‘New trade union strategies for new forms of employment’: Focus on Italy

Abstract

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.

Dependent self-employment – Italy as a good practice example

“…The worker is a partner whose activity must be adapted to the organizational needs of the company (Tealdi, 2012). The company pays lower social security contributions in connection with standard contracts for an indefinite period, while workers in Co.co.co contracts are entitled to (lower) social security benefits (Pedaci et al, 2017;Gramano and Gaudio, 2019).…”

“…Contrastingly, increasing social protection of dependent self-employment is considered an example of progressive legislation. As formulated by Gramano and Gaudio (2019), there should be a continuous trend of enlarging the scope of application of labour laws to apply certain traditional labour rights not only to employees but also to certain types of independent contractors.…”

“…employment(Eichhorst et al, 2013;Boheim and Muehlberger, 2006;Borghi and Murgia, 2019), the author has chosen to analyse the situation in Italy. Italy is the country where the category of dependent self-employment is not only recognised and officially regulated(Ranci, 2012;Tealdi, 2012;Pinelli et al, 2017;Gramano and Gaudio, 2019), but also protected similarly to employment(Spasova et al, 2019, MISSOC, Italy, 2021. Understanding the principles of regulation is a fundamental background for suggesting improvements in Slovakia, as well as for identifying possibilities of measuring the extent of dependent self-employment not only in Slovakia, but also in other countries.The dependent self-employment requires deeper analysis in the European Union, mostly because of inconsistency in general understanding of dependency/independency of selfemployment across the EU.…”