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Netherlands - New laws failing the self-employed

25 August 2014

According to FlexNieuws, Wessel van Alphen, the corporate ambassador for Dutch staffing specialist, IT Staffing, current employment laws and regulations are not adapted to the needs of independent contractors and knowledge workers. Therefore, a new legal framework should be introduced: "There will always be client businesses and there will always be people who are available on a project basis. But the way they come together is subject to change."

Mr van Alphen sees the ‘dynaworker’ as he calls the flex worker, as a source of innovation and economic progress "You have to be daring to change as a company. The dynaworker makes that possible. "

"Flexibility is not the right word: rubber is flexible and can be stretched, but it always jumps back to the same shape. However, people are dynamic evolving and constantly changing. The labour market is dynamic, rather than flexible. It is therefore logical for flextimer to be renamed 'dynaworker': this term reflects that."

But van Alphen goes further and suggest that “every organisation should operate a ‘dynacenter’ to identify and select candidates that could work with the business as freelancers or internal employees."

From 2015, changes will be introduced in the Netherlands to reform redundancy and the use of flexible staff. However, van Alphen finds that legislators omitted a very important point: "Developments within the current laws and regulations are not always beneficial to the social status of the dynaworker, the self-employed workers who sell their knowledge and skills. Therefore one should expect problems to arise in the fields of social security, retirement and disability. The current pension scheme available to the self-employed is nonsense: the government must address the problem at the core and ensure that a legal and tax entity is created for this group of "forgotten" knowledge workers.”