If you have a job, are you a worker or an employee? In everyday conversation, it is a distinction without meaning, and the two are usually taken to be synonymous and used interchangeably. In British law, though, workers and employees form discrete categories.
Legally, only an employee, who has a contract of employment, regular hours or shifts, and a guaranteed wage, enjoys full employment rights such as sick pay and maternity and paternity leave. A “worker”, often in casual, irregular or temporary work, possesses some of these rights, being entitled, for instance, to the national minimum wage and protection from discrimination, but is denied others, such as sick leave, protection against unfair dismissal, and statutory redundancy pay. The self-employed have no workers’ rights.
The distinction between “employees” and “workers” was codified by John Major’s government in the 1996 Employment Rights Act. It was a deliberate attempt to blur the line between an “employee” and someone “self-employed”, and to create a workforce more suited to a “flexible” labour market, establishing in essence a formal category of “insecure” workers.
Over the past quarter of a century, employers have taken full advantage of the flexibility afforded them, increasingly hiring workers on temporary, part-time or zero-hours contracts, and often as ostensibly “self-employed”, even if they are expected to work as normal employees. The most visible expression of this is the “gig economy”. However, the...
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