A proposed compensation scheme would, for the first time, give couriers legal protection if they’re hurt on the job. But large parts of the platform economy are excluded, and the small print leaves plenty of room for disputes.
Hong Kong’s Labour and Welfare Bureau has put forward a statutory workplace injury compensation scheme for food and parcel delivery riders, with legislation expected later this year. On the face of it, this looks like progress: for the first time, riders injured or killed while working for an app-based platform would have a legal right to compensation. Look closer, though, and the scheme falls well short of addressing the core problems facing platform workers, while leaving so many questions unanswered that disputes seem all but guaranteed.
The first problem is scope. Ministers have spent years promising to modernise protections for the platform economy, yet what they’ve actually produced covers only food and parcel couriers. Ride-hailing drivers, home-service workers and repair technicians who take jobs through apps face exactly the same algorithmic management and the same workplace risks but none of them are covered. The EU’s Platform Work Directive, by comparison, regulates the platform economy as a whole. Judged against that standard, Hong Kong’s proposal looks narrow from the outset.
Who decides if waiting counts as work? The platforms do
The proposal’s definition of “working time” is shaky, too. Cover would begin once a rider sets off to collect an order and end once it’s delivered, or the order is cancelled. But time spent waiting around for an order or racing other riders to grab one is left entirely up to individual platforms to decide whether to include. In practice, that means two riders working under the very same law could end up with quite different levels of protection, simply depending on which app they happen to be logged into. Rather than setting a single standard, the government has handed that decision to the companies the law is supposed to be regulating.
Extreme weather gets much the same treatment. Riders remain free to decide for themselves whether to keep working through storms or extreme heat, and there’s no dedicated compensation regime built around weather risk. The one exception is narrowly drawn: an injury within four hours of finishing a delivery, on the way home, while a severe weather warning or the government’s “extreme conditions” announcement is in force. Anything outside that tight window simply isn’t covered.
Who pays when a rider works for several platforms? Nobody’s said
Riders who pick up work across several apps at once present another problem the bureau hasn’t really solved. Its proposal says that if an injury occurs while a rider is working for multiple platforms, those companies should share the cost of compensation but offers no detail on how that split would actually be worked out or enforced. That’s precisely the sort of ambiguity likely to be fought over case by case once real claims start coming in.
There’s a similar gap on minimum income. Under Hong Kong’s existing Employees’ Compensation Ordinance, workers earning below the statutory threshold have their sick pay calculated against a minimum monthly income of HK$5,710, with payments set at 80% of that — at least HK$4,568 a month. The bureau acknowledges that this formula, built for regular employment, doesn’t really fit riders’ irregular, piecemeal earnings. Fair enough. But it stops there, without saying what will replace it, or whether that 80% guarantee will survive the change at all.
A “no-fault” principle full of loopholes
The oddest inconsistency in the whole proposal concerns liability. The government’s own document goes into considerable detail about how platforms exercise algorithmic control over riders: assigning orders, setting pay rates, restricting how riders build up repeat customers. Then, in the same breath, it states that the Employment Ordinance and the Employees’ Compensation Ordinance — the two laws that actually protect employees hurt through their work — simply don’t apply to platform work at all.
That ordinance is meant to work on a no-fault basis: whoever is to blame for an accident, an employer has to pay compensation so long as the legal conditions are met. Officials say the new rider scheme will follow the same principle, and that a rider’s own carelessness won’t, as a rule, let a platform off the hook. But the fine print carves out some sizeable exceptions. Platforms escape liability altogether if a rider is shown to have deliberately harmed themselves, or if an injury is linked to drink or drugs — provided it doesn’t result in death or permanent, severe loss of working capacity. Courts, meanwhile, must throw out any claim where an injury is found to stem from a rider’s own serious and deliberate misconduct, or where a rider is shown to have deliberately made their injury worse. For a principle meant to guarantee compensation regardless of fault, that’s a fair number of ways out.
Falling behind the rest of the world
Ministers are billing this as a step forward for platform workers. Set against what other countries have already done, it looks rather more like Hong Kong quietly falling behind. Spain’s Rider Law, in force since 2021, classifies delivery riders under platform algorithmic control as employees outright, entitled to minimum wage, paid leave and social insurance — not just injury cover. The UK’s own Supreme Court reached a comparable conclusion in the Uber case, ruling that drivers count as “workers” with statutory rights to the minimum wage and paid holiday. The EU has gone further still, with reforms that presume an employment relationship exists wherever a platform exercises genuine control over how someone works, rather than carving out a bespoke, limited scheme instead.
The platform economy has become one of the thorniest issues in labour policy worldwide, and elsewhere the direction of travel has moved well beyond bare injury compensation towards recognising these workers’ broader rights. Hong Kong’s proposal, by covering only a fraction of platform workers and leaving central questions of coverage and liability unresolved, looks like a disappointing outcome for the people it’s meant to protect.