Gray Areas with Regard to Employment Status

Claire Marzo^[1]

Abstract

Gray zones appear where standard employment statuses lose their pertinence. For legal scholars, gray zones involve (1) a weakening of the legal frameworks governing work and employment (the contract of employment) which result in a lessening of the efficacy of law; (2) A legal norm in the process of (re)constitution or the workings of a system of hybrid regulation. The chapter looks to see whether these features are to be found in recent developments in European labor law, and in the regulation of platform work more particularly. An analysis of the recent Platform Work Directive in terms of its legal gray areas reveals a weakening of the overall legal framework governing work.

The first section offers an overall assessment of the Directive and identifies the legal difficulties that may arise in applying it. In this, we follow the account of the gray zone given by Azaïs, Dieuaide, and Kesselman (2017), looking for ambiguities, unclarities and silences in the Directive that may represent legislative defect or even a frank disengagement of the law despite the EU’s declared intent. In the second section, we look at the motivations behind the new directive, asking whether it represents the (re)constitution of a legal norm, or simply one more instance of “the working of a system of hybrid regulation informed by the contradictory interests at play in the employment relationship”. Put another way, we ask whether the Directive puts into question the very idea of labor law.

Keywords: Digital platforms; platform work, European Union law; French law; digital law.

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Introduction^[2]

First proposed by French jurist Alain Supiot in a seminal article published in the journal Droit Social in 2000, the concept of the zone grise was intended to give theoretical expression to an observable blurring of the formerly rigorous distinction between employment and self-employment. For Supiot, the emergence of “autonomy within subordination” in the former and of “allegiance in independence” in the latter reflected, on the one hand, the “dilution of the relationship of subordination” that had characterized employment, and, on the other, the intensified control exercised over self-employed contractors by economically powerful corporations. In acknowledging this reality, he said, the concept had “the merit of breaking with black-and-white thinking and so paving the way for labor law of a new kind”, whose principles would govern all work relationships, whatever their character (Supiot 2000).

Over the next twenty-five years, two successive multidisciplinary, international research projects^[3] set out to further investigate and develop Supiot’s idea of the gray zone. Sharing his belief in its analytic power and policy relevance, the researchers sought to avoid the heuristic limitations entailed by any attempt to grasp the realities of work through the traditional, binary, legal distinction between employment and self-employment. This enabled them to explore the disconnect between law and the realities it is supposed to regulate (Bureau and Dieuaide 2018) and to map the interactions between the institutional, political, economic and social actors that are in fact involved in remaking labor regulation in a changing and increasingly digital world.

A sociological account of the blurring of legal distinctions noted by Supiot reveals the processes involved, notably a deinstitutionalization of work relationships reflected in an “increasing fragmentation of practices and representations and the multiplication of observable types [of work relationships], a ‘destandardisation’ that sees individuals and groups turn to makeshift solutions or conceive of new and often eclectic social arrangements” (Conchon et al. 2011). In other words, gray zones appear where standard employment statuses lose their pertinence, though as the situations they correspond to are diverse, they do not everywhere arise for the same reason.

Every discipline has its own specific concerns, and for the legal scholar that I am, coming to grips with the gray zone meant turning to this account of the idea by Azaïs, Dieuaide and Kesselman (2017):

The idea of the gray zone of employment that we propose to discuss is intended to give a better account of actors’ ambiguous positions, simultaneously engaged and not engaged in an employment relationship. It has three key aspects:

• It directly relates changes in the employment relationship to the relationships of power, trust or influence between employers and others (government, business, civil society, etc.). Going beyond a narrow, strictly legal and thus binary conception of the position of employer, it allows us to take account of practices of indeterminate status, neither legal nor illegal, that arise from non-legal relationships or informal agreements. It reflects a retreat or erosion of law.
• It expresses the weakening of the legal frameworks for the regulation of labor and the protection of workers whatever their “state of subordination” (Supiot 2000). Workers may be pseudo-employees, pseudo-self-employed, or employed but insecure. It reflects a fall in the proportion of the working population covered by a contract of employment.
• Finally, it suggests that perhaps it is the inadequacies of national labor-market institutions and the lacunae resulting from them that underlie the emergence of what may prove to be a new regime of employment. In other words, the persistence and diversity of gray zones can as well be thought of as the effect of a legal norm in want of or in the process of (re)constitution, as of the workings of a system of hybrid regulation informed by the contradictory interests at play in the employment relationship.

