The article aims at providing an exhaustive description of the current scope of application of labour law, with the goal to assess who is entitled to exercise fundamental labour and social rights within the Italian legal system. More specifically, this assessment is used to test the main hypothesis of the Authors of the ETUC report ‘New trade union strategies for new forms of employment’, according to which the idea of the ‘personal work relation’ may be used to redefine the personal scope of application of labour law as applicable to any person that is ‘ engaged by another to provide labour, unless that person is genuinely operating a business on her or his own account’. The article concludes that, although the Italian legal system cannot be currently reframed around the idea of the ‘personal work relation’, there are few signs under Italian law of a trend of enlarging the scope of application of labour laws in order to apply certain traditional labour rights not only to employees but also to certain types of independent contractors.

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Labour law struggles to deal with the vertical disintegration of the enterprise, a phenomenon that questions the traditional bilateral and contractual analysis of the employment relationship and the unitary concept of the employer. Multiple employer patterns have been proposed by the Italian and English scholarship to try to sidestep the current impasse. However, these seem to be inconsistent with the existing legal framework and, in addition, it is debatable that they can be always instrumental in addressing the issues arising from the vertical disintegration of the enterprise. Nevertheless, an alternative and more nuanced analytical path can be followed. Labour law mostly takes the view that the employer is the contractual counterparty to the employee. Yet it also recognises that other entities can assume certain responsibilities of the employer in certain specific regulatory domains, where legislators recur to particular regulatory strategies often independent of a contractual analysis of the employment relationship. This article argues that the law takes this step not because these other legal entities are functionally akin to employers, but precisely in spite of the differences between them and the employer form. Rather than seeking to redefine the concept of employer, a better understanding of the subject must recognise that employment law consists of a kaleidoscopic blend of different regulatory domains, characterised by a range of different purposes, the achievement of which requires the adoption of different and even non-contractual normative tools. Adopting a variable geometry approach to frame the scope of labour laws would constitute a better analytical response to potentially restore the coherence and completeness of the scope of employment protective norms.

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