The Changing Law of the Employment Relationship: Comparative Analyses in the European Context

This volume provides a comparative account of the development of the employment relationship in four key European countries - the UK, Germany, France and Italy.The book argues that in 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. Some new atypical and hybrid working arrangements have progressively emerged so that the notions of autonomy and subordination are no longer as clear-cut as in the past. This in turn has put under strain labour law systems across industrialised countries that were using the notion of dependent and subordinate employment to cast their personal scope of application. The volume advances ideas for a new dynamic equilibrium in employment law to accommodate this evolution.