a minimum salary set for the “duration of work”, because they considered that their work met the criteria of a dependent, contingent employment relationship.
In addition to the provisions of the Hungarian Labour Code, the Supreme Court used the criteria developed in case law to answer this question. The main findings of the judgment were as follows:
The Supreme Court did not intend to take a position on the “general question of legal policy or legislation”, that is, its decision was not intended to fill a regulatory gap concerning platform work, but merely to rule on the merits of the case at hand. In our view, however, the decision can be applied beyond this specific case and, perhaps with certain adjustments, can serve as a guideline when assessing other forms of platform work (to use the examples of the Supreme Court: transport of persons or goods and programming) or when answering reclassification questions.
Authors: Péter Sziládi, Zoltán Tarján, Karim Laribi and Dorottya Nagy