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Both tax law and employment law incentivize engagers of labour to structure their workforce as a crowd of self-employed micro-entrepreneurs. Recent technological change and the rise of the gig economy have made it easier for agents to respond to these incentives, contributing to an increase in self-employment. In this article, we review the evidence on the rise of the gig economy in the UK and lay out a set of key principles to guide the reform of tax and employment law to better enable policy to meet its underlying objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent Supreme Court decision in Clyde & Co v Bates van Winkelhof1 at first sight addresses no more than a rather technical point at the intersection of employment and partnership law, brought about as the result of questionable statutory drafting in section 4(4) of the Limited Liability Partnerships Act of 2004. Upon closer inspection, however, the case brings to the forefront a tension underpinning discussions of the personal scope of employment law, between an inclusive approach encompassing all relationships of employment or akin thereto, and the view that ‘private law’ or primarily commercial relationships should fall outside the scope of employment regulation. It will therefore have far-reaching implications for the employment status of partners in all forms of partnership arrangements, as explored in Section 2 of this note. The decision furthermore has the potential significantly to change our understanding of the interrelationship between the notions of employees and workers, by challenging a strand of previous decisions which seemed narrowly to interpret statutory extensions of employment status (Section 3). A brief third section, finally, explores the changing role of ECHR jurisprudence in UK employment law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 1 September 2013, a new Employee Shareholder status came into force in the UK. Under its provisions, employees can be denied access to key employment rights such as unfair dismissal protection and redundancy pay in return for a shareholding in their employer valued at a minimum of £2,000. This article sets out the details of the new status, and evaluates its impact from several angles. The notion of the employee shareholder is difficult to square with the existing frameworks of UK Employment and Company Law; it is also unnecessary and exceedingly complex and thus fails to live up to the Coalition Government’s proclaimed goals. Whilst extensive uptake is unlikely in consequence, the Employee Shareholder status nonetheless represents an unprecedented attack on the very core relationship of employment law, the contract of employment: divorced from employment protective norms, it loses its key public-regulatory function, the distribution of risk between workers and their employing entities. As a result, employment rights become subject to market forces in negotiation between workers and their employers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]