Helpling and the Supreme Court: when cleaning suddenly becomes agency work 🧼

What started as a handy app to find a cleaner ended in a legal clean-up for Helpling. The Supreme Court ruled on 11 April 2025 that the cleaners who worked through the platform were not self-employed but temporary workers. And that has implications, including for employers outside the cleaning industry.

Helpling worked as follows: households posted cleaning orders via the platform and cleaners could respond. They largely set their own schedule and rate (within limits set by Helpling), but had to work by the platform's rules, use the payment method Helpling prescribed, and receive reviews from their customers. It all seemed very flexible, but under the bonnet Helpling determined a surprising amount.

The Supreme Court looked through that flexibility and upheld the court's verdict: this is a temporary employment arrangement within the meaning of Section 7:690 of the Civil Code. And remarkably, the fact that the cleaners did not work in a company or organisation, but in people's homes, does not matter. A private household can also be a hirer. What matters is that someone temporarily performs work under the supervision and direction of another person, and that was the case here.

What can employers learn from this? Firstly, that the legal qualification of an employment relationship does not depend on labels or fancy terms, but on how things work in practice. Secondly, that even a platform that claims to be just an intermediary can still turn out to be an employer if it actually shapes and controls the employment relationship.

So for employers who work with freelancers or platforms, this is another wake-up call: make sure the legal and actual reality are aligned. The risks of false self-employment and misqualified employment relationships lurk.

Do you have questions about using freelancers or are you working with a platform model? If so, feel free to contact our employment law specialists.