This book presents a comparative analysis of the changing legal notions of the employment relationship in four European countries – the UK, Germany, France and Italy. It analyses the ways in which, during the past few decades, industrialised countries have witnessed a progressive crisis of the regulatory framework sustaining the binary model of the employment relationship based on the subordinate employment/autonomous self-employment dichotomy. New atypical and hybrid working arrangements have emerged, challenging the traditional notions of, and divisions between, autonomy and subordination. This in turn has strained labour law systems across industrialised countries that were previously based on the notion of dependent and subordinate employment to cast their personal scope of application triggering a de-regulatory dynamic that some Italian scholars have described as la fuga dal diritto del lavoro. Legal systems, at a national and supranational level, are constantly trying to catch up with these changes, and the core of the present work closely scrutinises the extent of their successes or failures.

The book is written at a time where no single solution to the problems being analysed has emerged, and in that respect it is very much a product of its time. It presents the various re-regulatory approaches currently being developed and argues that a new dynamic equilibrium can be achieved by using a mix of regulatory techniques and approaches aiming at expanding the legal notion of the employment relationship and at providing ad hoc regulation for a number of atypical forms of work. One of the major challenges in completing the present work has been to keep abreast of the constantly evolving legal framework at a national and supranational level. For a number of obvious and less obvious reasons, I have often had to take the difficult decision of leaving outside the scope of this book a number of legal developments that, according to my perhaps unwise judgment, were not strictly necessary to the substance and structure of the book. The work seeks to state the law as it stood on 31 November 2006, although one or two subsequent legal developments have been included at proof stage.

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Link for ebook: The Changing Law of the Employment Relationship​

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