Accept No Substitute? Worker Status To Be Overhauled

The rights an individual has under UK employment law depend to a large extent on their status. At one end of the scale, employees enjoy a host of rights, including protection against unfair dismissal. At the other, genuinely self-employed individuals have little or no protection beyond any contractual rights. In the middle, there are “workers”, who have many of the rights of employees (minimum wage, paid holiday, whistleblowing and discrimination protection) but are not entitled to claim unfair dismissal if their contract is terminated.

Unfortunately, identifying whether an individual is a “worker” is not straightforward. The legal test is whether they are required to perform services personally - and excludes them if they are providing services to clients for the purposes of their own business (in which case they would be self-employed). However, a large body of caselaw has grown up around this seemingly-simple definition. One of the key principles from these cases is that if the