TL;DR

  • On 16 June 2026 the Gerechtshof Amsterdam (Amsterdam Court of Appeal) ruled that Temper operates as an uitzendbureau (temporary work agency), not a marketplace for self-employed workers.
  • The court overturned a July 2024 District Court ruling, finding Temper has beschikking over de werkers (effective control over the workers) and that the work runs for Temper’s account and risk.
  • The contracts qualify as uitzendovereenkomsten (agency-work contracts) under Article 7:690 of the Dutch Civil Code, and Temper must apply the CAO voor uitzendkrachten (the collective labour agreement for agency workers).
  • The ruling shifts the legal default: Dutch platforms must now affirmatively demonstrate genuine arms-length brokerage to avoid agency reclassification.
  • The judgment arrived the same day the Eerste Kamer adopted Bill 36783 (the hourly-rate presumption), tightening platform work from a second direction.

The Gerechtshof Amsterdam handed down its judgment on Monday 16 June 2026, and within the same news cycle the Eerste Kamer adopted Bill 36783. Two separate institutions, two separate procedures, and a single message for anyone running, working through, or advising on a Dutch labour platform: substance is going to win over labels from here on.

The trade unions FNV and CNV had appealed the July 2024 Amsterdam District Court ruling that found in Temper’s favour. That earlier judgment had largely taken the contracts at face value: the platform called itself a marketplace, the workers were labelled ZZP’ers (zelfstandigen zonder personeel, the standard Dutch term for solo self-employed workers), and the District Court accepted the framing. The Court of Appeal did not. At Remote Work Europe we have been tracking this case as part of the broader European reckoning with platform work, and the appeal judgment is the most significant Dutch ruling on the question to date.

What the Court of Appeal actually decided

The substantive finding is narrow and important. The Gerechtshof Amsterdam held that Temper has beschikking over de werkers – effective control over the workers placed through the platform – and that those workers operate for Temper’s account and risk. Both elements push the relationship out of marketplace territory and into agency work.

Under Article 7:690 of the Dutch Civil Code (Burgerlijk Wetboek), an uitzendovereenkomst requires three things: the agency makes the worker available to a third party; the third party exercises direction over the work; and the agency itself holds the kind of control over the placement that goes beyond simple matchmaking. The court found all three present in how Temper actually operates, regardless of what the terms and conditions said.

The consequence flows directly. If the contracts are uitzendovereenkomsten, the CAO voor uitzendkrachten applies, with pay floors, paid leave, pension contributions and a structured progression through phase A, B and C employment protections – the protections the platform model had been built around avoiding.

Why the District Court got it wrong

The two courts reached opposite conclusions on essentially the same facts, which is worth a moment. The District Court looked at the contractual architecture: workers signed up as ZZP’ers, the platform’s terms described a brokerage service, the hirers contracted directly with the individual workers. On paper, this was a marketplace.

The Court of Appeal looked at how the arrangement actually worked. Who decided which workers were offered which shifts; who set the rate structure; who bore the financial risk when a client cancelled or a shift fell through; who could effectively remove a worker from the platform, and on what grounds. Each of those questions, examined honestly, pointed to Temper exercising the substantive control of an agency rather than the neutral facilitation of a marketplace.

This is the part other Dutch platforms now have to sit with. The Court of Appeal did not invent a new test; it applied the existing one with more attention to substance. Article 7:690 BW has not been rewritten, but platforms can no longer rely on contractual self-description to define their legal character.

What this means for other Dutch platforms

The ruling does not automatically reclassify every other platform in the Dutch market. Each case is decided on its own facts, and the Gerechtshof Amsterdam’s reasoning is binding only as between FNV, CNV and Temper. But the framework the court used is now the framework any first-instance court will reach for when the next claim is filed, and the Hoge Raad (Supreme Court) would have to overturn the methodology, not just the application, to change that.

In practice, platforms with Dutch exposure are looking at two questions. Can they evidence that the work genuinely flows directly between the hirer and the worker, with the platform’s role confined to introduction, listing and payment processing? And can they evidence that the worker bears genuine entrepreneurial risk, sets their own rates in any meaningful sense, and exercises real choice over which engagements to accept? The thinner the answers, the closer the model sits to the Temper finding.

For workers operating through platforms, the reading is more delicate. A successful reclassification claim is a significant undertaking; it requires either a union willing to litigate, as FNV and CNV did here, or a worker with the resources to bring a claim individually. What changes after this ruling is the bargaining backdrop, not the day-to-day cashflow.

The risk worth flagging here is that the workers who would benefit most from the protections the CAO voor uitzendkrachten brings are also the ones most exposed if platforms respond by tightening eligibility, narrowing the pool, or withdrawing from segments of the market. A ruling that improves the legal position of platform workers in principle is not the same as a ruling that improves the income of the specific workers currently on the platform; that gap is where the next phase of this conversation will be fought.

The same-week pincer

The Gerechtshof Amsterdam judgment did not arrive in a vacuum. The Eerste Kamer adopted Bill 36783, the Wet rechtsvermoeden bij laag tarief (a legal presumption of employment below a defined hourly rate), on the same day. It had been detached from the broader Wet VBAR framework, withdrawn earlier in 2026 after sustained criticism, and pushed through separately on a deadline tied to roughly €600 million in EU Recovery and Resilience Facility funding. The law must be in the Staatsblad by 31 August 2026 and commences on 31 December 2026, with practical effect from 1 January 2027.

That is the legislative leg of the pincer. The third leg is enforcement: the Belastingdienst has been operating an active reclassification regime through 2026 under a soft-landing arrangement, with fines reserved for cases of intent or gross negligence but reclassification itself fully on the table.

For the full legislative and tax-enforcement picture – Bill 36783’s hourly-rate presumption, the Belastingdienst approach, and the wider collapse of the Wet VBAR framework – see our companion piece on Dutch self-employment enforcement →. The point worth holding here is that the Temper ruling is the judicial expression of the same shift the legislature and tax authority are pursuing; three institutions, broadly aligned, tightening the boundary between self-employment and employment in the same month is not coincidental.

International parallels

Dutch courts are not the first to look through platform labels. The Spanish Supreme Court reached a comparable conclusion on Uber in 2024, building on the earlier Ley Rider framework. The UK Supreme Court’s 2021 judgment in Uber BV v Aslam found that Uber drivers were workers rather than independent contractors. Italian courts have reclassified Deliveroo riders on similar substance-over-form grounds. What the Dutch ruling adds is another senior national jurisdiction confirming the direction of travel, and the cumulative weight makes it harder for any single platform to argue its national market is the exception.

What to watch from here

For platform operators with Dutch exposure, the immediate questions are operational and documentary. How is the platform’s role evidenced in the contracts, the worker-facing interface, the dispute-resolution process, the rate-setting mechanism and the cancellation policy? Where the practice diverges from the marketplace framing, the documentation that papers over the gap is the documentation the next court will look at hardest.

For workers, the most useful posture is informational. Knowing how the Gerechtshof Amsterdam has ruled, and knowing what the CAO voor uitzendkrachten would mean if applied to your current platform, is a stronger position than not knowing. The unions that brought this case will not be standing down, and the next claim is already being prepared somewhere.

For anyone moving into the Netherlands to work through a platform – and our Netherlands country guide has the wider context on living and working there – the practical implication is that the Dutch market is no longer one where the platform’s framing of the relationship is the relationship. The legal architecture underneath is now visibly stronger than the contractual surface.

A Court of Appeal, the Eerste Kamer and the Belastingdienst all moving in the same direction, in the same month, on the same fundamental question, is not the kind of pattern Dutch labour-market actors get to ignore.