The legal position of delivery platform workers, more commonly referred to as food couriers, is currently the subject of active discussion. The discussions stem from court rulings that have determined that couriers are working in an employment relationship. In reality, however, the majority of couriers carry out their work as independent contractors, and these court rulings have not turned them into employees. How is this possible?
Couriers have the freedom to choose their work
Platform economy, i.e. economic activities in which services and goods are delivered with the help of various digital platforms, has increased significantly over the past few years. Courier work is based on a contract between a platform economy company and the individual doing the delivering that specifies the terms and conditions of the activities.
The contract is most commonly intended to be an entrepreneurial contract. With such a contract, the courier acts as an independent contractor and is free to choose when they will work and what tasks they take on. The courier is also often allowed to use a substitute to perform their tasks. The terms of this type of contract vary somewhat from company to company.
Therefore, working as a courier does not correspond to a traditional employment model in which the employee works personally in an employment relationship that is permanent, full-time and usually in the employer’s premises or otherwise under the supervision of the employer. The work of a courier contains aspects of both an employment relationship and self-employment.
Courts as interpreters of the situation
One problem with this situation is that our labour legislation was established to deal with problems related to traditional employment structures and, therefore, is not unequivocally applicable to this courier situation. In legal praxis, for example, the possibility to use substitutes has influenced the assessment of the existence of an employment relationship. Drawing a clear boundary between an employment relationship and self-employment requires a comprehensive assessment and can be complicated.
When the legal status of a courier has to be assessed in court, the court is obligated to make a ruling. The court may, therefore, be forced to decide whether, for example, a courier’s
pension security will be handled according to the employee’s or entrepreneur’s pension legislation. The court justifies its decision and, at the same time, provides a legal rule to resolve similar situations. These legal rules begin to create a legal basis on which, for example, authorities act and make decisions. When a decision intended to guide legal praxis has been given at the highest court level, the decision is called a preliminary ruling.
In 2025, the Supreme Administrative Court issued a preliminary ruling in which it determined that couriers are operating within an employment relationship. The Insurance Court, as the highest court of appeal for income security matters, also issued a similar ruling. However, the actual situation of the couriers continues to be almost the same as it was prior to these rulings, and the majority of couriers are still working as independent contractors. Why is that? Why haven’t the preliminary rulings affected this situation?
Why didn’t the court ruling officially turn couriers into employees?
In order to understand why the situation is so convoluted, we first need a more detailed understanding of what the lawsuits have been about. The legal rule given in the cases where the courier was determined to be an employee is not binding for any of the parties involved in the settled cases. This is due to the fact that these legal cases have been looking to resolve some other issue and the legal status of the couriers was just established as a necessary preliminary matter underlying the ruling.
For example, in the preliminary ruling of the Supreme Administrative Court, KHO 2025:41, the case to be resolved concerned whether a platform economy company was responsible for keeping a record of the working hours of couriers. In order to resolve this case, the court first had to determine whether the courier was considered to be working as an employee. The Supreme Administrative Court ruled in the case that the courier is working as an employee, but since the courier has so-called working hour autonomy, the company has no obligation to record their working hours. Thus, the binding effect of the ruling concerned the recording of working hours rather than the courier’s position in labour law.
Another reason why the preliminary rulings made have not changed the prevailing practice can be seen when examining the status of the court ruling as a source of law. Unlike in the United States, for example, preliminary rulings issued by courts in Finland do not act as sources of law that are strong enough for future decisions to be automatically based on them. In Finland, legislative power belongs to the Parliament, and preliminary rulings cannot create a new, more extensively binding law.
Case-by-case assessment
The legal rule in preliminary rulings regarding the employee status of couriers only serves as a guiding factor for the court when the situation to be resolved is completely or almost identical to the one for which the preliminary ruling was issued. Each situation must, therefore, be assessed on its own merits, and if it differs from the earlier case, the decision on the employment status of the courier may end up being different. This has, in fact, happened in Insurance Court, where, in the decisive matter concerning an employee’s pension insurance (VakO 1802:2022), it considered the courier to have been working as an employee, but when resolving an accident insurance case (VakO 2205:2022), it found that the courier had been working as an independent contractor.
When assessing the similarity of cases, the contract between the courier and the platform economy company, as well as the actions of the courier are examined to see how many hallmarks of an employment relationship there are. In its preliminary ruling, the Supreme Administrative Court described the hallmarks of an employment relationship, i.e. the basis on which it came to the conclusion that the courier had been working in an employment relationship. A platform economy company can change the interpretation of the situation and strengthen their worker’s self-employment status by amending or removing from its contracts those specific conditions that contain hallmarks of an employment relationship. This has been the case, to a degree, after the court’s rulings. On the other hand, platform economy companies have also started to develop combination models in which the worker has the option to choose whether to be an independent contractor or an employee.
Employment or freedom of contract?
In terms of principle, it seems strange that the Supreme Administrative Court’s decision has not changed the situation more strongly in the direction of employment. However, since there are always two sides of the coin, you can also approach it from a freedom of contract point of view. We all have the basic right to decide freely how we wish to sell our work input to others. We are free to decide whether we want to be independent contractors or to enter into an employment contract and work as employees. Companies also have a basic right to choose whether to buy labour input from another entrepreneur or to hire employees. From this point of view, it would be strange if all those working in a certain limited sector would be designated as employees and entrepreneurship would not be possible. So, some type of combination solution needs to be established.
Will new regulation solve these problems?
No matter how we look at it, it is clear that there are issues when it comes to the activities of platform workers and companies that need to be resolved. The issues particularly centre around the employment terms and working conditions. The situation is difficult for both the couriers and the companies, because the employment status of couriers and the obligations of companies are, in this respect, unclear. The need for more applicable regulation has been identified and sparked the issuing of the so-called platform work Directive (EU) 2024/2831, which Finland will have to incorporate into its national legislation over the course of this year.
The Directive provides for the assumption that the platform economy worker is, in principle, an employee. However, this assumption can be refuted if a platform economy company can demonstrate that its contract model does not contain the hallmarks of an employment relationship and their couriers are, therefore, independent contractors.
As such, the situation would not seem to be changing significantly from the current one. The rulings will continue to be made, at least in part, on a case-by-case basis, where the circumstances of each case are examined separately and the legal rule from an earlier preliminary ruling can only be applied in completely or mostly identical situations.
It is precisely because of this case-by-case interpretation that court rulings have not automatically turned platform economy couriers into employees, and in my opinion, will not do so in the future either. Even the new regulation does not entirely eliminate the need for case-by-case interpretation. However, the scales are likely to be tipped in favour of viewing couriers as employees in the future.
