The legal concept of employment : Concept légale de l'emploi : la marginalisation des travailleurs

Moreover, the dramatic growth of self-employment since the 1980s in Canada raises important questions about the operation of labour markets, whether self-employment is coterminous with entrepreneurship, and the adequacy of prevailing legal tests of employment status for determining the personal scope of labour protection. [...] Moreover, the purposive approach to determining the sc ope of labour law transforms the legal category “employee” into a cipher whose meaning is to be determined on the basis of the view of the decision maker of the appropriate class of persons who should receive the benefit of the law. [...] Second, the remarkable growth of self-employment since the early 1980s calls into question models of how capitalist labour markets operate, theories about entrepreneurship, understandings about the nature of self-employment, official measures of self-employment, and the adequacy of the legal tests of employment status for determining the personal scope of labour protection and social benefits. [...] The changing nature of self -employment as well as the diversity of the people who make up the self-employed and the nature of their employment poses a number of challenges for public policy. [...] Part Three critically evaluates the conventional narrative that assumes the salience of the distinction between employment and self-employment and views the emergence of the contract of employment and employment and labour regulat ion as a shift from status to contract and back to status.