The boundaries between dependent employment and self-employment have become increasingly blurred in some areas in recent years, in the context of changing labour markets and the spread of practices such as outsourcing and contracting out.
The debate focuses on emerging employment arrangements that are mid-way between self-employment and dependent employment. ‘Economically dependent workers’ have some characteristics of both in that they are formally self-employed – they usually have a sort of ‘service contract’ with the employer – and that they depend on a single employer for their income, or a large part of it. In some cases, economically dependent workers may also be similar to employees from other points of view, in that they have a lack of a clear organisational separation – in other words, they work on the employer’s premises and/or use the employer’s equipment – and no clear distinction of task – they perform the same tasks as some of the existing employees, or tasks that were formerly carried out by employees and later contracted out to ‘collaborators’.