While I agree with these authors on the way the interplay of interests they evoke has resulted in newly fluid configurations of power, I wish here to concentrate on the juridical aspects. A specifically legal reading of the above account notes two features of relevance:

1. A weakening of the legal frameworks governing work and employment, accompanied by a fall in the proportion of the working population covered by a contract of employment, meaning fewer protections offered to fewer workers and, more generally, a lessening of the efficacy of law.
2. A legal norm in the process of (re)constitution or the workings of a system of hybrid regulation informed by the contradictory interests at play in the employment relationship? The involvement of new actors such as digital platforms, consumer associations or non-worker cooperatives stands in constant tension with the traditional power relationships reflected in the institutionalized, tripartite relation between government, employers and unions.

The question to be answered here, then, is this: Are these features to be seen in recent developments in European labor law, and in the regulation of platform work more particularly? An analysis of the recent Platform Work Directive in terms of the legal gray areas it generates or allows does indeed reveal a weakening of the overall legal framework governing work.

European law itself is a recent creation. Established in 1957, the European Union and its institutions do not enjoy the same legitimacy as do national institutions, often the result of centuries of negotiation. European labor law gradually emerged in the 1970s with the adoption of directives and regulations by what was then the European Economic Community, with its six Member States—a top-down process initiated and executed at the supranational level, albeit in response to pressure on its institutions from employers’ organisations and/or trade unions. Considerable growth in the number of Member States and the increasing involvement of other actors has since led to a weakening of European social law. Gray areas have always existed, given the very nature of law, which is open to interpretation, but these developments have seen them proliferate. The problems of European labor law, and of the recent Platform Work Directive more specifically, offer very good illustrations of the way the margin of appreciation (the scope for varying interpretation) allowed to Member States generates legal gray areas.

Here, then, we shall apply the notion of the gray zone to the analysis of the Directive on Improving Working Conditions in Platform Work. A directive of the kind had been proposed some three years earlier (COM [2021] 762 final of 9.12.20),^[4] and following lengthy consideration and negotiation in Council and Parliament (Battez, Elci, and Toutain 2024), the final version was eventually adopted on 23 October 2024 (Directive EU 2024/2831). The Directive provides for the determination of the employment status of persons engaged to work via digital platforms and establishes new rights, for both employees and self-employed workers, in respect of algorithmic management. It is innovative in its provision for traceability and transparency in the use of algorithms, in the obligation it imposes on platforms to declare work undertaken to the relevant national authorities and otherwise to make essential information available, and also, most notably, in its approach to the employment status of platform workers, where it provides for a presumption of employment. It opens, in fact, an entirely new field of social/digital law.

The Directive has, however, resulted in much uncertainty, as it leaves its concrete application for the most part to Member States and their courts. Here, we consider what the future may hold and venture a few predictions. The first section following this introduction offers an overall assessment of the Directive and identifies the legal difficulties that may arise in applying it. In this, we follow the account of the gray zone given by Azaïs, Dieuaide and Kesselman above, looking for ambiguities, unclarities and silences in the Directive that may represent legislative defect or even a frank disengagement of the law despite the EU’s declared intent. In the second section, we look at the motivations behind the new directive, seeking to identify elements corresponding to the second of the two key features identified above and asking whether it represents the (re)constitution of a legal norm, or simply one more instance of “the working of a system of hybrid regulation informed by the contradictory interests at play in the employment relationship”. Put another way, we ask whether the Directive puts into question the very idea of labor law.

I. The Directive Creates Gray Areas That Represent a Weakening of the Legal Framework

Law always creates gray areas, given the inevitable uncertainties accompanying the application of a norm to concrete situations. The mere fact that a law is new prompts doubts about what it will mean in practice. For legislation cannot help but leave a margin of appreciation to the judge whom Montesquieu called “the mouthpiece of the law”. That said, some instances of legislation create more uncertainty than others. Can we identify any specific “legislative failings” (Kesselman 2022) in the Platform Work Directive? The account of the gray zone given above draws our attention to two aspects in particular: (A) the growth of ambiguous employment corresponding to a reduction in the proportion of the workforce engaged in a standard employment relationship, and (B) the gray zone can be more generally understood, beyond the question of employment status, as representing an erosion of law. Both of these aspects are exemplified in the Directive, as we shall see.

