Employee and Self-Employed in Working Life: Is There a Real Difference?

Among the profound changes that have been observed in the working world in the recent decades, the reshaping of the traditional difference existing between “salaried employees” and “self-employed workers” seems to be one among those little-studied issues, notwithstanding each of them is involved in trends which suggest that their features are evolving. According to the classic literature, these typologies represent two completely different situations, having a strong and relevant reference in the two respective legal dimensions. This way of considering them does not seem appropriate concerning the ascertained rapid and steady increase in the number of self-employed individuals and the different conception of work, nowadays. With this chapter, we aim to deepen these two different working statuses entering into some crucial dimensions to understand if and where they are conditioning working practices and if it is possible to confirm or not the existence of a gap between the two—apparently?—different “worlds”. To examine this topic, we use a large international dataset—the sixth European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) conducted in 2015 on a large sample of workers from the EU35, the most recent at disposal. This dataset offers the opportunity to compare the effective situation of the two groups in many European countries, enabling the chance to understand if this way to classify working status continues to be useful or not to grasp the evolution of work in progress. At the end of the chapter, we propose stimuli for further research in this field.