Mapping Precarity: How the UK Supreme Court Redistributes Risk and Value in the Gig Economy
本文批判劳动法主流评论对零工经济诉讼的分类视角，通过分析英国最高法院两个标志性案例，揭示法律如何构建一个既缺乏充分就业保护又受平台支配的劳动者主体，并追踪其将工资、责任和身体消耗转移给移民工人和福利国家、同时让平台获取超额利润的分配后果。
Abstract Dominant labour-law commentary treats gig-economy litigation as a cartographic exercise: are drivers and couriers being ‘correctly’ mapped into the statutory boxes of employee, worker, or independent contractor? Drawing on critical labour law theories of law’s constitutive power, this article shifts the focus from misclassification to the political economy. Using the UK Supreme Court’s twin flagship cases, Uber BV v Aslam (2021) and IWGB v CAC & Deliveroo (2023), as analytical prisms, it shows how section 230(3)(b) ERA 1996 constructs a legal subject who is at once too ‘entrepreneurial’ to merit full employment protection and sufficiently subordinated to fuel on-demand logistics. The analysis traces the distributive consequences of that construction. It argues that doctrinal valorisations of ‘substitution’ and ‘multi-apping’ redirect wages, liability and bodily depletion onto racialised migrant workers and, downstream, onto the UK welfare state, while freeing platforms to realise extraordinary profits. Law, welfare policy and shareholder returns thus form a single redistributive circuit. By foregrounding these entanglements, the article questions whether jurisprudential tinkering can deliver substantive change: when legal categories are already embedded in—and reproductive of—the very accumulation regimes they purport to regulate, any emancipatory project must look beyond classificatory refinement to structural re-engineering of value and risk flows.