A. Gray areas representing a reduction in the applicability of the contract of employment

If the gray zone is understood in terms of the non-applicability of the contract of employment, it can only signify, legally speaking, an expansion of self-employment. The Directive’s introduction of a rebuttable presumption of employment was intended, in principle, to counter this (1), but closer analysis reveals in fact the unexpected possibility of growth in the proportion classified as self-employed (2).

1) A greater role for national courts with the introduction of a rebuttable presumption of employment

The most important feature of the Directive is its introduction of a presumption of employment. The European Commission declared that this was intended to flush out cases of what are sometimes called the “bogus self-employed” or “legally independent but economically dependent workers”. Article 4.1 of the first version of the draft Directive, amended before adoption, provided that “The contractual relationship between a digital labour platform that controls . . . the performance of work and a person performing platform work through that platform shall be legally presumed to be an employment”.

The draft shows that the Commission had decided to make employment the default. Given the binary distinction that generally prevails among the EU’s Member States (only a few, Spain among them, allowing for a third, intermediary status), it wanted as many platform workers as possible to be classified as employees. They would then benefit, under applicable national law, from more extensive rights than do the self-employed, notably in matters of employment law and social protection (Explanatory Memorandum, s. 6).

The choice of the three options put forward for consideration by the Commission (the presumption of employment, a third status, or the simple reversal of the burden of proof, i.e. shifting it onto the platform in proceedings brought by workers) had, however, ruled out from the start any more stringent provision. For the Commission could have envisaged the imposition of employee status by means of hard law, as exemplified, for instance, by the health and safety directives that impose clear obligations (e.g. the limitation of working time to 40 hours a week by the Working Time Directive (Directive 2003/88/CE). The Commission preferred, however, to leave Member States a greater margin of manoeuvre. The presumption of employment, the most protective of the three options proposed, was supported by the unions (SWD[2021] 143 final) and also by the European Parliament (European Parliament, 2019). The decision in favor of the rebuttable presumption already indicated a preference for a relatively uncoercive instrument that would leave much discretion to judges, states and even platforms, so favoring deinstitutionalization, yet the final version of the Directive adopted in October 2024 would be even less protective in its effects.

2) The possibility of an increase in the proportion of workers classified as self-employed despite the presumption of employment

The Commission provided in the first version of the Directive a list of criteria for assessing a platform’s control of the performance of work, and thus the existence of an employment relationship:

1. effectively determining, or setting upper limits for the level of remuneration;
2. requiring the person performing platform work to respect specific binding rules with regard to appearance, conduct towards the recipient of the service or performance of the work;
3. supervising the performance of work or verifying the quality of the results of the work including by electronic means;
4. effectively restricting the freedom, including through sanctions, to organise one’s work, in particular the discretion to choose one’s working hours or periods of absence, to accept or to refuse tasks or to use subcontractors or substitutes;
5. effectively restricting the possibility to build a client base or to perform work for any third party.

If two or more of these criteria were met, the platform would be legally presumed to be an employer, and the persons who did work through it would enjoy the employment and social rights attached to employee status. This also reversed the burden of proof.

In the final text, however, these criteria had disappeared, and two new Articles 4 and 5 left it to Member States to give effect to the presumption in practice. It was certainly maintained in principle, Art. 5, s. 1 providing that

The contractual relationship between a digital labour platform and a person performing platform work through that platform shall be legally presumed to be an employment relationship where facts indicating direction and control, in accordance with national law, collective agreements or practice in force in the Member States and with consideration to the case-law of the Court of Justice, are found.

But it would be left to States and then judges to decide on the indicators of control and direction, the canonical criteria for the existence of an employment relation (Gamet 2021, 2022). Some have taken this as maintaining or even reinforcing the presumption (Marzo 2022), but most have seen in it a dilution of the obligation that could lead to an increase in the proportion classified as self-employed as it is the State that will decide criteria and conditions and in doing so might make employee status more difficult to attain.

Furthermore, stepping back from close interpretation, we may also see the final version as acknowledging the erosion of law.

