On 26 March 2026, the Knesset plenum passed in first reading the so-called 'Uber Law' — a bill that would, for the first time, let private vehicles carry paying passengers through apps like Uber and Lyft in Israel. The bill, sponsored by MKs Moshe Passal (Likud), Dan Illouz (Likud) and Eitan Ginzburg (Blue and White) in coordination with the Transport Ministry, sets a long list of preconditions for ride-hailing drivers: at least four years of driving experience, mandatory training on traffic safety, harassment prevention and accessibility, a medical certificate, criminal and security background checks, and vehicles no more than eight years old with current safety systems. Apps must show fares in advance, allow free cancellation within three minutes of driver confirmation, and provide real-time GPS tracking with driver photos and ratings.
What the bill conspicuously does not answer is the harder question Israel's regulators have been avoiding for half a decade: when an app-managed driver, courier or rider works exclusively through a single platform that controls their pay, ratings and dispatch, are they an employee, a self-employed contractor, or something the existing Labour Law category does not yet name?
The case for binary reclassification — taken seriously
The strongest argument for forcing platforms into employer status is concrete: 17,000 Wolt couriers in Israel currently work without minimum-wage guarantees, pension contributions, paid sick leave, severance, or unemployment insurance. In August 2022, Judge Ariella Gilzer-Katz of the Tel Aviv Regional Labour Court accepted a class action — Khazanovitch v. Wolt Enterprises Israel Ltd. — finding a 'reasonable possibility' that an employment relationship existed. The court's reasoning was specific and serious: couriers work only for Wolt (not for restaurants or customers); Wolt sets the pay rate and can unilaterally change it; Wolt monitors performance in real time through the app; and 'Wolt has no business without the couriers.' The flexibility of the schedule, the court held, does not negate an employment relationship. Wolt's appeal has been pending at the National Labour Court since 2023.
That reasoning travels. The same control-and-economic-dependence test that flagged Wolt would, applied honestly, capture much of any future Israeli Uber and Lyft fleet. Reformers argue that pretending otherwise — letting platforms classify workers however their commercial model prefers — exports the cost of risk (accidents, illness, retirement) from profitable multinationals onto either workers or the National Insurance Institute. That is a real distributional concern, and it deserves a serious answer.
Why binary reclassification is still the wrong answer
The answer, however, is not to declare every platform worker an employee by judicial fiat. Wolt's own data — admittedly self-interested but consistent with similar surveys across European jurisdictions — shows that 87% of its courier partners across markets prefer independent-contractor status, that the average courier works about eight hours per week, and that three out of four work fewer than 20 hours. A binary employee mandate would, at the margins, force platforms to do exactly what they have done in Spain and parts of California: cut the workforce, raise consumer prices, restrict who can log in and when, and replace flexible part-timers with a smaller fleet of scheduled shift workers. The retiree topping up a pension and the student covering rent are precisely the workers a heavy classification rule pushes off the platform.
It is also worth noticing that Wolt is not the Israeli policy bogeyman it is sometimes painted as. The company already covers couriers with free accident and third-party liability insurance while online (and for one hour after logging off), and has publicly stated it 'has always supported and actively called for regulation for platform work' that combines flexibility with protections. That is a corporate position worth holding to — but it is also a signal that a well-designed third-way framework is politically available.
What a proportionate Israeli framework should look like
The Uber Law's gap is the place to start. Israel should add — either as a committee amendment before the bill's second and third readings, or in a companion gig-worker statute — a narrow, platform-specific tier of protections that does not force binary reclassification:
- Mandatory accident and occupational-disability insurance for any worker dispatched through an algorithmic platform, paid by the platform, with statutory minimum coverage limits.
- Earnings transparency: real-time disclosure of base rate, surge factor, customer tip and platform commission per task, with monthly per-courier statements suitable for tax filing.
- A statutory floor on engaged-time earnings — calculated against the national minimum wage plus a multiplier for vehicle and equipment costs — without converting log-on time into paid working hours.
- Algorithmic due process: a right to a human-reviewed explanation before deactivation, modelled on Article 22 of the GDPR, which would meaningfully constrain the most arbitrary management practice without dictating commercial terms.
- A portable benefits account funded by a small per-task platform contribution, vesting with the worker rather than with the platform — the model already piloted in Washington State and Utah.
This is not the European Platform Work Directive, and it should not be. Israel's tech ecosystem, including domestic platforms like Wolt's Israeli operation, is small enough that a reclassification shock would visibly contract a market that consumers and part-time earners both use intensively. But the answer to that risk is not the current status quo — a 2022 class-action ruling sitting on appeal while 17,000 people work without basic protections. It is to write the missing tier of law the Uber Bill leaves out, and to do it now, while the Economic Affairs Committee still has the bill in hand.