A basic principle of good employment law, you would think, should be that you can tell an employer when you are caught by it and when you are not. An early fail then for the rules around worker status, in particular following the EAT’s recent decision in Johnson –v- Transopco UK Limited, which appears to bring into express consideration in that question factors over which the employer will rarely have any knowledge, let alone control.
By section 230(3) Employment Rights Act, a worker is (very slightly paraphrased) someone who contracts to do or perform personally any services for another party to that contract whose status is not that of a customer or client or any profession or business carried on by the individual. That requires consideration of two points – first, whether the individual operates a trade or business and second, if he does, whether any given end-user of his services is a customer or client of it. The two are often run together with the implication that if someone operates their own business, anyone he does any work for must necessarily be a customer of it. However, that is an over-simplification. It is entirely possible for an individual to operate a business but separately to supply his services outside it on a basis which would bring him within section 230(3).
The detailed facts of Johnson are not a necessary part of this post. In brief, he is or was a cab driver, part of whose income was earned doing taxi jobs received via a...
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