Legal Acknowledgement of the Category of Economically Dependent Workers

Abstract

In the current context of economic and social crisis, our study aims to determine whether labour law protection should be granted only to employees or whether other categories of workers should also be protected. As a part of the research project, ‘Which securities for (which) workers in time of crisis?’, we introduce some clarifications in relation to the second part of the question (‘which workers’?), considering, in particular, the intermediate category of economically dependent workers in different European States. However, there is a certain degree of uncertainty surrounding the definition of economically dependent work and confusion as regards the designation of the phenomenon and its overlap with the problem of false self-employed workers. Some States have legal concepts of an economically dependent worker, while in many others it is a phenomenon that remains under discussion.