B. Gray Areas in the Directive as Acknowledgement of the Weakening of Law

Beyond the ambiguities related to the interpretation of the presumption of employment that now allow States more room to manoeuvre, this once very ambitious legislation can be understood as an acknowledgement of the weakening of the force of European law. Other gray areas attest to this: firstly, the Member State is free to decide how the directive is to be implemented (section B.1 below), and secondly, it is the platform that is made responsible for applying it (B.2). Scholarly interpretations do of course differ: some celebrate the creation of obligations on these actors; for others, these provisions can equally be interpreted as a sign of disengagement on the part of the EU, which avoided making hard law, preferring instead to make recommendations and leave key decisions to other actors.

1) The role of the State in deciding key issues, e.g. the promotion of collective bargaining

We have already seen how national governments were made the chief decision-makers regarding the implementation of the presumption of employment. The same key role for Member States is found again in Article 25 of the Directive, entitled “Promotion of collective bargaining in platform work”, which provides that

Member States shall, without prejudice to the autonomy of the social partners and taking into account the diversity of national practices, take adequate measures to promote the role of the social partners and encourage the exercise of the right to collective bargaining in platform work, including measures with regard to the determination of the correct employment status of platform workers and to facilitate the exercise of their rights related to algorithmic management.

This grants an important role to States while not giving workers a hard right to collective bargaining.

It should be noted that France fought in the negotiations to ensure that the presumption of employment and the possibility of the judicial reclassification of status that it entailed should not apply in circumstances where collective agreements were arrived at through employer-union negotiation. The so-called “French derogation” would have exempted that country from the presumption on the basis that it had already set up a public body—the Autorité des relations sociales des plateformes d’emploi (ARPE)—to govern industrial relations in platform work, charged with establishing national collective bargaining for the sector under government auspices. An endeavor that for the moment has had little success in winning the confidence of those working through ride-hailing and delivery platforms (Marzo 2024). This invocation of collective bargaining as an excuse to avoid the legislative presumption and the ensuing dilution of the text illustrates how the significant role granted to Member States could undermine the legal force of the Directive.

2) The role of platforms in deciding key issues, e.g. health and safety at work

The second indication of the weakening of law to be found in the draft Directive is the role given to platforms themselves. For example, Recital 23 of the first draft of the Directive encouraged Member States to improve “the working conditions of genuine self-employed persons performing platform work”. This was still the case in its penultimate version, where at the end of Recital 25 platforms were encouraged to themselves take responsibility for the social protection of self-employed workers:

Where a digital labour platform decides—on a purely voluntary basis or in agreement with the persons concerned—to pay for social protection, accident insurance or other forms of insurance, training measures or similar benefits to self-employed persons working through that platform, those benefits as such should not be regarded as determining elements indicating the existence of an employment relationship.

The Directive as finally adopted states that

Member States should therefore establish appropriate measures in order to ensure that, under this Directive, persons performing platform work working through intermediaries enjoy the same level of protection as persons performing platform work who have a direct contractual relationship with the digital labour platform. Member States should establish appropriate mechanisms, including, where appropriate, through joint and several liability systems.

This can be understood as encouraging, though not obliging, platforms to protect their self-employed workers, but it also reflects a disengagement on the part of Member States, and even of the EU itself, which abstained from making hard law, preferring rather to enshrine in the Directive the recommendations ultimately orchestrated by the platforms themselves and to leave them free to decide on their implementation. The great leeway here allowed to the platforms accords with a logic of social deregulation (Froissart and Huang 2023). This amounts to legislative defect because, on the one hand, existing employment legislation is inapplicable, and on the other the lack of applicable legislation makes it impossible to apply the law (Dieuaide and Azaïs 2020). The provision represents an erosion of law that recalls the approach of France’s Loi d’orientation des mobilités (Loi 2019-1428 of 24 December 2019) and the so-called El Khomri employment legislation of 2016 (Loi 2016-1088 of 8 August 2016; see Daugareilh, Degryse, and Pochet 2019, among others). It reflects, without a doubt, the opposition of Member States, France chief among them, to the Commission’s earlier proposal. Here the gray area arises from the ambiguities of a weakened law.

We then face the question of whether we are witnessing a shift in the basis of law, for the existence of legal gray areas can also be understood as the effect of a system in movement. Does the Directive reflect a dynamic of this kind?

