Legally Invisible Labour: Reclassifying Digital Freelancers Under Bangladeshi Labour Law

ABSTRACT:

Bangladesh now ranks among the world’s largest suppliers of online freelance labour, yet the workers who earn this income occupy an uncertain place in its legal order. The Bangladesh Labour Act 2006 was drafted around a worker employed within an establishment under the direction of an employer. Digital freelancers, who contract directly with clients abroad through platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr, do not answer that description, and so are treated as independent contractors falling outside the statute’s protections on wages, hours, safety, social security and collective organization. This article interrogates that exclusion. It contends that the omission of freelancers reflects a defect in statutory design rather than a deliberate judgment that such workers merit no protection, and that the defect can be remedied without sacrificing the flexibility that draws people to freelancing. Reading the problem through the dual lenses of precarity and the protective purpose of labour law, and against the contrasting responses of the United Kingdom, the European Union, the United States and India, the article shows that legal systems facing the same pressure have converged on protection by different routes: judicial reinterpretation, statutory presumption, a contested statutory test, and a dedicated social-security code. It then advances a reform programme for Bangladesh anchored in a statutory category of digital worker, a contributory social-protection scheme, a regulatory authority, a domestic dispute-resolution mechanism, and supporting measures on collective representation and fiscal policy. The argument is that recognising freelancers as workers is entitled to a defined floor of rights coheres with the Constitution, with the country’s international labour commitments, and with its own digital-economy ambitions.

Keywords: digital labour; freelancers; platform work; Bangladesh Labour Act 2006; worker classification; social protection; comparative labour law