The role of competition law in addressing worker dependency on digital labour platforms

This article explores the role of EU competition law in addressing the economic dependence of workers on digital labour platforms. It traces how platform design erodes the outside options of self-employed workers and develops the notion of relative market power to capture this vertical dependence in competition-law terms. The article links this analysis to the normative foundations of EU competition law and draws on the ordoliberal idea of freedom as non-domination. It contends that economic dependence should be treated as a structural concern for competition law and considers how ex-post control and ex-ante duties could respond to this form of platform power.