For years, the person who dropped a hot biryani at your door or drove you home after midnight existed in a strange legal limbo.
Not quite an employee. Not quite a free agent. On June 12, 2026, the United Nations’ labour body tried to fix that. Whether it actually will depends on something far less glamorous than a vote count: paperwork, politics, and time.
ILO Convention on Gig Workers
At the 114th International Labour Conference in Geneva, member states of the International Labour Organization adopted Convention No. 193, formally titled Decent Work in the Platform Economy. The vote was lopsided: 406 in favour, 8 against, and 36 abstentions.
This was not a snap decision. The text was hammered out over a two-year discussion spanning the 113th and 114th sessions of the ILC, the kind of slow-grinding multilateral process that rarely makes headlines until the very end.
What makes this convention different from the patchwork of national rules that already exist is its scope. It is, by the ILO’s own framing, the first binding international agreement that sets employment standards specifically for digital platform workers, covering food delivery and taxi services among other sectors.
The convention recognises that platform workers may be classified as either employees or independent contractors, but for the first time establishes protections that apply regardless of that classification, things like occupational safety, minimum pay floors, and protection against being deactivated from an app without explanation.
Algorithm Has To Explain Itself
Perhaps the most novel part of Convention 193 is its attempt to regulate something governments have historically struggled to even define: algorithmic management. The convention sets international rules requiring platforms to disclose how and when automated systems are used to manage worker pay and access to work.
That sounds bureaucratic until you remember that millions of riders and drivers have had their accounts switched off by a piece of software they never met and could never appeal to.
The geopolitics of the vote tell their own story. The United States and New Zealand voted against the convention, while the United Kingdom and India abstained, a split that signals ratification will be uneven at best.
Washington’s objection was philosophical as much as practical. The US representative argued the country did not support a prescriptive binding convention in a fast-evolving area of the economy.
Europe, by contrast, has historically embraced ILO conventions more readily, which means the regulatory gap between gig workers in Paris and gig workers in Phoenix is likely to widen, not narrow.
A Floor With A Missing Half
The original plan was for Convention 193 to be adopted alongside a companion Recommendation, a non-binding document meant to spell out exactly how the convention’s protections should work in practice. That did not happen.
The Recommendation was not debated due to a lack of time and remains pending. Public Services International, the global union federation that lobbied for the convention, called this a setback, noting the Recommendation was designed to give the convention its full practical force.
In other words, the binding rulebook passed, but the instruction manual for how to actually follow it got left on the table in Geneva.
Even setting that aside, the convention itself is not self-executing. The standards still need to be ratified by individual governments and then enforced nationally before they mean anything on the ground.
International Labour Organization Enforcement Power
The ILO itself has no enforcement power, it relies on member complaints that can trigger investigations and political pressure. Only once a country ratifies and writes the convention into domestic law can an individual worker actually drag a platform company to court over it.
This is not a new problem for the ILO. Plenty of its conventions, on child labour, on forced labour, on maritime work, took years or decades to gain real teeth, and some never did in countries that simply refused to sign on. Convention 193 is being launched into that same uncertain pipeline, just with far more workers waiting on the other end and, this time, half its supporting architecture unfinished.
The World Bank’s 2023 estimate puts the number of app-based gig workers worldwide as high as 435 million, a population larger than the United States.
Where India Fits Into This
India’s abstention is worth sitting with, because the country’s own gig economy data makes the stakes obvious. NITI Aayog’s 2022 report estimated India had 7.7 million gig and platform workers in 2020, a number projected to triple to 23.5 million by 2029-30, eventually forming 6.7 percent of the non-agricultural workforce.
India already has its own partial answer: the Code on Social Security, 2020, which requires aggregators to contribute 1 to 2 percent of their annual turnover to a Social Security Fund covering health, maternity, and old-age benefits.
Rajasthan went further in 2023, passing the first dedicated state law for platform workers, establishing a Gig Workers Welfare Board funded by a welfare cess on transactions. Karnataka followed with its own welfare fund.
Yet the lived reality has not caught up to the paperwork. A 2023 Fair Work India study found that delivery and ride-hailing platform workers earn between ₹15,000 and ₹20,000 a month, below minimum wage for the hours actually worked.
That gap between law on paper and money in pocket is exactly what Convention 193 was meant to close globally. Whether it does will not be decided in Geneva. It will be decided, slowly and unevenly, in parliaments, courtrooms, and the fine print of national labour codes, one ratification at a time, with the missing Recommendation still waiting for its turn on a future conference agenda.