II. The Directive as Creating a Gray Area that Reflects a Legal Norm in the Process of (Re)Constitution

As noted earlier, law always creates gray areas, given the inevitable uncertainties regarding the application of norms, but here we need to look at the intentions of the European Commission, explicitly declared or implicit in its actions. Behind its intention to legislate, do we see “the workings of a system of hybrid regulation informed by the contradictory interests at play in the employment relationship”, or rather the process of (re)constitution of a legal norm? The Directive in fact represents new law, bearing on a new field, intended to frame and support a changing society. Behind it, one can make out two goals: that the new law should cover persons as such, not just employees, as had formerly been the case (A); and to legislate a multiplicity of specific rights to make up for the absence of any recognized status bringing with it codified rights to protection (B).

A. The Directive is not employment legislation: it does not cover employees alone

The Directive creates a new gray area in covering both employees and the self-employed, so effecting a reconfiguration of European social law (1), and also in covering persons who are not necessarily workers at all (2), thereby putting into question the very idea of labor law.

1) Employed and self-employed

Workers are the central concern of the Directive, as is clear from its name, being a directive “on improving working conditions in platform work”, but it is difficult to know who exactly these are. The definitions provided in Article 2 indicate the need to distinguish between a “person performing platform work”, meaning “an individual performing platform work, irrespective of the nature of the contractual relationship or the designation of that relationship by the parties involved” (Art. 2.1(c)), and a “platform worker”, meaning “any person performing platform work who has or is deemed to have an employment contract or an employment relationship as defined by the law, collective agreements or practice in force in the Member States with consideration to the case-law of the Court of Justice” (Art. 2.1(d)). Is it that the latter is an employee under EU law, but the former not necessarily?

The Directive is intended to apply to persons other than employees, and the self-employed are expressly mentioned. Yet it soon becomes clear that the Directive goes even further in concerning itself with all persons.

2) Not employment alone

The draft Directive sought to establish minimal rights “that apply to every person performing platform work in the Union” even if they “do not have an employment contract or employment relationship”.^[5] This provision is interesting because it clearly highlights the difficulty of identifying workers in the digital sphere, a difficulty that means it is easier to create personal rights, even fundamental personal rights, than to provide for workers’ rights. It also re-enacts, in so far as they apply to algorithmic management, the already existing protections afforded to natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data (Regulation (EU) 2016/679 ).

Taken as a whole, there is an attempt here to resolve the legal category of the worker—the subject of labor law—into that of the person. And the workers’ rights that are identified recall the rights of the natural person in the General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679), suggesting the emergence of a category of digital fundamental rights. The rights here granted to all join a corpus of so-called digital rights that has gradually expanded over recent years, among which we can identify a number of newly-minted fundamental rights intended to respond to the digitalization of actors’ dealings with each other and indeed of society more generally.

These new rights show us the Commission feeling its way forward in the areas concerned. The gray area is in that respect an effect of change, a change in the subject of rights, the worker no longer being protected as worker but as a human being. But if labor law is no longer concerned with the worker, is it still even labor law? Here emerges another gray area, with labor law itself being put into question. And here again, it remains to be seen whether the new mode of protection will prove more effective.

B. A new mode of regulation of work, or an attempt to protect newly unprotected workers?

One gray area, in the sense of uncertainty induced by a major legal upheaval, arises from the endeavor to regulate the digital sphere by law. Here this involves new rights granted to all workers (1). There is uncertainty because much in this field remains to be decided, and there is a sense that European lawmakers are still finding their feet. A new dynamic is emerging (2), but it remains to be seen whether it will lead to better protection of platform workers.

1) A plethora of digital rights

We shall not deal here with all the rights granted to workers by the Directive, but consider three that already appeared in the first version, the three following being granted to all workers.

Firstly, Article 6 imposed on digital platforms a duty to provide their workers with information about automated monitoring and decision-making systems. One recognizes here the right to information provided by Article 22 of the GDPR, but specified in such a way as to better meet the needs of workers.

Secondly, one finds rules requiring human monitoring of automated systems and human review of significant decisions. Articles 7 and 8 both imposed new obligations on Member States, who were to ensure platforms’ compliance. These measures might prove difficult to implement.

