The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MHRSS) and the Supreme People's Court (SPC) jointly released the typical cases of labor disputes related to new employment forms, in a bid to enhance the quality and efficacy of handling such cases and to achieve the common development of the platform-based economy and the protection of laborers' legitimate rights and interests.

The cases, covering major types and common employment practices in the platform-based economy, implemented the guidelines issued by eight central departments, including the MHRSS and the SPC, to safeguard the rights and interests of workers in new forms of employment.

The "fact first" principle was adopted in handling the cases to identify labor relations based on actual employment practices, and the identification criteria for labor relations were standardized by comprehensively analyzing the personality, economic and organizational attributes between workers and enterprises, while taking into account the worker's degree of autonomy in deciding their work time and workload. Illegal employment practices involved in the cases, such as using civil cooperation agreements to circumvent employers' obligations and disguising actual employment as outsourcing practices, were also corrected.

Going forward, the MHRSS and the SPC will continue to strengthen joint surveys on such disputes, focus on the improvement of legislation in this regard, and intensify guidance for labor dispute arbitration institutions and the people's courts, in a bid to achieve sound results in political, legal and social aspects in resolving labor disputes.