2. Categories of worker — employment status

Most statutory employment rights depend on someone’s “employment status”. Access to key minimum rights, such as the national minimum wage, holiday pay and rest breaks, depend on someone being a “worker”. Other important rights, such as the right to claim unfair dismissal, to ask for flexible working, or to qualify for a redundancy payment, depend on being an “employee”. By contrast, the genuinely self-employed enjoy few rights. Employment status also has an important impact on tax and national insurance liabilities.

For these reasons, employment status laws have been exploited for many years by bad employers looking for ways to minimise employment and tax responsibilities and to shift liability and risk from the organisation to the individual. The spread of “false self-employment”, has been given extra impetus by the growth of the gig economy. This Chapter starts with the most important union-backed victory in this field — the ruling that Uber drivers are workers.