Thirdly and lastly, as regards the right to redress, Article 8 provided that “Member States shall ensure that platform workers have the right to obtain an explanation from the digital labour platform for any decision taken or supported by an automated decision-making system that significantly affects the platform worker’s working conditions”. To this was added provision for “effective and impartial dispute resolution and a right to redress” (Article 13). That right was underpinned by procedural guarantees, among them duties on platforms to provide means for workers to communicate securely with each other and with their representatives (Article 15), and on Member States to ensure disclosure of evidence in proceedings (Article 21) and protection against adverse treatment or consequences (Article 17) or dismissal (Article 18). The supervisory authorities monitoring the application of the GDPR in any State were made responsible for monitoring the application of the Platform Work Directive itself in matters of data protection. One again recognizes the method introduced by Articles 77 et seq. of the GDPR, which here receive a formulation more explicitly tailored to workers’ needs.

These rights were further developed and elaborated upon in the final version of the Directive, but one finds there the same intention to frame and support a new society whose functioning depends on digital systems. And these rights are accorded to all, rather than to employees alone.

Beyond the presumption of employment and the creation of rights against the algorithm, the Directive seeks to (re)configure labor law for platform workers. This is why different provisions of existing employment law are cited in the text and sometimes extended to cover self-employed workers. This being so, it is worth undertaking a detailed reading of the Directive and unravelling its different elements to see how different categories of workers are protected. For instance, the rights to social security will be given to employees only and thus limited to those who have benefited from the application of the presumption.

The Directive’s creation of a multiplicity of rights can perhaps be explained by the weakening of the presumption of employment that was to bring to platform workers the protections afforded to employees but in its weakened form does not do so. What we see instead is a gray area of new rights that have yet to be properly defined.

2) Political assessment

Analysis of the Directive has revealed a presumption of employment that is simultaneously put into question and, alongside this, the introduction of algorithmic and other rights. While we see the creation of gray areas in the sense of areas of legal uncertainty, we have also identified a trend toward the rewriting of labor law. We do not know, however, the direction the law will take, nor whether the adoption of the Directive and its transposition into national legislation will result in better protection for workers.

A number of cases in Member States and elsewhere have shown that the reclassification of employment status can be a thorny issue (see, for example, Dirringer 2021). One thinks of the recent Deliveroo cases in Belgium (Cloot 2021; “Tribunal du travail Bruxelles–Statut des coursiers Deliveroo”; Lievens and Surgeloose 2024), of a number of recent cases elsewhere,^[6] or again of the status of “worker” in the United Kingdom, which is not the same as the status of employee.^[7]

Taken as a whole, the Directive revises European social law to create a social law for the digital age. This has brought with it a new way of understanding the rights of platform workers. Does this herald a radical transformation in labor law? A look at the history of the construction of the European Union and of social Europe in particular suggests that it may well do. Social Europe grew rapidly in scope from its beginnings in the Treaty of Rome and through the 1970s. Its development then slowed with the integration of the new, East European Member States and the adoption of the intergovernmental (rather than supranational) policy-making exemplified by the Open Method of Coordination. Social Europe is now again being rethought for the modern, digital world. Recent initiatives, sometimes very little coercive in character, such as the European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan or the new guidelines on collective bargaining for the self-employed nonetheless evidence a new trend, and the Platform Work Directive accords with this. It is essential to ensure that the new law that is emerging retains the perennial goal of employment law, which is the protection of the worker, and that European labor law, with its concern for workers as a class, is not resolved into a multiplicity of individual rights, however fundamental. It is, as yet, too early to tell whether the Platform Work Directive will indeed bring about an improvement in the conditions of platform workers.

Conclusion

To conclude, this examination of the presumption of employment and of the rights accorded to platform workers under the new Directive shows what the notion of the gray zone can contribute to the analysis of changes in employment standards and other phenomena pertaining to work and employment. Bringing the heuristics and epistemics of gray zone theory to bear on these matters reveals 1) the limits to the applicability of law (for Donna Kesselman, “[the notion of] the gray zone allows the objectivation of the space that lies ‘between the law and the realities it is supposed to regulate’,”) and 2) the need for law’s further development. We are witnessing a reconfiguration of work and employment, with the appearance of new stakeholders mobilizing new resources in processes tending to varying degrees of institutionalization. The existence of such processes, however, should not lead to neglect of the role of law as the primary guarantor of rights and the ultimate protection of the worker.

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