Entry Motivations Shape Preferences for Social Protection Among Platform Workers

We study platform workers’ willingness to pay for social protection — in the form of sick pay and paid holiday — distinguishing between workers who entered platform work out of economic necessity (the “pushed”) and those attracted by its flexibility and advantages (the “pulled”). Using a discrete-choice experiment administered to approximately 800 taxi, cleaning, and delivery platform workers in Germany, Italy, and Poland, we find that average willingness to pay amounts to 0.9% of earnings for sick pay and 2.1% for paid holiday. Preferences, however, differ sharply by motivational orientation: pushed workers are willing to forgo on average 3.8% of earnings for paid holidays, while pulled workers’ valuations are substantially lower and, in most specifications, statistically indistinguishable from zero. This divergence is robust across educational groups, income dependence on platforms, country, and current access to benefits, and is not accounted for by the demographic composition of the two groups. The findings suggest that the welfare impact of extending social protections to platform workers — as envisaged by the EU Platform Work Directive — might depend on the share of necessity-driven workers in the platform workforce.