Subordination Theory in Practice: An Empirical Analysis of Chinese Courts’ Approaches to Classifying Labour Relationships in Platform Cases

Abstract

Determining the juridical nature of the work relationship is key to understanding the capacity of labour law to protect the rights and interests of gig workers. How to apply the traditional ‘subordination’ test and its constituent elements to platform work remains controversial in both theory and practice. In this article we examine the approaches of courts to this question using a sample of 71 Chinese judgments. We construct a binary probit model to conduct an empirical test of the degree of correlation between eight factors which serve to identify protected worker status, on the one hand, and courts’ rulings on the presence or absence of subordination, on the other. We find that, among the factors relevant to the subordination test, ‘control’ and ‘integration’ strongly predict a finding of worker status. We conclude that the subordination test is still being widely used to determine the status of gig workers in China, and that an approach to classification based on the ‘primacy of the facts’ of the case continues to be feasible in the context of platform work.