When the Law Looks Away: How Legislative Exclusion Shapes South Africa’s Gig Economy

South Africa has one of the most sophisticated labor law regimes on the African continent. Its constitution guarantees fair labor practices, its statutes set minimum working hours and paid sick leave, and its dispute-resolution machinery is designed to be accessible and low-cost. Yet a growing share of the country’s workforce stands entirely outside this architecture. New research from the University of Johannesburg argues that this is not an oversight or a regulatory vacuum, but an actively maintained boundary — one that transforms the everyday control exercised by digital platforms into lived precarity.

The study, published in Frontiers in Sociology, examined how gig workers in Johannesburg experience what the researchers call legislative exclusion: the process through which state action constitutes a category of workers as falling outside the scope of labor law. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with ten platform workers spanning e-hailing, delivery, digital freelancing and social media content creation, and analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis, the research offers an interpretive account of how political and economic processes — usually treated as separate domains — combine to shape working lives.

The analytical starting point is deliberately counterintuitive. Much scholarship on platform labor in the global South frames the problem as regulatory absence: where the state has not legislated for platform work, workers are classified as independent contractors and fall outside protective law. The remedy, on that view, is simply to legislate. South Africa unsettles this assumption. Section 23 of the Constitution entrenches fair labor practices; the Labor Relations Act and the Basic Conditions of Employment Act establish extensive protections; sections 200A and 83A install a rebuttable presumption of employment; and the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration provides accessible adjudication. Platform workers stand outside every one of these instruments — not because the regulatory state is missing, but because of how a well-developed one draws and maintains the boundary of the employment relationship.

The researchers identify four processes through which this exclusion is produced. The first is definitional: the statutory definition of an employee in section 213 of the Labor Relations Act, applied through the dominant impression test, places platform work outside the protective scope by ordinary interpretation rather than by any dedicated legislative act. The second is jurisdictional and corporate. In a 2018 Labor Court case involving Uber, the court set aside a ruling that drivers were employees of the local entity, holding that local and Netherlands-based entities had been improperly conflated — and declined to determine whether they were employees of the foreign parent. Exclusion was produced procedurally, through the question of which entity could be cited, without any determination on the merits.

The third process is the most striking illustration that exclusion is actively made rather than merely absent. The National Land Transport Amendment Act, gazetted in June 2024 and brought into operation in September 2025, recognizes e-hailing as a distinct category of public transport, requires operating licenses, and imposes vehicle branding and panic-button obligations. Compliance costs fell on individual driver-operators, and the employment relationship is nowhere addressed. The researchers describe this as regulation without recognition: the state constitutes the driver as a licensed transport operator and, in the same instrument, confirms that the driver is not a worker. The fourth process is discursive — platform work is officially framed as entrepreneurship and job creation, positioning regulatory restraint as the protection of opportunity in a context of mass unemployment.

These processes do not bear on all gig workers equally. The study distinguishes between location-based work — e-hailing and delivery — which is geographically tethered, capital-intensive for the worker, and in principle regulable by the national state, and remote online work — freelancing and content creation — which is contracted across borders and mediated by clients and monetization programs rather than dispatch algorithms. The transport regulation reaches location-based drivers alone; remote online workers are addressed by no domestic instrument at all. For freelancers and content creators, the counterparty is frequently a client in another country or a foreign monetization program, so there is often no local entity to cite and no forum in which any claim could be entertained.

The lived consequences differ accordingly. Location-based participants described unreviewable deactivation — account suspensions without warning, hearing, or appeal — alongside the transfer of vehicle, fuel, maintenance and now licensing costs onto the worker. One e-hailing driver told the researchers: “We drivers are disposable. A customer complains, Uber acts fast with no warning, no hearing. We have no protection.” Online participants described a different configuration: client non-payment, unenforceable informal agreements, unpaid speculative pitching, and dependence on ranking, reach and monetization criteria that are neither published nor contestable. A content creator recounted an agreement with no written contract that ended with no money received.

Both segments reported unbounded working time, though in different registers. E-hailing and delivery participants described working up to sixteen hours a day to earn what they considered a decent income, pushing themselves through illness because missing a day means losing income permanently, and accumulating fatigue that they linked directly to road accidents. Online participants described a working day extended across evenings, weekends and time zones — with client communication, revision requests and continuous posting schedules, and with considerable labor performed speculatively and remunerated not at all. In both cases, the researchers read the absence of a socially guaranteed boundary around the working day as a structural condition rather than a personal preference: the limits the Basic Conditions of Employment Act places on ordinary hours, rest periods and paid sick leave do not merely protect individuals, they place part of the cost of illness and fatigue on employers and the state. Where that boundary is absent, the limit on working time is set by the worker’s body and by the earnings required to survive.

The study also documents how exclusion compounds over time. Without payslips, contracts or verifiable income, participants cannot satisfy the documentary requirements of credit, insurance and tenancy — so exclusion from labor law becomes exclusion from financial and social citizenship. Neither segment is covered by unemployment insurance or compensation for occupational injuries, and neither receives any employer contribution to retirement or medical provision. Participants described self-insuring against illness, injury and old age, with little capacity to save. The researchers argue that this is a structural arrangement rather than a series of unfortunate events: access to work is held at the discretion of an entity that is not, in law, an employer, and can be withdrawn without reasons, notice or hearing, while the worker’s dependence is total.

Reform is now on the table. In February 2026, the Minister of Employment and Labor published draft labor law amendments following negotiations at the National Economic Development and Labor Council, including expanded statutory definitions of employer and employee, a strengthened presumption of employment capable of reaching digital platform workers, and a new framework for on-call and zero-hours arrangements. The researchers caution, however, that a presumption of employment operates by identifying an employer — and would most readily reach platforms directing location-based work within South Africa, while leaving freelancers and content creators, whose counterparties are dispersed foreign clients and advertisers, substantially where they stand. Their broader argument is that the boundary of the employment relationship is the operative site of both exclusion and any prospective inclusion, and that remedies must be assessed against which segment of platform labor they can actually reach — whether through presumptions of employment, payment-protection duties on marketplaces, social security detached from employment status, or enforceable duties of algorithmic transparency. What participants described, the study concludes, was not a wish to see platform work abolished, but a claim to protection, to reasons for the decisions that shape their livelihoods, and to a forum in which those decisions can be contested.

Subject of Research: Legislative exclusion and precarity among gig workers in South Africa's platform economy

Article Title: Exploring the impact of legislative absences on the working environment of gig workers in South Africa

Article References: Gwele, Z., Mabaso, C., & Knight, X. (2026). Exploring the impact of legislative absences on the working environment of gig workers in South Africa. Frontiers in Sociology, 11, Article 1824697. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2026.1824697

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsoc.2026.1824697

Keywords: gig economy, legislative exclusion, platform capitalism, algorithmic management, precarity, South Africa, labor law, e-hailing, freelancing, content creation, job insecurity, dispute resolution