The Netherlands: solo self-employment and labour on demand

In the Netherlands, social security is organised by means of employee insurance schemes for labour-related risks and national insurance schemes for social risks that concern all residents. Of late, the first in particular are increasingly failing to protect dependent or ‘precarious’ workers. This is caused by changes in the labour market: the entry of solo self-employment (SSE) and of app-driven labour on demand. This chapter concentrates on the first development as one that is more or less crystallised. The Dutch SSE case study shows two things: one, social insurance and tax legislation can be very potent stimuli in the growth of this work type, which is, measured against EU standards, extraordinary. And two, stimulating a certain work type using fiscal facilities is much easier than reversing its effect once the result is not as agreeable as expected. The government should take this message to heart in its (future) approach to work in the ‘sharing’ or ‘gig’ economy.