Independent or Dependent? European Labour Statistics and Their (In)ability to Identify Forms of Dependency in Self-employment

In studies of labor market change and the transformation of employment relations, the growth of new forms of self-employment, including platform work, has triggered a broad debate on how to define, classify, and analyze the wide range of positions within the heterogeneous category of the self-employed. This article analyzes the emerging methods used in European comparative labor statistics to identify forms of dependency in self-employment. Using the 2015 sixth wave of the European Working Conditions Survey and the 2017 ad hoc module on self-employment from the European Labour Force Survey, this article discusses how the representation of dependent self-employment changes by adopting different operationalizations of economic and operational dependency. The results show how different indicators of dependency change the representation of self-employment in different economic sectors, with implications for our understanding of the transformation of working arrangements within self-employment and the boundaries between employment and self-employment.