Dependent self-employment across Europe: involuntariness, country’s wealth and labour market institutions

Dependent self-employed individuals: are they different from paid employees?

“…These results are contradictory to the earlier established findings of Muehlberger (2007a), Fehringer (2014) or Th€ ornquist (2015), arguing in favour of Dependent selfemployed individuals this relationship. Thus, it is an interesting research question to see whether the established patterns and theoretical expectations of PWT changed or were only time-and/or contextspecific (Eichhorst et al, 2013;Carrasco and Hernanz, 2021;Allan et al, 2021). Therefore, we particularly state the following hypothesis to be verified: H1.…”

“…Given the proliferation of technological change and the appearance of new forms of employment, relations in the labour market have been altered fundamentally, including the complexity of self-employment. Growing attention is paid to the different forms of self-employment, which on the one hand, may be perceived as a way to circumvent labour regulations (Sargeant, 2017;Baker et al, 2018;MacDonald and Giazitzoglu, 2019), described as precarious work, with less stability, higher risk and uncertain income (Putnin ¸ s and Sauka, 2011;Ald en and Hammarstedt, 2016;Moore and Newsome, 2018;Conen and Schippers, 2019;Hernanz and Carrasco, 2021;Heyes and Tomlinson, 2021;Kitschelt and Rehm, 2022) but on the other hand, a way how to allow individuals to strive for more independence and freedom (Rustagi, 2013;Allen and Curington, 2014;Hagqvist et al, 2015;Murgia and Pulignano, 2021). Another perspective highlights the importance of self-employed persons working as freelancers, their role in enabling entrepreneurial attitudes (van Stel and de Vries, 2015;Burke et al, 2020) and their impact on the productivity and efficiency of other organisations (Popiel, 2017;Bologna, 2018;Drahokoupil and Fabo, 2019;Pichault and McKeown, 2019).…”

Grey workers in the European Union: precariousness among economically dependent solo self-employed

“…The present study further elucidates the non-ideal-type(s) of self-employed by focusing on the least romanticized group, i.e. those most prone to WP nowadays: the economically dependent solo self-employed (Mühlberger, 2007; Horodnic and Williams, 2019; Carrasco and Hernanz, 2021). Due to their economic dependency, using an oversimplified binary division of the labor market, the group is positioned between the traditional (fully) dependent employees and (fully) autonomous self-employed (Murgia et al.…”

“…Workers in the agriculture, arts, entertainment, recreation and household services were at high(er) risk of dependent/bogus self-employment (Williams and Horodnic, 2018, p. 119). Carrasco and Hernanz (2021) used 2017 European Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) to explore EU25-based economically dependent non-agricultural solo self-employed whose main client decides about their working hours. The probability to become this type of dependent solo self-employed decreased with age, level of education, job tenure and voluntariness to enter solo self-employment (whereas the probability was higher among those involuntarily “pushed” to self-employment by their former employer than those previously unemployed who were “pushed” by the lack of employment opportunities) (Carrasco and Hernanz, 2021).…”

“…By default, these conversions are implemented regardless of the employees' preferences (“involuntary” self-employment) and the newly established partnerships preserve the previous subordination of the weaker contracting party to the stronger one (Mühlberger, 2007; Kautonen et al. , 2009; Carrasco and Hernanz, 2021). Such subordination assumes the presence of personal dependency on top of the economic one (Mühlberger, 2007; Böheim and Mühlberger, 2009).…”