Employee, contractor, or business?

Watch a recording of British experts Keith Ewing and John Hendy discussing a new approach to determining who is entitled to the protections of labour law.

This webinar provides an opportunity to hear two of the United Kingdom’s leading labour law experts, Keith Ewing and John Hendy, discuss an innovative proposal to define who should be entitled to the rights and protections in statutory labour law.

Traditionally this question has been answered by focusing on the legal form of the relationship between the person contractually obliged to provide their labour and the person benefiting from that labour—if the person is an employee they fall within the protected group, otherwise not. That approach has become increasingly problematical as employing entities increasingly seek to avoid or evade statutory obligations by creating even more arcane legal forms of employment, a trend that has accelerated with the advent of gig and platform employment.

An alternative approach is to focus not on artificial legal categorisations but on the practical question of who should be entitled to the benefits of the statutory rights and protections. The obvious answer is any persons who are contractually obliged to provide their personal labour for the benefit of another. The form of a real legal relationship should not dictate whether a worker is entitled to a minimum wage, proper conditions of work and the right to associate in trade unions.

This principle lies at the heart of proposed United Kingdom reforms developed by the Institute of Employment Rights and which have subsequently been adopted as Labour Party policy.

In this webinar, two of the leading architects of this proposal discuss the nature of the United Kingdom proposal and its implications for future employment law. The webinar is particularly timely given the work of the Tripartite Task force considering employees and contractors.

About the speakers

Keith Ewing is a Professor of Law at the Dickson Poon School of Law at Kings College London and is one of the United Kingdom’s leading experts on labour law and human rights law. Along with John Hendy QC and Caroline Jones, he was an editor of the Manifesto for Labour Law (2016), which has been central to the development of Labour Party policy in the United Kingdom.

John Hendy QC is perhaps England’s leading labour law barrister and has had a long and distinguished career both legally and politically. He is a Labour peer in the House of Lords and an Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Law at University College London.

The webinar was jointly hosted by the Faculty of Law and the Centre for Labour Employment and Work, both at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.