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For almost a century, employment contracts have been the preferred contractual model for the organisation of relations with workers, to ensure productive activity. Digital platforms disrupt the traditional representations of the legal framework of labour relations, insofar as their business model is built on the circumvention of labour law through the recourse to the figure of the self-employed worker. Collaborative platforms deny the existence of a relation of subordination. They therefore refute the exercise of any power over workers, claiming to be merely intermediaries between two independent users: the person demanding a service and the person offering to carry it out. However far from putting an end to labour exploitation, platforms in fact generate a massive phenomenon of self-exploitation, with the result that it is only the actual forms of labour exploitation that have changed.