UK: Experts call for definition of self-employment to prevent exploitation
Author: Crystal Umbrella, Published on: 28 June 2018
"Expert consensus: self-employment must be defined in law", 27 June 2018
Further expert commentary has emerged about the definition of self-employment following the latest employment tribunal ruling that Hermes couriers were not independent contractors but workers. After the ruling, the Association of Independent Professionals and the Self Employed (IPSE) called for a clear, statutory definition of self-employment to be written into law, enabling genuine independent contracting professionals and end clients alike, certainty about where they stood...Meanwhile, Dave Chaplin, founder and CEO of the online information and support portal for contracting professionals, ContractorCalculator, agreed that the ruling, along with a series of others that preceded it, such as the recent verdicts over Pimlico Plumbers and Deliveroo staff, highlights a serious problem: some firms appear to have exploited the vagaries surrounding employment status to coerce workers into phoney self-employment. Chaplin's proposed remedy, which he has called on Parliament to implement, is the introduction of a new rule that would allow workers to be classified as 'employed for tax purposes', a designation that would grant them the complete suite of employment rights automatically.