High-skilled platform jobs in Europe: Trends, quality of work and emerging challenges

This article focuses on high-skilled jobs performed through digital labour platforms (DLPs) in Europe. First, it discusses the main typologies developed in recent years to classify DLPs according to the level of skills required of workers. Second, it pro-vides an overview of the available data and attempts to measure this growing phenomenon. Third, it focuses on the quality of high-skilled platform jobs in com-parison to both low-to-medium-skilled platform jobs and offline jobs performed by the self-employed. The analysis identified several typical characteristics of platform work that have been overlooked by the debate on the quality of work, which has hitherto mainly been based on dependent employment and offline work. Finally, we conclude by discussing the main challenges that DLPs pose in terms of quality of work.

Precarity among Tertiary Educated Civil Servants

Precarious working conditions are spreading among highly qualified workers. The Chilean civil service employs many university graduates, the honorarios, on a temporary basis. Torres explores the question of what follows objectively and subjectively from this special status of non-recognition of the honorarios’ de facto dependent employment relationship for these workers, and whether commonalities in experiences and self-understanding arise on this basis, which in turn form the starting point for a conscious stance as a collective actor. Her answers are guided by Honneth's recognition theory and Paugam's theory on strategies for dealing with precarity. In this way, Torres enriches insights into possible identity constructions among precarious workers.

Gegenwartsprobleme des anwaltlichen Arbeitsrechts

The attorney’s dependent employment with legal employers has become much more attractive in recent years. Therefore, this thesis addresses relevant questions regarding professional and labour law during the employment. Solely by taking an overall view on both areas of regulation it is possible to develop the employment contract in a legally compliant manner. In particular, questions regarding legal independence, working time law, salaries, external representation and liability are addressed. Furthermore, possibilities of regulation under collective law, which have so far been rarely relevant in practice, are discussed.

‘Grey zones’ within dependent employment: formal and informal forms of on-call work in Germany

This article aims to take stock of the various manifestations of on-call work in Germany. It is shown that formal on-call work is, by international standards, relatively strictly regulated in Germany, not least as the result of a 2019 reform of the law. Similar to other countries, however, other informal variants are used that lie outside the scope of the re-regulation or ‘normalisation’ of formal on-call work. Differentiated analyses based on survey data show that both formal and informal variants of on-call work are associated with disproportionately high levels of short part-time work, low pay and consequently with considerable risks of poverty. As a consequence, the ongoing debate on the erosion of the status of employee should not be too narrowly restricted to self-employed workers in the gig economy (Deliveroo, Uber) but should be extended to include the ‘grey zones’ in the area of dependent employment. Cet article vise à faire le point sur les différentes manifestations du travail à la demande en Allemagne. Il montre que le travail à la demande formel est, selon les normes internationales, réglementé assez strictement en Allemagne, grâce notamment à la réforme de la loi en 2019. Toutefois, comme dans d’autres pays, d’autres variantes informelles sont présentes et échappent au champ d’application de la re-réglementation ou de la “normalisation” du travail à la demande formel. Des analyses différenciées, basées sur des données d’enquête, montrent que les variantes formelles et informelles du travail à la demande sont associées à des niveaux proportionnellement trop importants de travail à temps partiel de courte durée, de faibles rémunérations et, par conséquent, à des risques considérables de pauvreté. Dès lors, le débat en cours sur l’érosion du statut de salarié ne devrait pas être strictement limité aux travailleurs indépendants de la gig economy - ou économie des petits boulots (Deliveroo, Uber), mais devrait être étendu aux “zones grises” présentes dans le domaine de l’emploi dépendant. Der vorliegende Artikel zielt auf eine Bestandsaufnahme der verschiedenen Erscheinungsformen von Abrufarbeit in Deutschland und zeigt, dass die formale Variante von Abrufarbeit hier im internationalen Vergleich relativ strikt reguliert ist, nicht zuletzt durch eine Gesetzesreform, die 2019 in Kraft trat. Ähnlich wie in anderen Ländern kommen jedoch andere informelle Varianten zum Einsatz, die außerhalb des Geltungsbereichs der Re-Regulierung oder ‘‘Normalisierung’’ der formellen Abrufarbeit liegen. Differenzierte Analysen auf der Grundlage von Umfragedaten zeigen, dass sowohl formelle als auch informelle Varianten von Abrufarbeit mit einem unverhältnismäßig hohen Anteil an kurzer Teilzeit, Niedriglöhnen und damit einem hohen Armutsrisiko assoziiert sind. Die gegenwärtige Debatte über die Erosion des Arbeitnehmerstatus sollte sich deshalb nicht zu eng auf die Solo-Selbständigen in der Gig-Ökonomie beschränken (Deliveroo, Uber), sondern auch die ‘‘Grauzonen’’ im Bereich der abhängigen Beschäftigung in den Blick nehmen.

Solo Self-Employment and Alternative Work Arrangements: A Cross-Country Perspective on the Changing Composition of Jobs

The nature of self-employment is changing in most OECD countries. Solo self-employment is increasing relative to self-employment with dependent employees, often being associated with the development of gig economy work and alternative work arrangements. We still know little about this changing composition of jobs. Drawing on ad-hoc surveys run in the UK, US, and Italy, we document that solo self-employment is substantively different from self-employment with employees, being an intermediate status between employment and unemployment, and for some, becoming a new frontier of underemployment. Its spread originates a strong demand for social insurance which rarely meets an adequate supply given the informational asymmetries of these jobs. Enforcing minimum wage legislation on these jobs and reconsidering the preferential tax treatment offered to self-employment could discourage abuse of these positions to hide de facto dependent employment jobs. Improved measures of labor slack should be developed to acknowledge that, over and above unemployment, some of the solo self-employment and alternative work arrangements present in today’s labor market are placing downward pressure on wages.

Abhängige Beschäftigung - ein Auslaufmodell?

The article deals with the legal term of dependent employment, which serves as a starting point for the collection of social security contributions. Its concretisation by the courts moves in a field of tension between the goal of legal certainty and a rapidly changing world of work in which forms of work and traditional demarcation criteria lose their shape. In addition, there is an acceptance problem with regard to social security as a whole if the state grants a comparable social security to persons who haven’t been paying contributions at all. Possible solutions include distance bans for contribution-financed social benefits, as well as the introduction of a social insurance for all gainfully employed persons, including the self-employed. At the same time, however, it is necessary to reorganise the relationship between citizens and the state and to strengthen individual responsibility.