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Over recent years, a heated debate about social justice in European contract law has been taking place. Great emphasis is placed on ideological assumptions. For example, the over-individualistic interpretation of European private law, its market-led orientation and the insufficient attention paid to the idea of the protection of the weaker party. This discussion considers the traditional conflict between the meta-principles of market-oriented efficiency and solidarity-based action. The whole debate, it seems to me, now calls for a more rules-based approach. In endeavouring to validate such an approach, this article starts by illustrating the various facets connected to the theme of 'European contract law'. Then as a preliminary step, I shall briefly examine the question as to why labour lawyers have remained silent and take no part in the discussion on European social contract law. There is ample reason to believe that the contrary is necessary. It has been generally acknowledged that labour contracts are not outside private law-individual contract law in particular-and that it represents one of the most important examples of long term incomplete contracts. The idea of labour law as autonomous is dead and it appears simple to promote the reintegration of labour law into modern social contract law. In the context of the debate on European contract law, three different strategies can be envisaged to achieve this end. The first strategy tests the degree to which provisions under the contractual regime, not all of which are legally binding, effectively meet the needs of the weaker party in the contractual relationship, in terms of his/her security-what might for short be termed the social validity of the contract regime-(the Principles of European Contract Law, the EU rules affecting contract law, etc which are analysed and proposed in the various workshops that are currently examining them), from the specific point of view of labour law. A second strategy is to codify European or Community labour law. Lastly, another strategy is to introduce an intermediate category of long-term social contracts. What makes this last trend particularly significant for the future is that today globalisation is progressively diminishing the income earned from labour contracts and in this sense creating insecurity. In a globalised economy, where levels of remuneration are lower than in the past, the individual's sense of security must be ensured also in the context of other social or long-term contracts (outside the workplace), which enable people to

This paper takes as its starting point the European Court of Justice (ECJ) case law dealing with the concept of ‘worker’ for the purposes of Article 39 of the EC Treaty (free movement of persons). In particular, the leading case, Lawrie-Blum v. Land Baden-Württemberg, provides the classic definition of worker, based on the criterion of the ‘performance of services for and under the direction of another person’, in short ‘subordination’, a concept that appears to have no parallel in English labour and employment law. It is argued that a general, standard EU-law notion of employed persons or workers, based on the concept of subordination, is lacking. The paper examines the connections between para-subordinate workers in Italy and employee-like persons in Germany (Arbeitnehmerähnliche Personen), with comparable workers in the UK, para-subordinate workers in France, Portugal and Spain and dependent contractors in Sweden, in support of the view that everywhere in Europe there is a sort of middle category. In the UK it is a statutory category including both employees and certain self-employed workers, whereas in Germany, Italy and France the middle category consists of self-employed workers and replaces personal subordination with a test based on the economic dependence of the worker on the enterprise. To conclude, the author puts forward the view that Lawrie-Blum is an insufficient basis for the notions used in EU-law dealing with self-employed persons, contracts of employment and salaried workers.