Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is deputy general secretary of the Fabian Society
For the drivers and riders of the UK gig economy, employment status really matters. Most are classed as self-employed and do not receive statutory sick pay, for example. That’s worth remembering as they dodge between cars trying to make enough money to live on and not end up injured, or worse.
Efforts to improve the rights of this group have resulted in some changing their employment status — but often to one where they are neither self-employed nor employees. Instead they belong to a little-known, intermediate category of work, known by the opaque term “limb (b)”.
In 2021, the UK Supreme Court moved Uber drivers into this intermediate status. Until last year, couriers for Just Eat were also included in it. Workers in this category have the right to annual leave and a minimum wage, but they still do not have full employee rights. They don’t have protection from redundancy or dismissal, for example. The trade-off is that they tend to have more autonomy.
Recently, though, this limb (b) category has become highly contentious, primarily because of how some major gig economy companies operate in the grey areas of employment law.
Prior to the general election, the Labour party suggested that all of these workers should become full employees instead — a policy known as single worker status. While this idea was not included in the King’s Speech, the imminent employment rights bill will have an impact on any future reforms to status. For example, gig economy drivers who once had no employment rights at all could have employee rights from day one.
This won’t improve things for all in the gig economy but it might help to clarify and enforce the law. Many legal experts and trade unions have been tearing their hair out at the inconsistencies and confusion in employment judgments, which have classed Uber drivers as limb (b) workers but Deliveroo riders as self-employed.
But do workers want the intermediate employment status to go? The answer is not clear cut. Our research project found that their views reflected the complexities of life at the sharp end of the labour market where the realistic alternative of many employee jobs is a harsh one. Any move to shift them into employee status — designed to improve their rights — must ensure the change does not actually make their working lives more unpleasant.
Crucially, the intermediate employment status was initially created to extend the protection of employment law to vulnerable self-employed people. But this group doesn’t easily fit into employer-employee relationships, which is what single worker status could do in practice.
One option might be to keep the intermediate worker status but reform it to include more people, at least in the short-term. This could offer a quick and practical way to wrap a new group of the most vulnerable gig economy workers into a protective layer of employment law — far sooner than the wholesale shift to single worker status suggested by the government could hope to do.
In particular, it could emphasise the amount of control that companies exercise over workers as the primary test of their status. It could pay less attention to whether employers can send a substitute or not — which is how some companies have tried to keep their workforce classed as self-employed.
This is clearly a debate we need to have, and it’s important to start now. Listening to the voices of those affected by these policies is a vital first step.
Most of us, thankfully, don’t have to constantly police our employment rights. With the right status reforms, the most vulnerable workers in our society can enjoy that security too.
