At the end of 2021, the European Commission introduced a comprehensive proposal for a Directive to regulate platform work in the 27 Member States of the region. The initiative was supported by research from various fields. In the field of law, Christina Hiessl, professor of labor law at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), was responsible for researching the decisions of the region's courts. At the time, Hiessl's research analyzed more than 100 (one hundred) court decisions and 15 (fifteen) administrative decisions from European countries and concluded that there was a tendency for courts to reject the classification that various platforms made of their workers as self-employed, recognizing an employment relationship or a similar category.

The European Commission's proposed directive was concerned with the high number of lawsuits involving digital platforms and drew on Hiessl's research to highlight the need to prevent a deterioration in labor legislation and working conditions. Recently, after a long negotiation process, the European Union directive was approved, becoming the most comprehensive regulation of platform work.
Updated in February 2024, Christina Hiessl's research published in Platform Work: Regulation or Deregulation? analyzes more than 800 judicial and administrative decisions in 18 (eighteen) European countries on the issue of employment relationships in various platform-based jobs and the so-called gig economy and continues to point to a trend toward reclassifying workers as platform employees or a similar category.

What Hiessl indicates is that in 267 cases, workers were considered employees of digital platform companies, while in 109 cases, they were also classified as employees, but of subcontracted companies. In a smaller number of cases, 88, they were classified as self-employed, in 38 cases as workers in an intermediate category between employee and self-employed, in 11 cases as temporary agency workers, and in two cases as employees of the clients who used the platforms.

In Hiessl's database, considering only cases strictly related to platforms (therefore excluding cases related to the gig economy), there are eight countries with final court decisions: