Self-employed professionals in the European labour market. A comparison between Italy,Germany and the UK

Abstract

German

French

The transition to an on-demand service economy, supported by unprecedented technological developments and the digital revolution, has modified traditional self-employed professions and generated new ones, fostering the growth of a body of highly qualified and hyper-specialised self-employed professionals in the European economies. An analysis of this phenomenon highlights three critical questions, connected to their position in the labour market: 1) the contested definition of their legal status and the (ad hoc) regulation adopted; 2) their position within each national social protection system; 3) the complexity of collective representation in a context of major labour market fragmentation. The article explores these issues from a socio-economic perspective, comparing three European countries − Italy, Germany and the UK − with different welfare state regimes and diverse models for regulating professions. First findings show partly divergent responses to such common challenges, yet display some positive signs of change for self-employed professionals.

Keywords

Self-employed professionals social protection collective representation Italy Germany United Kingdom

Introduction

The population of self-employed professionals, i.e. self-employed workers without employees engaging in a service activity or knowledge-based service in the advanced tertiary sector of the economy,¹ has grown considerably in Europe over the last decade. This growth is especially relevant when compared with the trend in other employment categories in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Between 2008 and 2016, the increase in the number of self-employed professionals peaked at +24.8 per cent, while the number of subordinated workers and self-employed non-professionals respectively increased by 11.1 per cent and decreased by 0.9 per cent (Eurostat, 2017). The expansion of self-employed work is relevant not just from a quantitative perspective, but also in its structural composition by industry and occupation. Self-employment has become an important, if not the most widespread, contractual arrangement within an array of new highly skilled areas of work and professions beyond the traditional ones.

Such a self-employment surge has not however attracted the attention expected, whether in the political sphere or in academia. Across European countries, national policy-makers have only recently started to acknowledge the increasing relevance of self-employment and to address its emerging socio-economic demands (Schulze Buschoff and Schmidt, 2009). Similarly, this segment of the labour market has expressed concern about the social protections associated with its status on the one hand, and about job-related protections on the other.² At supranational level, efforts have been made to get the issue onto the political agenda in Member States. In 2014, the European Parliament’s Resolution entitled ‘Social protection for all, including self-employed³’ urged Member States to provide social protections to self-employed workers, ranging from mutual assistance to cover accidents, health care and pensions, and continuous training, as well as measures opposing bogus self-employment. Importantly, the Parliament stressed that access to social security is a fundamental right for the whole labour force, as well as a key pillar of the European social model. However, at country level the picture remains blurred and fragmented, highlighting the necessity to update the legislative framework and social protection systems to bring them in line with current labour market developments. As also pointed out by international observatories such as the OECD, ‘concerns have been expressed over the working conditions, training, security and incomes of some self-employed’ (The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2000: 155). Furthermore, the demand for collective representation emerging from this individualised and segmented group in the labour market⁴ is challenging traditional industrial relations infrastructures.

Hence, the analysis of professional self-employment in Europe highlights three main critical questions connected to the labour market status of self-employed professionals: 1) the contested definition of their legal status and the ad hoc regulation adopted; 2) their status in the social protection system; 3) the complexity of collective representation within a context of major labour market fragmentation. The article explores these three issues from a comparative perspective, considering the different institutional responses in three European countries − Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom − with different welfare systems and diverse labour market models and ways of regulating professions.

The article opens with a review of the literature on the links between transformations of the economy, the upsurge of professional self-employment and the emerging socio-economic challenges. After having introduced the research design, the empirical evidence will be presented from Italy, Germany and the UK. Within each national context, attention will focus on the legal status of self-employed professionals, on the configuration of the social protection system applied to these workers and on their collective representation in the labour market. A concluding section discusses the results from a comparative perspective.

Economic transformation, the upsurge of professional self-employment and emerging challenges

The expansion of the service economy (Piore and Sabel, 1984), supported and strengthened by the innovative power of new technologies (Castells, 1996), has changed the role of traditional professions and generated new ones. Increasing market fluctuation and intensified global competition are not only creating new professional opportunities, but also increasing the risks of skills becoming obsolescent. At the same time, working careers are becoming more fragmented and unstable, the ‘system’ is increasingly dominating workers (Harvey, 1989; Sennett, 1998) and an increasing emphasis is being put on ‘employability’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005) as a strategy for professional survival. Despite specific differences, such paradigmatic changes have effects on subordinated employment and on self-employment, both of which are characterised by a marked sensitivity to the institutional regulatory system and to the market environment.

In Europe, self-employment has attracted renewed attention since the 1990s when the transition from industrial to service economies triggered an increase in self-employed professionals in new areas of work (Bologna and Fumagalli, 1997). At that time, the growing use of self-employment was seen as an adaptive response of enterprises to excessive labour market rigidity, especially in southern Europe (Grubb and Wells, 1993). Moreover, self-employment appeared to be a possible, albeit partial, answer to rising unemployment rates in many European countries, generating various kinds of institutional incentives to support start-ups (also through tax relief for the new self-employed).

Beneath the apparently stable ratio between self-employment and the total labour force, the structural configuration of self-employment has changed significantly. Remarkable changes are reported between different economic sectors and between countries, affecting both regulated professions as well as unregulated professionals, such as artists, designers, IT specialists and consultants. Moreover, different degrees of transformation relate to self-employed workers working via digital platforms and with service contracts (Rapelli, 2012).

An analysis of the European Labour Force Survey data reveals that while overall self-employment decreased by about 600,000 over the 2008−2015 period, i.e. during the international economic crisis, professional self-employment increased steadily (Table 1).

Table 1.

Self-employed and self-employed professionals in the EU, IT, DE, UK (absolute value; thousand; age 15−64).

		2008	2012	2016
EU-28 Self-employed	% of total employment	14.22%	14.50%	13.95%
EU-28 Self-employed	absolute value	31,121.8	30,650.6	30,523.5
EU-28 Self-employed professionals	% of total employment	3.31%	3.94%	4.16%
EU-28 Self-employed professionals	absolute value	7251.9	8318.2	9.113.2
Italy Self-employed professionals	% of total self-employment	29.69%	32.21%	32.87%
Italy Self-employed professionals	absolute value	1540.5	1604.7	1566.2
Germany Self-employed professionals	% of total self-employment	32.64%	35.07%	35.46%
Germany Self-employed professionals	absolute value	1270.7	1333.2	1332.4
UK Self-employed professionals	% of total self-employment	33.39%	37.34%	38.93%
UK Self-employed professionals	absolute value	1206.3	1349.7	1431.2

Source: Our elaboration based on Eurostat (2017).

However, the growth in numbers of self-employed professionals, considered as the most innovative and dynamic segment of knowledge workers, has highlighted three critical aspects negatively influencing their careers, entrapping them in weak professional and social paths (Borghi et al., 2016).

Social marginalisation and professional insecurity have become real risks for a significant part of self-employed professionals. Career paths increasingly oriented towards an international dimension and growing mobility in Europe have not been backed by a harmonisation of national legislative frameworks, with self-employment and entrepreneurial activities still regulated in a patchy and irregular way. This blurred configuration often leads to unsatisfactory regulatory categories poorly representing hybrid situations between a traditional company and the new professional work, between consultancy work and economically dependent self-employment.

A second issue concerns the marginal, or even lacking, inclusion of self-employed professionals in the social protection system. This represents a critical aspect in relation to the needs of the workers in business, who often lack protection against sickness or maternity for instance. Furthermore, it constitutes a long-term problem if sustainable and accessible pension schemes are not foreseen for this category of workers with their fragmented careers, exposure to market trends and alternation between subordinated employment and self-employment.

A third emerging critical point concerns the complex network of collective representation for self-employed professionals. Over the last decade, their visibility in the public debate has been raised due to initiatives and campaigns launched by new freelancer organisations and highlighting both critical issues as well as the economic potential of this labour market segment, such as the ‘Secure self-employment’ campaign promoted by the British association Citizens Advice and the ‘European Freelancers’ campaign launched by the European Forum of Independent Professionals (EFIP). The process of establishing representative bodies for self-employed professionals has progressed at diverse speeds across countries. At embryonic stages in some contexts and more institutionalised in others, overall collective representation still has to cope with significant fragmentation, reflecting the segmented professional contexts in which the self-employed work.

The overall picture in Europe is characterised by mixed configurations as far as the three critical dimensions are concerned. Hence, the article explores these emerging issues from a comparative perspective, starting out from the national dimension. Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom are selected as the targets of analysis, since they embody different welfare state regimes and diverse labour market models and ways of regulating professions. A qualitative analysis of the state of the art within the respective national regulatory and institutional frameworks was carried out. Empirical evidence is based on 20 semi-structured interviews (eight in Italy, seven in Germany and five in the UK) carried out with key informants (experts, trade union officials, freelancers’ associations) across the three countries in 2016/2017, complemented by an extensive documentary analysis of secondary sources including collective agreements (where signed, as in the UK), media debates, legislation, internal paperwork and academic literature.

Steps towards new labour rights in Italy

Self-employment has historically constituted a relevant source of work in Italy, with its development featuring three main phases (Ranci, 2012). Between the end of the Second World War and the 1970s, the large majority of self-employed people were small tradesmen in the retail and craft sectors (Sylos Labini, 1974). During the 1970s and the 1980s the development of industrial districts triggered the growth of self-employment in small manufacturing enterprises. The third phase, beginning in the 1990s and currently expanding, is characterised by an increase of highly specialised self-employed professionals working in the tertiary sector, reflecting the post-industrial transformation of the economy (Bologna and Fumagalli, 1997).

Despite the numerical incidence of the self-employed population and the key role they play in economic development (Semenza, 2000), their importance has never been fully acknowledged in the public debate and the political sphere (Accornero and Anastasia, 2006). The interplay between their lacking political representation, their low involvement in policy-making, and the misleading social recognition suffered by self-employed workers are contributory factors explaining why this important segment of the productive and occupational system is so underestimated (Ranci, 2012). Instead, a critical interpretation has traditionally accompanied the phenomenon. First, the growth of self-employment has long been associated with the spread of small and micro enterprises characterising the Italian productive system. The small size of companies was symptomatic of the inherent incapacity of industry to expand and to invest in order to maintain competitiveness in a global market (Maida, 2009). Second, self-employment has been interpreted as a permanent area of fiscal parasitism. The world of regulated professions in particular is associated with the idea of political nepotism and the fiscal privileges they enjoy. Third, the academic debate has been dominated by the opinion that the rise in self-employed work is the result of growing bogus self-employment (Pallini, 2006).

Such misconceptions relate to a parallel development in the Italian labour market since the 1990s: the spread of economically dependent self-employed workers (Pedersini and Coletto, 2010) and the introduction of semi-subordinate contractual arrangements in the labour market as a way of raising employment in the late 1990s. Economically dependent self-employment corresponds to an intermediate blurred area of autonomous work, where a self-employed worker is generally engaged via a mid- or long-term service contract featuring a compulsorily exclusive contractual relationship with a unique customer, who hence acts more as an employer, rather than a client. Accordingly, the worker turns out to be only formally self-employed, but substantially dependent on a single employer who also sets organisational constraints. Semi-subordinate contracts have been exploited to establish flexible working relationships and reduce labour costs, enabling companies to employ a cheaper self-employed workforce instead of subordinated workers.

However, the specious application of these contracts, although relevant, is not a satisfactory argument to explain the spread of self-employment in Italy, steadily increasing from 1.5 to 1.6 million workers in the aftermath of the financial crisis (Table 1). Professional activities account for the 45.7 per cent of the self-employed workforce in the advanced services sector, distributed as follows: 12.4 per cent in health and social work activities, 10.1 per cent in service activities, while the remainder is divided between the financial sector (4.8 per cent), information and communication (5.7 per cent), education (5.1 per cent), and the arts, entertainment and recreation industry (7.6 per cent) (Eurostat, 2017).

As far as the legislative framework is concerned, self-employment is governed by the Civil Code where a ‘genuinely self-employed worker is defined as a worker who legally undertakes to perform a service or a job against payment, without being subject to any form of subordination towards the customer, working with his own resources and mainly through his own work’ (Article 2222). The Civil Code also establishes a dual system of knowledge-related professions (regulated and non-regulated professions), a distinctive feature of the Italian configuration (Feltrin, 2012). On the one hand, the law defines the regulated professions, whose practice is subject to a state examination and to enrolment in a professional body. The state delegates control of such professions to their governing associations (Article 2229). This is the case with more than 30 professions, a peculiarity in Europe. On the other hand, a large and heterogeneous group of non-regulated professions has developed, not subject to the same legislative recognition. Law no. 4/2013 has recently revised the legislative oversight of non-regulated professions, putting their regulation on the same footing as regulated professions in order to reduce discrepancies and inequalities.

Such dualism in the infrastructure of professions is crucial since it mirrors important differences in the social protection applied to the two groups. As compulsory members of their respective bodies, professionals working in regulated professions have their own private professional social security funds. These funds offer members an array of protections including paid maternity leave (albeit limited) and pensions. Conversely, the vast array of non-regulated professions has long been excluded from this system of protection (Bologna, 2015). The picture is characterised by an overall lack of income support and health-care protection, as well as exclusion from pension funds. In 1995, the Dini reform (Law no. 335/1995) instituted a Separate Fund of the National Institute of Social Security (Gestione Separata INPS), a public pension fund to which contributions were made compulsory for all self-employed workers not belonging to a private fund. Despite this intervention, the disparity persisted, rooted in the diverse configuration of the two social security systems. The social security rates imposed by the Separate Fund are in fact higher than those for the private funds.

The recently approved Statute of Autonomous Work (Law no. 81/2017) has introduced important new protections for the self-employed, including full tax deductibility of training costs, access to EU funds, parental leave of up to six months, and benefits in the case of illness and injury.

The collective representation of self-employed workers is particularly fragmented and often lacking. The governing bodies of regulated professions have long played a role in representing and lobbying for the interests of their members. In addition, first- and second-level associations have emerged, such as Confassociazioni − the Confederation of Professional Associations officially recognised by Law 4/2013 − and Confprofessioni, a confederation bringing together regulated professions. The latter is recognised as a social partner in collective bargaining and signs national collective agreements for employees in professional firms.

The trade unions have instead showed a certain degree of organisational inertia in reorienting their actions and strategies towards the self-employed segment of the labour market (Ambra, 2013). In the late 1990s, the three main union confederations started to reconsider their recruitment and representation strategies to include workers with non-standard employment relationships. To this purpose they established specific structures (for example Nidil-CGIL and Alai-CISL), but these were mainly oriented towards precarious and atypical workers rather than self-employed workers. Only recently have union strategies specifically targeted the self-employed, as is the case with the Consultative Body for Professional Work set up by the CGIL and the online community of self-employed workers vIVAce! created by the CISL. Furthermore, bottom-up innovative experiences of collective representation have emerged, aimed at transversally aggregating the heterogeneous segment of non-regulated professionals, such as trainers, consultants, researchers, IT specialists, and creative workers (as is the case with the association ACTA).

The German case: between innovation and fragmentation

Numerous studies have analysed the significant erosion of the German industrial relations system in recent decades (Bispinck et al., 2010; Hassel, 1999) and the related deterioration of wage levels and working conditions especially in the service sector (Bosch and Weinkopf, 2008). The reforms adopted between 2003 and 2005 (Hartz I−IV) fostered the segmentation of the labour force (Hassel, 2014), introduced temporary agencies and deregulated atypical employment through mini- and midi-jobs (Gaskarth, 2014). The trend towards self-employment has to be considered in this context of increasing flexibility and significant crisis of intermediate bodies throughout Europe (Crouch, 2012). The growth of self-employment during the 1990s was fuelled by the spread of new business activities in the former East Germany (Ortlieb and Weiss, 2015) and, in the following decade, by the increase of self-employed without employees.

Increasing attention is being paid to self-employed workers below the low-income threshold: competitiveness in the tertiary sector and the low market entry rate have contributed to boosting the number of low-income self-employed, especially in regulated and artistic professions. A recent study (May-Strobl et al., 2011) shows that in 2010 monthly net income was less than €1100 for 95,000 self-employed, less than €500 for around 270,000 self-employed, while 127,000 received social benefits to top up their income.

The dynamism and adaptability of this workforce segment, combined with the digital activism of certain freelancer organisations and the work of the union ver.di, have generated new media attention to the heterogeneous world of self-employment. A first relevant issue subject to public discussion relates to the pension schemes for self-employed professionals. The fragmentation of professional conditions is mirrored by the unequal opportunities to access pension schemes, mandatory only for specific categories of self-employed workers including craftsmen, artists, publicists and regulated professionals (Mutual Information System on Social Protection, 2016). All other self-employed workers contribute to a pension fund on a voluntary basis. The high costs of private pension funds mean that many self-employed workers are unable or unwilling to pay into them, thereby posing a challenge for public institutions which will have to cope with an elderly population of formerly self-employed workers without or with very low pensions. As in other European countries, a second widely debated topic relates to the phenomenon of the economically dependent self-employed. However, identifying the number and conditions of economic dependence is a complex task, given that recognition of such is up to the courts, on a case-by-case basis. A third question deals with the reduction of health insurance contributions against an economic background of overall precariousness, especially for self-employed workers without employees. In 2016, the contribution debts of self-payers (i.e. the self-employed) in the German statutory health insurance (GKV) rose by €1.5bn, and now correspond to €6bn. Accordingly, three federal states (Thuringia, Berlin and Brandenburg) have urged the federal government to reform the health insurance for the self-employed without employees.

Considering the quantitative trend, since 2005 the growth of self-employment has displayed a slowdown (Mai and Marder-Puch, 2013) despite the continuous increase in the tertiary sector (Fritsch et al., 2012). In particular, growth is fostered by the positive trend in the share of self-employed without employees (Brehm et al., 2012), of the female component (Dautzenberg and Steinbrück, 2013), of the part-time self-employed (Metzger, 2014), and of start-up founders (Brenke, 2013).

The regulatory framework for self-employment is governed by income tax and social security legislation. The German system distinguishes between Gewerbetreibende (a self-employed worker running his own business) and Freiberufler (originally the self-employed in the regulated professions but now extended to cover unregulated professions). The two categories have different legal and administrative obligations. The Gewerbetreibende is subject to the income tax system defined by the Industry and Commerce Chamber (IHK- Industrie und Handelskammer): accordingly the self-employed person has to register with such a Chamber, enrol his business activity in the German business register and use double-entry bookkeeping. Conversely, these obligations do not apply to Freiberufler.

Overall, the self-employed enjoy more limited social protection than employees. Since 2006 the mandatory health insurance has been extended to all residents, including the self-employed, but unlike employees and other social groups, they must bear the full monthly costs,⁵ causing considerable difficulty for those temporarily without work or on a low income. Furthermore, since 2006 self-employed people who previously worked as employees are entitled to remain contributing members of the unemployment insurance system on a voluntary basis. Conversely, the social protection system applied to the self-employed does not provide for either paid maternity leave or invalidity and disability allowances. A disability pension is guaranteed only to the small minority of self-employed included in the compulsory pension scheme. This means that self-employed workers need to insure themselves through the private insurance market. Against this backdrop, self-employed artists and journalists represent an exception: in exchange for their compulsory contributions to retirement and health insurance they pay into a special social security fund (Künstlersozialkasse), benefiting from more advantageous conditions compared to those offered by the private market and the other insurance schemes within the statutory social security system.

The system of collective representation for self-employed professionals is extremely complex and fragmented. Associations focused on single professions such as the association of interpreters and technical translators (BDÜ − Bundesverband der Dolmetscher und Übersetzer) have developed alongside other organisations aiming to represent self-employed professionals in both knowledge and technical professions, like the union ver.di. A structural difference exists between the associations organising in regulated professions and the associations emerging in the knowledge, digital and creative industries. While the former are more structured, and institutionally legitimised, the latter differ according to their organisational strength, the effectiveness of their actions and their goals. Hence very heterogeneous organisations belong to the second group, ranging from the longstanding Association of Literary Translators or VdÜ (Verband deutschsprachiger Übersetzer Literarischer Wissenschaftlicher und Werke) created in 1954, to the umbrella association bringing together more than 35 organisations dealing with copyright contracts, the Initiative Urheberrecht; from the grass-roots movements promoting digital cooperativism to a dozen organisations operating in the digital creative economy. These latter associations are of particular interest since they foster an alternative vision of the market, based on different models of profit distribution and the diffuse ownership of data and software. However, their ongoing projects are experimental, meaning that their institutionalisation is still at an early stage. Finally, new organisations have emerged, such as the VGSD (Verband der Gründer und Selbstständigen), with a lean horizontal structure specifically oriented towards self-employed professionals in the advanced service sector. VGSD is part of EFIP (European Forum of Independent Professionals), the European network of associations for the self-employed, which also includes the Italian ACTA and the British IPSE.

