Self-employment in Spanish law

Aneta Tyc

doi:10.18778/0208-6069.103.05

Authors

Aneta Tyc University of Lodz, Faculty of Law and Administration, Department of European, International and Collective Labour Law https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0593-2862

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/0208-6069.103.05

Keywords:

self-employment, employment relationship, Spanish law, economic dependence, bogus self-employment

Abstract

The objective of the article is to analyse legal regulations concerning self-employed activity in force in Spain. Spain is the first EU Member State to have adopted a separate law (on 11 July 2007) to comprehensively and systemically regulate the legal status of the self-employed. The Spanish 2007 LETA act aimed to sort out the situation of the self-employed and grant them additional rights. A new category of economically dependent self-employed persons was introduced and accorded special protection. The author discusses the concept and typology of self-employment, including classic, economically dependent, and bogus self-employment. In her view, the Spanish solution of regulating self-employment in a single piece of legislation appears attractive, but the criteria introduced in the law to determine the status of economically dependent self-employed do not adequately fulfil their role in practice. Their restrictive nature, far-reaching casuistry, and the criterion of economic dependence of the self-employed, who must receive at least 75 per cent of their income from a single counterparty, which is difficult to verify objectively and relatively easy to circumvent, result in a negligible number of self-employed persons benefiting from the protective guarantees provided by LETA.

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