Hybrid Areas of Work Between Employment and Self-Employment: Emerging Challenges and Future Research Directions

Abstract

The growth of non-standard employment relations has created one of the major challenges in terms of workers' rights as well as collective representation in European societies. Among non-standard employment relations, so-called "solo self-employed"-self-employed workers without employees-are challenging the very foundations of our labor markets, that is to say the opposition between employers and employees, fostering the development of emerging "hybrid" areas of work. The heterogeneity of the solo self-employed is difficult to capture from official statistics, which are still based on traditional classifications, and questions also the legal categories that qualify these workers. Moreover, the fact that solo self-employed workers do not form a homogenous group, and are diverse in terms of their activities, interests and needs, calls for changes in the way trade unions, employer organizations, and new freelancer associations develop collective actions, claims-making activities, and strategies of organizing. With the aim to achieve an in-depth understanding of the increasingly extensive and populated categories of the solo self-employed, this contribution aims at reconstructing the state of the art within different fields of study, such as employment relations, labor law, industrial relations and social movements, and at offering some possible future research directions.

Mind the gap between discourses and practices: Platform workers’ representation in France and Italy

“…From a methodological point of view, we position our study within the framework for comparative qualitative research in industrial relations (Almond and Connolly, 2020;Murray et al, 2010). In an attempt to interpret the existing polyphony of meanings and actions among the studied unions and alternative actors, our research is based on a cross-national ethnography (Hannerz, 2003) on the collective representation of solo self-employed workers in Europe (Murgia et al, 2020). The research was conducted simultaneously in three countries -France, Italy and Slovakia -and included six months of extensive ethnographic fieldwork, carried out between July and December 2018 by three native-speaking researchers.…”

Independent or Dependent? European Labour Statistics and Their (In)ability to Identify Forms of Dependency in Self-employment

“…These phenomena have been further exacerbated by the advent of digital labour platforms, which made the experience of labour even more fragmented and embedded in global competition (Howcroft & Bergvall-Kåreborn, 2019;Kaine & Josserand, 2019). From a legal perspective, the development of these forms of employment relations implies shifting the regulation of employment relations from labour regulation to issues related to trade relations and commercial law (Countouris & De Stefano, 2019), redrawing -or in many cases excluding -access to labour and social protection regulations (Murgia et al, 2020;Digennaro, 2020). Moreover, outsourcing and subcontracting practices have shaped the forms of both economic and operational dependency that define the emerging work arrangements.…”

“…In this context, public statistics are also struggling to represent and monitor these changes. Consolidated definitions and measures employed by labour force surveys have been challenged by the erosion of the traditional classification of work arrangements rooted in the employment versus self-employment dichotomy, on which not only labour statistics, but also legal definitions and welfare regimes have hitherto relied (Murgia et al, 2020). To describe these changes and the blurred boundaries between employment and self-employment, categories like 'dependent' self-employed (Eurofound, 2017;Eurostat, 2018;Williams & Horodnic, 2018, 2019, 'quasi' (Kautonen & Kibler, 2016) or 'false' and 'bogus' selfemployed (Thörnquist, 2015), as well as 'dependent contractors' (ILO, 2018a(ILO, , 2018b(ILO, , 2018c, have received growing attention in national and European official statistics.…”

Platform capitalism - towards the neo-commodification of labour?

“…Thus, we can conclude that while platform labour in its purest form bypasses or even erodes social protection systems which are not designed to cover solo 4 self-employed workers, it also presents a strategy to 'add up' a decent income through extra work -platform workers can thus be seen as a prime example of 'hybrid self-employed', where the boundaries between employment and self-employment are blurred -both in terms of their legal status and the discourse surrounding them (Murgia et al 2020;Murgia and Pulignano 2019). Crucially for our topic, this sort of arrangement is not a system anomaly -it means that platform labour not only embodies the tendencies of recommodification but it also accelerates the workfare agenda, by imposing a market solution to market problems.…”