The institutional impulse to self-employment in the UK

Self-employment has played a central role in the development of the British economy. The volume of VAT-registered workers in fact continued to display an upward trend even during the financial crisis. In 2016 alone, the number of VAT registrations grew by about 4.3 per cent, rising from 2.45 million businesses to 2.55 million (Office for National Statistics, 2016). The increase in the number of self-employed professionals in the advanced tertiary sector is particularly relevant: increasing from 1.22 million in 2008 to 1.86 million in 2016, they now account for half of total self-employment. Self-employment is especially widespread in the professional, scientific and technical activities (23.6 per cent), as well in administrative and support services (15.3 per cent). The remaining share is equally distributed between education (12.6 per cent); human health and social work (11.9 per cent), information and communication (9.3 per cent) and the arts, entertainment and recreation activities (9.1 per cent) (Eurostat, 2017). The picture shows an overall transformation of the British business landscape. Not simply symbolically, the Department of Trade and Industry has been substituted by the new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Dellot, 2014). The political class has also spotlighted the relevance of self-employment for the British economy, with former prime minister David Cameron recently depicting self-employed work as ‘the lifeblood of the UK economy’. Similarly, Iain Duncan Smith⁶ described the rise in self-employment as an indicator that ‘the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in the UK’. Such support for entrepreneurship is however bipartisan in the political sphere, with former Labour leader Ed Miliband promising to go ‘into the next election as the party of small business and enterprise’. In a nutshell, self-employment and entrepreneurships seem to embody the new zeitgeist, the new spirit of the age, in the UK (Dellot, 2014).

The political orientation of successive governments since the 1980s towards an ‘enterprise culture’ has helped lay a favourable and accommodating ground for self-employment (Schulze Buschoff and Schmidt, 2009). ‘By creating a climate whereby starting up is relatively easy, with the minimum of costs and bureaucracy’ (European Employment Observatory Review, 2010: 13), self-employment has been largely encouraged. Public policies played a major role in creating opportunities for self-employment and small business, and in influencing public attitudes to taking up such opportunities (Bennett, 2014). The privatisation and outsourcing programmes launched since the 1980s triggered the spread of small production and service companies, many of them single-person self-employed workers supplying services as subcontractors (Kitching, 2015). A second important driver for self-employment are the active labour market policies promoted by government since the 1980s to help unemployed people return to work. In 1981, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government issued the Enterprise Allowance Scheme (EAS) (renewed in 2013 under the name ‘New Enterprise Allowance’), a policy initiative designed to guarantee mentoring support and financial assistance to unemployed people setting up their own businesses. A further explanation of the boom in self-employment relates to the lack of employment opportunities in the UK labour market, and in particular the lack of good job opportunities ensuring affordable and decent living standards and working conditions. In a sense, unemployed workers and the working poor have been somehow ‘pushed’ or ‘forced’ into self-employment by the total lack of and/or unattractive employment alternatives (Dellot, 2014).

Regulation of self-employment is minimal, limited to governmental guidelines oriented towards supporting workers, inter alia pointing out that their employment status determines their related rights and the responsibilities of the entity making use of their services. In particular, they specify that self-employed workers do not enjoy the employment rights and protections accorded to employees. Consistent with an economic culture oriented towards free market competition, overall the country displays the lowest restrictions to professional practice in Europe (The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 1999). Professional associations are autonomous in the regulation of the respective practice, as are professional ethics, self-regulated through codes of conduct. The principle of free competition imposed by the Monopolies Commission prohibits the setting of minimum or maximum standards regarding payment rates for professional practice (Feltrin, 2012). Generally speaking, professions are divided between those with regulated access − i.e. legal, medical and accounting professions − and all other non-regulated ones.

