The ‘gig economy’: employee, self-employed or the need for a special employment regulation?
Adrián TodolÃ-Signes
Additional contact information
Adrián TodolÃ-Signes: Employment Law Department, Faculty of Law, University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Spain
Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 2017, vol. 23, issue 2, 193-205
Abstract:
The digital era has changed employment relationships dramatically, causing a considerable degree of legal uncertainty as to which rules apply in cyberspace. Technology is transforming business organisation in a way that makes employees – as subordinate workers – less necessary. New types of companies, based on the ‘on-demand economy’ or so-called ‘sharing economy’ and dedicated to connecting customers directly with individual service providers, are emerging. These companies conduct their entire core business through workers that they classify as self-employed. In this context, employment law is facing its greatest challenge, as it has to deal with a very different reality to the one existing when it was created. This article analyses the literature available about the classification of this new type of worker as an employee or as self-employed, concluding that there is a need for a new special labour regulation. It also describes and justifies the bases for this new special labour regulation.
Keywords: Outsourcing; ‘sharing’ economy; employment contract; self-employment; Uber economy; gig economy; economic dependency; legal concept of employee; gig economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1024258917701381 (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:treure:v:23:y:2017:i:2:p:193-205
DOI: 10.1177/1024258917701381
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().