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Lecture 3 Notes Comparative Labour Law
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Comparative Labour LawLecture 3
Part 1 - Europe
In all countries of Europe, work can be done in many forms. Some of it is employment, self-
employment, volunteering work, etc.
Most economically active people are people working on a contract of employment. How would we
define a contract of employment?
Most countries will roughly use the same definition for a contract of employment:
A contract of an employment, is a contract whereby one party (employee) undertakes the obligation
to perform (work against are renumeration) under authority/ subordination of another party
(employer). This definition specifies at least 3 basic elements of the definition of ‘contract of
employment’:
a. Work
a. Often very clear
b. Pay
a. Often very clear
c. In subordination
a. Asks for most elements of discussion
This is uncertainty about subordination is because work and pay is also present under the self-
employed:
Also, the contracts with the self-employed, called: (opdracht (NL), Dienstvertrag (DE), Contract for
Services (UK) contrat de prestation de service (FR) are characterised by the elements
(a) Work
(b) Pay
Here, however, the element “in subordination” is lacking 🡪 there may still be an element of directives
given by the other contracting party.
This means that the element of ‘subordination’ distinguished the contract of employment from the
contract of services 🡪 still doesn’t work that easily; there’s borderline cases of course.
� in principle, the contract for services with self-employed are not governed by most labour
and social security laws 🡪 makes it important to know the divide, although borderline cases
make this difficult to do
It is very important to identify a contract as being a contract of employment or not, because large
parts of labour law and social security law are only applicable to contracts of employment, not to
other employment relationships. 🡪 key to labour law, as well as a large part of the social security law
You as a client of a hairdresser would not like to be seen as the employer of the hairdresser with all
its consequences 🡪 you only pay the 1 price of the haircut
Other example: hairdresser is unemployed and cannot start their own hairdresser 🡪 starts to work in
the shop of another hairdresser but becomes an independent worker 🡪 all the money you get from
your clients is what you earn, however you have to pay a certain percentage as a lease for this chair 🡪
however, in reality this hairdresser would still be an employee, and can therefore claim all the rights
they have as an employee, so they return to the owner of the hair salon. 🡪 this would be a court case if
it went this far, the court will then give a judgement on the actual relationship. 🡪 this shows how small
the line is between self-employed people and contractual employees
, It is difficult to see the difference because there are two sides to one story:
● A med. Doctor may be independent or an employee of an hospital.
● A photographer may be independent or an employee of a newspaper
● A gardener may be independent or an employee of a gardening company.
There’s clearly a twilight zone between employees and self-employed workers, which couldn’t be
settled entirely in any country. 🡪 this shows that the ‘control/authority’ test is not enough to
distinguish; therefore, there are more difficult tests to see which contract is actually taking place.
The multiple or mixed tests
A multiplicity of factors is taken into consideration, although note of these factors are actually
decisive in determining the type of contract. Starting point of this approach is still to ask whether the
work is being done voluntarily, or under control of another party.
Other questions asked are a bigger range of circumstances which determine the type of contract
together:
− The freedom to organise working time?
− Who bears the entrepreneurial risk?
− Who delivers the raw materials and the tools?
− etc.
o see syllabus
courts have to study all aspects of the relationship; no factor on its on can be decisive, and each
might vary in weight and direction; they often depend on the type of weight this factor has in the
actual situation.
The judgements may therefore differ from case to case, even if there’s a large similarity between the
cases, no case is actually identical
- there may be differences within costs and who is responsible for these costs, so it is
important to know what kind of contract you have.
Alternative solutions proposed by scholars
− measure where the employee forms an integral part of the business
− measure of economic dependency of the other party
however: European countries are reluctant to follow these suggestions as these would create new
borderline questions 🡪 liberals 🡪 this would also expand domain of labour law too far into the world of
self-employment
instead of adopting a whole approach like this…
Alternative solutions already applied by lawmakers.
− Some states created a straightforward provision in statutory law to ensure labour law
protection cannot be circumvented by sham civil law contracts
− Other states adopted a statutory provision on a rebuttable presumption of the existence of a
contract of employment (e.g. Netherlands)
− ‘Assimilation’ widening the scope of legal rules on certain categories of workers who might
fall outside of the category of employees
o Assimilation: Sometimes the domain of labour law and social security law is slightly
expanded
− Creating an intermediate category which doesn’t expand the scope of labour law as a whole
but only of a number of labour laws
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