Concerning the social security system, the institutional configuration is characterised by weak protections and limited benefits which are increasingly being made conditional on activation requirements in the labour market for both subordinated and self-employed workers.

Self-employed workers are eligible for many of the protections enjoyed by wage-earners, including housing benefits, council tax reductions and the working tax credit. There are however some policy areas where coverage for self-employed is still very limited. Overall the main differences relate to sickness and maternity allowances, where self-employed cannot benefit from paid leave (statutory maternity pay and statutory sick pay), as well as old-age pensions (MISSOC, 2016). Moreover, self-employed workers forgo statutory paid paternity leave, as well as the industrial injuries disablement benefit (Dellot and Reed, 2015).

The collective representation of the interests of self-employed professionals is segmented across professional categories, with both professional associations and trade unions responsible for the organising. Beyond lobbying and self-regulating, the professional bodies can engage in representation and negotiation tasks for their members. This is particularly the case with the education and medical professions, such as for nurses (the Royal College of Nurses). Trade union representation of self-employed workers is concentrated in productive sectors with a high incidence of such workers beyond a subordinate workforce with whom they share interests and working conditions (Pedersini and Coletto, 2010). The artistic and creative sector is rich in experience. On an occupational basis, occupation-related unions have established organising for both salaried and self-employed workers, despite the latter being prevalent. This is the case for example with the BECTU (Broadcasting Entertainment Cinematography and Theatre Union) in the media and entertainment sector; Equity (British Actors’ Equity Association) which includes actors and performers, but also directors, choreographers and dancers; and the MU (Musicians’ Union) in the music industry. Recognised as social partners, these unions sign collective agreements mainly with individual employers to set working conditions and pay levels for self-employed workers.

Alongside these sectoral experiences, cross-industry organisations have emerged, trying to give voice to self-employment in general terms, mainly through lobbying activities. The PCG (Professional Contracting Group) – since renamed IPSE, the Association of Independent Professionals and the Self-Employed – is a successful social aggregate. It represents 22,000 self-employed workers belonging to all sectors of the economy, giving them wide visibility and voice during the setting of policy agendas.

Discussion and conclusion

The comparative analysis of the three European countries sheds light on the specific features of the different legal and institutional contexts, while also pointing to significant similarities, as summarised in Table 2.

Table 2.

A three-country comparison.

	Legal framework	Social protections	Collective representation
Italy	Highly regulated (Civil Code; New Statute of Autonomous Work, Law no. 81/2017)	Weak protections. Recent trends towards an extension (2017 New Statute of Autonomous Work)	Fragmented and lacking. Recent innovative experiences
Germany	Highly regulated and fragmented (Hartz reforms 2003−2005)	Limited and paid for by the self-employed	Articulated and fragmented
The UK	Low-regulated (via fiscal system)	Weak protections, increasingly conditional on activation requirements	Segmented. Collective bargaining in the creative and artistic industries

The results are of particular interest, considering the incidence of self-employment in Italy, Germany and the UK, three countries accounting for more than half of the total in Europe and where self-employment is concentrated in the professional and creative sectors. However, the growth trend is particularly significant in the UK (in contrast to Italy and Germany) where the rate has been steadily high and has markedly increased over the last decade. Overall, the research highlights some signs of greater political awareness of the socio-economic questions arising from the spread of self-employment in traditional and new professions, changing the content of work as well as organisational patterns. However, the dominant narrative across the three countries has different focuses. In the UK, the political-institutional context appears strongly favourable towards self-employed professional work, simultaneously encouraged by flexible regulation and active labour market policies. Conversely, in Italy and Germany the political debate, but also the academic reflection, has long been trapped in the dispute on bogus self-employed and on the economically dependent self-employed. Nevertheless, the specious application of the self-employed status only partially explains the growth of highly skilled self-employed workers in Europe. In Italy, in particular, self-employed professionals have been traditionally viewed with suspicion, with self-employment considered an economic area of fiscal parasitism. Since the 1990s, they have instead played a key role in satisfying the rising demand for flexible, skilled and hyper-specialised work emanating from the post-Fordist service economy.

