In recent years, with the rapid development of the platform economy, new forms of employment characterized by flexible employment have reached 84 million workers, accounting for 21% of the total number of employees in China, including express delivery drivers, food delivery drivers, ride hailing drivers, and online anchors. However, this large group also faces increasingly prominent issues such as difficulties in protecting workers' rights due to significant differences in employment methods compared to traditional ones. On December 23, the Supreme People's Court released for the first time a special guiding case on labor disputes in new forms of employment, responding to the needs of judicial practice, addressing social concerns, and legally safeguarding the legitimate rights and interests of workers in new forms of employment. From 2020 to 2024, courts across the country have accepted approximately 420000 civil dispute cases related to new forms of employment. Why disputes occur frequently can be traced back to the traditional "binary structure" followed in China's labor legislation. The protection objects of labor law are "employers and workers who form labor relations with them", in other words, whether there is a labor relationship has a significant impact on the rights and interests of workers. If there is a labor relationship, the worker is entitled to a series of legitimate rights in accordance with the law, such as receiving labor remuneration, enjoying social insurance and welfare, and having the right to receive economic compensation and compensation when terminating or terminating the labor contract. However, the labor employment model in the field of new employment forms presents new characteristics such as flexibility, diversity, and technicality in management methods, working hours, and compensation payments. There are difficulties in judging labor relations, and there are also some enterprises that avoid establishing labor relations. For example, some platform companies outsource related businesses in a chain, while others induce workers to register as "individual industrial and commercial households" and enter into contracting and cooperation agreements to avoid labor laws and regulations and employer responsibilities, further increasing the difficulty of accurate judgment and to some extent affecting the uniformity of judgment standards. The phenomenon of enterprises avoiding the establishment of labor relations is not uncommon. Based on the comprehensive trial practice from 2021 to 2023, some courts have found that although there are differences in the employment models of different industries in the new business model, most of them show a certain degree of "de labor relations" tendency. The "de labor relationalization" and other reasons make the workers in the new business form have a vague understanding of the subject of responsibility. The business based on "Internet plus" also makes it difficult and time-consuming to investigate and collect evidence, which leads to the difficulty in finding the facts of the employment dispute cases in the new business form compared with ordinary labor dispute cases. Another union conducted research on food delivery workers and found that "it is clear that platform companies deliberately evade labor laws and regulations through various means, avoid establishing direct labor relationships with workers, and thus evade the main responsibility of employers in terms of rights protection. In view of this, the Supreme People's Court focuses on the core issues and clearly judges whether there is a labor relationship between enterprises and workers. It cannot only focus on the form and appearance, but must grasp the essence and core characteristics of the labor relationship, that is, whether there is dominant labor management, identify the root cause, and make precise decisions, which is conducive to ensuring the unified judgment scale of new employment forms and effectively safeguarding the legitimate rights and interests of workers. Some companies that attempt to avoid labor relations and reduce labor costs by signing employment agreements or labor contracts with workers should be cautious. Compared to platform enterprises, the weakness of workers also comes from the structural power imbalance caused by algorithm management and data processing in platform employment, as well as the weak awareness of workers' own rights protection. For the former, platform enterprises need to ensure a certain degree of algorithm transparency to prevent algorithm exploitation. For the latter, whether it is "some riders themselves are not clear about what agreement they are signing", or investigations have found that "a considerable number of workers do not care about who they are working for or whether they have signed a labor contract, as long as they can receive their wages and compensation in a timely manner", both indicate that there are still many efforts to prevent labor disputes in the new industry from the source. (New Society)