The complexity of the legal definition of the worker has been a major, and growing, focus of scholarly interest and legislative innovation over the last decade. The singular legal notion of the worker as the bearer of homogeneous labor rights has passed into history in part due to the need to respond to new labor relations but also as a result of the pressure exercised by flexibilization. Thus alongside the classic definition of the worker which incorporates the defining elements of voluntary work for another economic actor, dependency, and pay for work - all of this articulated around the work contract - new regulatory forms and social rights regimes are emerging. These new regulatory forms respond to forms of work such as the autonomous worker, para-subordinates and public employees and they have generated increasingly heterogeneous rights. These heterogeneous rights - and definitions of the worker or of forms of work - are characterized by segmentation, articulated at the level of regulation whether by special relations in general codes (such as the Workers Statute), individual statutes for particular types of work, or mixed systems including both general and specific statutes (as is exemplified by the Spanish case).

The object of this research is to examine the legal definition of the worker in Spanish law and to place the Spanish case in comparative perspective by comparing it with the range of alternative legal approaches to this issue found in the complex legal systems of countries with modern and diverse economies. We assembled a group of experts in Spanish labor law and in comparative labor law, including comparativists as well as experts in several especially important cases of modern legal systems. The national cases of interest to us for their contrasts with Spain included several major cases which represent various legal approaches - namely the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy - as well as three other countries which present us with especially heterogeneous workforces - namely Canada, South Africa and Israel. These cases offer us different answers to the challenge of defining the worker in an increasingly complex economic context. Our work includes a systematic juridical analysis of statutes and jurisprudence in the Spanish case and the elaboration of contrasts and similarities with other cases. In this endeavor, we focus on the legal handling of the growing heterogeneity of work situations and the status of social rights both in labor codes such a Spain's Worker Statute and in more specialized statutes for particular types of work situations. Through the examination of similarities and differences between the Spanish model and other national systems in their legal definition of the worker and worker rights, we establish the basis to offer some suggestions for possible future reforms of labor law in this field.

The following publicacions figure amongst the results of this project:

LÓPEZ LÓPEZ, J. (dir.), Segmentation and labor rights. Monographic issue of the Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal, 2014, forthcoming, articles from Julia López, Mark Freedland, Katherine Stone, Bruno Caruso, Consuelo Chacartegui, Brian Langille i Guy Davidov.

First meeting

"Goals and Challenges of Labour Law: The legal concept of worker and segmentation of labor rights: a comparative approach"

Second meeting

"The notion of worker and segmentation of rights"