new forms of employment / non-standard forms of employment

Eurofound identified nine new forms of employment:

• casual work: employment is not stable and continuous, and the employer is not obliged to regularly provide the worker with work but has the flexibility of calling them in on demand (on-call work), with workers’ prospects of getting such work dependent on fluctuations in the employers’ workload. Casual work is typically characterised by low income, job insecurity, poor social protection and little or no access to human resources benefits;
• collaborative employment: freelancers, self-employed or micro enterprises cooperate in some way to overcome limitations of size and professional isolation. This form of employment may associate:
  • umbrella organisations, which offer specific administrative services such as invoicing clients or dealing with tax issues;
  • co-working, involving the sharing of workspace and back-office and support tasks;
  • cooperatives, jointly owned enterprises characterised by intensive cooperation among the members in the fields of production, marketing and strategic management;
• employee sharing: a group of employers forms a network that hires one or several workers to be sent on individual work assignments with the participating employer companies;
• ICT-based mobile work: work arrangements carried out at least partly, but regularly, outside the ‘main office’, be that the employer’s premises or a customised home office, using information and communication technologies (ICT) for online connection to shared company computer systems;
• interim management: a company ‘leases out’ highly specialised experts to other companies temporarily to solve a specific management or technical challenge or assist in economically difficult times;
• job sharing: employment relationships in which one employer hires several workers (part-time work) to jointly fill a single full-time position;
• platform work: an online platform enables organisations or individuals to access other organisations or individuals to solve specific problems or to provide specific services in exchange for payment; crowdworking is a form of platform work;
• portfolio work: small-scale contracting by freelancers, the self-employed or micro-enterprises who work for a large number of clients simultaneously;
• voucher-based work: an employer acquires a voucher from a third party (typically a governmental authority) to be used as payment for a service from a worker.