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.
Highlights
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 (Cordova, 1986; Supiot et al, 1998)
Among non-standard employment relations, the so-called “solo self-employment”—self-employed workers without employees or “own account workers”—is increasingly intertwined with precarious forms of work, in which individuals have low legal protection, a limited coverage in terms of social security provisions, little capacity for savings, insurance or pensions, and are hardly included in traditional interest representation (Stanworth and Stanworth, 1995; Schulze Buschoff and Schmidt, 2009; Dekker, 2010; Keune, 2013; Spasova et al, 2017; Jansen and Sluiter, 2019)
Solo self-employment is a category that is challenging our understanding of the nature of employment relationship, that is to say Hybrid Areas of Work the opposition between employers and employees, and is encouraging discussion around the emergence of “hybrid” areas of work (Murgia et al, 2016; Armano and Murgia, 2017; Murgia and Pulignano, 2019)
Summary
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 (Cordova, 1986; Supiot et al, 1998). A future agenda for research is proposed, with the aim of contributing to the development of transdisciplinary and multi-method approaches, more able to grasp the emerging “hybrid areas of work” and achieve an in-depth understanding of the increasingly extensive and populated categories of the solo self-employed.
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