Rules ZZP-ers clarified

The Cabinet introduced the bill Clarifying assessment of employment relationships and legal presumption for consultation laid.

This (draft) bill is yet another attempt to contain the issues surrounding self-employed people. On the one hand, the aim is not to discourage people from being self-employed. But on the other, it is to prevent people who need the social safety net from missing out because they are more or less forced to work as self-employed. The question, of course, is whether this attempt will succeed, where all previous attempts have gone down ingloriously. Needless to say, it is not clear when this bill will be introduced.

What is clear is that when this change in the law is introduced, the number of self-employed people will drop considerably.

Clarification

To article 610 of Book 7 of the Civil Code to clarify the concept of employment, it is added that there is employment in the service of an employer if:

• the work is performed under work content management by the employer, or
• the labour or the employee organisational its embedded in the employer's organisation, and;
• the employee does not perform the work for his own account and risk.

These criteria will be fleshed out in an order in council. Of course, we find the draft of these rules in the Explanatory Memorandum to the bill. But that is a bit too extensive to discuss in this article. We will therefore limit ourselves to a few outlines.

Work-based management:

• the worker is authorised to give directions and instructions on how the worker should perform the work and the worker must follow them;
• the worker has the ability to monitor the work of the worker and is authorised to intervene on that basis.

Organisational embedding:

• the work is performed within the organisational framework of the employee's organisation;
• the work is part of the organisation's core business;
• the work is structural in nature within the organisation;
• work is performed side-by-side with employees performing similar work.

Own account and risk:

• the financial risks and results of the work lie with the working;
• when carrying out the work, the worker himself is responsible for tools, aids and materials;
• the worker possesses specific training, work experience, knowledge or skills, which are not structurally present in the organisation of the worker;
• the working person acts independently while working;
• there is a short duration of the assignment and/or a limited number of hours per week.

An additional test could be whether the worker is behaving economically as a self-employed person:

• the working has several clients per year;
• the working spends time and money on gaining a reputation and finding new customers/clients;
• the working has business investment of some size;
• the worker behaves administratively as an entrepreneur (Chamber of Commerce registration, VAT entrepreneur, is entitled to the tax benefits of entrepreneurship).

Legal presumption

In addition, a new section is added to the aforementioned Book 7. It provides that a person who performs work for another person for remuneration not exceeding €32.24 per hour is presumed to be performing such work under an employment contract (legal presumption).

This legal presumption is designed to give working people an easier entry point to enforce in court that their employment relationship is an employment relationship.

The calculation of the hourly rate is as follows (this hourly rate will follow the trend of the legal minimum wage):