Temper gig workers could be owed back pay after ruling

The work platform Temper is legally a temp agency, an Amsterdam appeal court has ruled, meaning people who worked through it were wrongly treated as self-employed and may be owed back pay.

Tuesday’s ruling overturned a 2024 decision that had sided with the platform and handed a win to the trade unions FNV and CNV, which have been fighting the case since 2020.

Temper lets people sign up through an app for short shifts in hospitality, retail and logistics – work the company says is done by self-employed “FreeFlexers”.

But the court found that the platform sets the terms, handles payment and exercises the kind of control that makes it an employer, applying the same test the Supreme Court used in its 2023 Deliveroo ruling.

Niels van der Neut, an employment law lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, said the outcome was no surprise. Temper workers do ordinary, non-specialist work for the businesses that hire them, carry little business risk and earn a low hourly rate, he said – the hallmarks of agency work rather than running your own business.

What it means for workers

For people who have worked through Temper, the ruling opens the door to claims for holiday pay, sick pay, pension contributions and other entitlements they did not receive as freelancers. The court also said Temper must repay a €1-an-hour fee it charged workers until 2019.

Nothing changes immediately, though. The court did not make its decision enforceable straight away, so if Temper takes the case to the Supreme Court – which it says it is considering – the company will not have to act until that appeal is settled.

A wider reckoning

Temper said it was “very surprised” and disagreed “fundamentally”, arguing the court had ignored the freedom and entrepreneurship of the tens of thousands of people who use it to earn extra money. FNV and CNV called the decision a “wonderful victory” for workers who had been wrongly classed as self-employed.

The case is part of a broader clampdown on sham self-employment in the Netherlands, where the tax office stepped up enforcement last year. The cleaning platform Helpling was similarly declared a temp agency before going bankrupt.