Against the backdrop of different regulatory models and welfare regimes, analogous critical issues emerged across the three countries, primarily concerning the institutional regulation of self-employment. Common questions deal with the fragmented status of self-employed workers, in particular in regulated professions. Within the three national contexts, dualism persists in the professional system. Accordingly, different rules, diverse degrees of autonomy and an unequal distribution of rights and protections apply to the self-employed depending on whether they work in the regulated professions (protected by the professional bodies) or in the non-regulated professions, which also include the expanding labour market in the creative industry. However, such a dichotomy seems to have shrunk in Italy following the 2013 reform of non-regulated professions (Law no. 4/2013) which harmonised an unbalanced configuration of rights and protections between regulated and non-regulated professions, without equivalent in Europe.

Similarly, an analogous demand for more encompassing and universalistic social protection systems has arisen across the three countries. The comparative perspective highlights the overall weakness of social protection systems for self-employed professionals, with more limited rights than their counterparts in subordinate employment despite some recent attempts to plug the gaps. In Germany, the social security system mirrors the insider-outsider divide where full protections are guaranteed, beyond subordinated workers, only to a marginal group of self-employed. Despite the legislative interventions in 2006 extending mandatory health insurance and unemployment insurance to a wider share of the population of self-employed workers, the gap has persisted, given that they have personally to contribute fully to such insurance funds. Also in Italy, the social protection framework is fragmented and inadequate. Nevertheless, the new Statute of Autonomous Work (Law no. 81/2017) has led to certain progress in terms of social rights, addressing a number of crucial aspects of social protection for self-employed professionals, such as economic subsidies for parental leave, specific allowances for maternity and sickness leave.

Finally, we can observe a major overall fragmentation in the collective representation of self-employed professionals and the partial inadequacy of traditional forms. Across the three countries, different types of associations compete to recruit self-employed workers: alongside trade unions and professional associations, innovative grass-roots initiatives including cooperatives, freelancer associations, self-organised movements and quasi-unions are emerging. The role of the unions remains institutionalised and focused on productive sectors with a high incidence of self-employed workers beyond a subordinate workforce with whom they share interests and working conditions. The artistic and the creative sectors are rich in experience, as seen in the British unions BECTU, Equity and the MU, as are the technical and professional occupations represented by the German union ver.di. By contrast, only recently have traditional unions in Italy tried to adjust their representation strategies and structures to the changing circumstances triggered by self-employment.

Overall, demands arising from independent professionals are increasingly being intercepted by non-traditional and new collective players such as freelancer associations, cooperatives and self-organised movements. These experiences have not only filled a representation gap, but importantly have been able to encompass the specific features of this labour market segment and accordingly to channel the interests of the new self-employed generation through innovative forms. By transversally aggregating the demands of self-employed professionals, they are becoming relevant institutional stakeholders in national political arenas, able to influence, through advocacy, the policy agenda on self-employment, as seen with IPSE in the UK and ACTA in Italy.

To draw some preliminary general conclusions from the analysis of Italy, Germany and the UK, the demand for representation and protection by self-employed professionals, intrinsically individual in a hyper-fragmented and volatile labour market, seems to pose a serious challenge to the infrastructure of collective representation and to traditional players, swinging between universalism and selectivity, between cross-industry political claims and occupational demands. This aspect is even more interesting if interpreted in the light of attempts to reduce labour market inequalities between the self-employed and employees, an expression of the classical insider-outsider segmentation, considering that the population of self-employed professionals is largely excluded from labour law and social protections, as well as collective representation dynamics (Schulze Buschoff and Schmidt, 2009). Self-employed professionals are marginally represented by political players who raise their voice mainly for insiders.

These first reactions to the modern challenges to interest representation could mark the beginning of a new era of unionism (Wynn, 2015). Union revitalisation could envisage a twofold strategy to incorporate new emerging collective representation demands. Dependent also on institutional constraints and the regime of employment relations within which they operate, unions might either extend their traditional structures to new labour market segments or envisage tailor-made innovative configurations for the growing population of self-employed professionals (Bibby, 2005).

Footnotes

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission – DG Employment, Social Affairs & Inclusion [agreement number VS/2016/0149].

Notes

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