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The legal classification of different contractual arrangements for work, and the extent to which individuals performing work should be included in the scope of individual and collective labor regulation, as well as other protections afforded to working people, is an issue that is both old and fundamental.1 In recent years, the focus has been on the changes in the organization of work brought by technological developments. Most notably, the emergence of web-based platforms serving as different forms of intermediaries has raised the issue of the legal status of the relationship between the platform and the persons performing the work. This has resulted in litigation, 2 an intense scholarly debate, 3 and various policy discussions and initiatives on both the national and the international level. Apart from trying to find the best way to ensure a correct classification of the relationships, the debate has also centred on the possibilities of further extending the scope of certain parts of labor law protection to those that do not have the status of employees, including the introduction of new labor law categories.4 To understand these developments, and to be able to have an informed discussion about the regulatory options, we need to know more about the nature of the relationship between those performing work and those for whom the work is performed in contractual work arrangements. This article is about one such category, self-employed workers selling their services to other businesses, organizations, or public agencies, referred to as businessto-business self-employed (B2B self-employed). A framework for analyzing the relationship between self-employed workers and their clients will be presented and put to practice using a unique survey of B2B self-employed in Sweden.
The framework and the results of the survey will then be used to discuss the possibilities of extending the personal scope of different parts of individual and collective labor law to some B2B self-employed workers. An approach referred to as “employee plus X” which would extend selected labor law protections to different categories of self-employed workers is advocated rather than for example, institute a third category.
